Creator News Roundup: 02/12/2024

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Feb 12, 2024

What’s up, creator economy 👽

In today’s roundup:

Creators are partnering with NBA players, Netflix, and Nike.
Killer Mike sells out his brooms.
TikTok livestream subscriptions are growing.
Bluesky is open for business.

I hope you learn something interesting.

Share this post with a friend to catch them up on the creator economy.

Who is not partnering with creators?

Knicks players Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart are working on a long form video podcast with the creators of Sidetalk, a NY street show.1

The creators, Trent Simonian and Jack Byrne, know what New Yorkers like and are helping ideate episodes and plan segments that could grow the Knicks fandom.

Are creators the new studio?

British YouTubers, Sidemen, are releasing a documentary on Netflix.

What’s unique about this partnership is how much control the group is maintaining for the project.

The group funded and produced the film themselves instead of letting Netflix or another studio oversee the production.

They also own the rights to the film so they can release the documentary on their YouTube channel in the future. 2

Creators like Sidemen have so much leverage in negotiations like this because of their strong following. They don’t need studios to distribute their content when they have 20M subscribers on YouTube, almost 6M followers on Instagram, and 2M followers on X.

Studios, like Netflix, want to tap into a distribution like Sidemen’s to reach new people. Studios need creators.

Step aside, athletes

For the first time ever, Nike is partnering with a streamer.

The streamer is Kai Cenat. Kai has 9M followers on Twitch and 6M subscribers on YouTube and knows how to mobilize his fans.

You might recognize his name as the streamer that drew thousands of his followers to Union Square for a give away that ended in chaos.

Kai is promoting Nike in an upcoming IRL stream in Las Vegas. He’s also participating in the NBA All-Celebrity Game for Team Shannon.

The details of the partnership aren’t public yet, but I expect we’ll see Kai wearing lots of Nike. 3

Creators in the Wild 🏝️🦜🌊 🦍🐒

Sell me this… broom

It’s about the brand, not the product.

To celebrate winning three Grammys, Killer Mike sold a limited edition broom that “covers 3x the area” and is “used exclusively for sweeping the Grammys.”

killermike

A post shared by @killermike

The brooms, listed for $100 each, are already sold out.

Trends 🔮

Showing up for your community

Would you pay a subscription to chat with your favorite creator?

Creators are making money on TikTok live streams with the platform’s LIVE Subscription.4

TikTok is helping by building more subscription-only benefits to nudge fans into paying for a monthly membership.

TikTok isn’t the only platform investing in communities. You can create communities on Twitch, Substack, X, Patreon, and Skool, but only some of these support monetization.

Decentralized social media is in

Bluesky, an invite-only X alternative, opened publicly last week. The platform picked up over 1M users and has grown to over 4.7M users.

Jack Dorsey started Bluesky as an internal project while he was at Twitter. It’s lived on as an open-sourced, decentralized social media platform.

What is decentralized social media?

It’s the idea that users can interact with each other across platforms, promoting a more open web.

At Bluesky, users can even customize the algorithms that power their feed and their content moderation settings.

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Content Diet 🍊📚

Reading: French Love Poems by Tynan Kogane
Podcast: The Biology of Social Interactions and Emotions with Dr. Kay Tye and Huberman
Watching: Griselda on Netflix
Music: Korean City Pop