Creators now have more ways than ever to make a living online. This report explores how brands should approach and engage creators for partnerships in the new monetization ecosystem.

Creator economy crescendo: Amazon is quickly building out areas of its business that center on influencers, as the walls between social media and ecommerce erode and creators' roles in those spaces start to blend together.

BuzzFeed will pay up to $10K to creators: The program will award prizes for top-performing content. Though it will only last through the summer, it's likely a pilot program or a precursor to a more social BuzzFeed Community hub.

On today's episode, we discuss which platforms have the most creator-friendly environments, how influencer marketing is evolving, and what the next stage of the creator economy will look like. We then talk about Pinterest's new livestreaming feature, the popularity of influencer marketing on TikTok, and how companies should navigate social media coming out of the pandemic. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg.

Creators have never been hotter: Social platforms want them, and marketers want to work with them. The creator economy is offering up new or improved opportunities for creators to make money outside of brand partnerships. So, where does that leave brands?

Twitter’s Super Follows isn’t to attract new creators—it’s to keep the ones it has: As the platform slowly sheds US users, new monetization options and better anti-harassment features are the least it can do.

How creator monetization efforts are faring: Q2 was also a big quarter for creator economy announcements. In addition to creator shops on Instagram, the company also added new tools to streamline branded content creation on IGTV, Instagram Live, Reels, and Stories and an affiliate tool for creators.

May 2021: Introduced Story Studio for creators, a standalone app for creating and editing videos and other content. Content built with the app can be shared not only to Snapchat, but to other platforms as well. May 2021: Introduced Creator Marketplace, where businesses can find and partner with creators to develop branded content.

One big sign of success will be if TikTok expands the Shopping tab to creators beyond existing Shopify merchants with TikTok For Business accounts. Not only will that open up a host of new influencer marketing opportunities, but it could also pull in some creators who have been lured by Instagram’s more developed shopping features.

Many marketers had long underestimated the value of creators in their marketing mix. That’s no longer the case. Most brands today have incorporated influencer marketing into their media plans, and many intend to allocate even more funds to the tactic this year.

., Scroll’s ad-free access to news), and brand-new exclusive content from creators on the platform (via Revue, the subscription newsletter publishing platform it purchased in January).

Article: Even Amazon wants in on the creator economy.

Tipping comes to Clubhouse: The social audio app will now let users tip hosts, likely a play to keep creators on the platform as they’re in danger of being poached by bigger players like Twitter and Twitch.

It launched Reels to try to capture some of the short-video momentum that has moved over to TikTok, and its recent creator monetization efforts are, in part, an attempt to maintain its relevance as a place where Gen Z users engage with creators.

Marketer Takeaway: If Super Follows wasn’t enough to convince you that Twitter is eyeing the creator economy, shoppable tweets should do it. Not only will creators be able to monetize their audiences, but shoppable tweets open the opportunity for enhanced influencer-brand partnerships on the platform. Will shopping on Twitter work?

In addition to trying to keep existing creators on its platform, YouTube is competing for new creators, who are gravitating toward short-form video for its reach and sponsorship potential. In her letter, CEO Susan Wojcicki named growing the creator economy as one of the company’s 2021 priorities. Advertising. There are no ad placements in Shorts yet.

After news reports surfaced in February that Facebook was building a social audio product, he used Clubhouse to deliver news about Facebook Shops reaching 250 million active users and joined a room (along with Spotify’s Daniel Ek) to discuss the creator economy. Users: N/A.

Per research by HubSpot and Talkwalker, for example, some of the most common meme topics between July 2019 and August 2020 included COVID-19, the economy, and politics. Even though consumers may seek comic relief about those topics from friends and creators, they might not necessarily want the same from brands. “It’s a fine line,” Mallin said about pandemic-related memes.

US marketers allocated more than $7 billion in digital ad spending to YouTube last year, eMarketer estimates, up 15.1% over 2018 spending levels. That resulted in more than $3.4 billion in net ad revenues for the video-sharing giant, with most of the remainder going to content creators.

They will allow content creators, developers, and data experts to completely reimagine interactive, immersive, and personalized user experiences across myriad interconnected devices.

YouTube officially launched Premieres in June 2018, which allows content creators to debut pre-recorded videos as a live moment. When creators release a Premiere video, YouTube automatically creates a public landing page to build anticipation and hype around new content.

The third-party data we cite in this report was gathered before the coronavirus pandemic reached crisis proportions and began to affect the economy. Likewise, most of our forecasts cited in this report reflect pre-pandemic data and assumptions about the economy. The effects of the pandemic have and will likely continue to cause tighter spending by consumers and marketers alike. 

“As consumers become more fragmented in where they spend their time, advertisers will have to try new things,” said Alicia Whalen, a Niagara Falls, Ontario-based digital consultant and author of “The New Conversation Economy.” “They will have to add marketing innovation along with lead generation and sales tactics.

The big question is whether that situation is sustainable over the long term, as the economy continues to take a severe hit from the pandemic. The more sophisticated direct-response advertisers that have jumped on the opportunity have done so based on calculations of customer lifetime value (LTV) that may not hold up in a world of double-digit unemployment.