Creator 3x3

II.

Modern attempts at extending reality with VR and AR devices really began about 10+ years ago.

Magic Leap, Microsoft’s Hololens, Google Glass, PlayStation’s VR, Snap, and Oculus (later acquired by Meta) all started their product research efforts in the early 2010’s and released their first live products from 2016 onward.

Pretty much all of these efforts failed to catch on in a significant way despite lots of really capable tech companies spending gobs of money on development.

If you’ve ever tried VR, there’s zero doubt that there’s something magical about experiences like flying in zero G, but it’s worth exploring why it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.

Really really ridiculously smart people like Matthew Ball (former Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios) think and talk about this problem a lot.

To him, the conversation ultimately boils down to “hardware is really hard” and “our expectations aren’t quite reasonable”.

Matthew uses GPS to explain how to pragmatically think about what VR/XR devices will eventually do for us.

As a mental model for “Why VR?”, I think it’s pretty solid.

III.

By some metrics, VR has actually hit with users.

Beat Saber has been around for 6 years and it’s still one of the most incredible entry level VR experiences.

It’s also made the team (and Meta who acquired it in 2019) a cumulative $225 million+, is regularly still in Top VR Games lists, and has millions of active players.

And that revenue number is about 18 months out of date so it’s probably much higher now.

When VR hits, it hits hard.

Sounds like the creator economy, huh.

3 NOTES ON THE PRESENT

The secret to blowing up on TikTok is becoming a virtual hat.

@throwbackvr
How to hit the blimp in Derby! #derbyvr #vr #virtualreality #baseball #applab #metaquest #metaquest2 #gamedev #homerun #blimp #

At least…

that’s what you might think when ThrowBack Studios shows up in your feed.

They’re the makers of Derby.

They’ve gone from from 4K to 182K followers on TikTok this past year, just started their initial growth spurts on other platforms, and have hundreds of thousands of players hitting dingers regularly in their game.

At first glance, they’re an incredibly engaging, free-to-play baseball batting cage simulator.

But after chatting with founder Jordan Kutzer about his vision, it’s super clear Throwback Studios is building something much more interesting than this already pretty neat (and successful) thing.

They want to make the first infinite content, VR theme park.

Videos will be part of it, but by far the most important content at the park is the space you’re in and the world you’re interacting with.

That world will be co-created with creator-players shaping the environment, components, and ways in which they want to enjoy the game-park.

And everything in the game-park is perfectly capturable and sharable by the device you’re already wearing to play the game.

A still from their in-game livestream podcast

It’s a bold vision and I love it.

To be completely honest, I’ve only just begun to mentally digest the brain-bending ramifications of VR content creation.

The potential is crazy and I’m certainly watching (and playing) whatever Throwback Studios comes up with next.

II.

Lebron is thinking about streaming.

Imagine getting dunked on in NBA 2K by King James playing as himself.

I’m here for it.

III.

Vision Pro is coming (maybe this month).

It’s really expensive (~$3500).

But Apple has a voracious, high-purchasing-power fanbase and a huge chunk of them will buy whatever Apple releases that year.

The same person who would have never in a million years bought a VR headset to play games might spend a Hermes handbag’s amount of dollars on the Vision Pro in just a few weeks.

That feels important.

3 THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

Content in VR is already wild.

@framerategg
how could he kill super shaggy like that 😭 [🕹️ @benbuttv ] #vr #shaggy #vrgame #gaming #framerate

But the potential for content in VR (and AR) is staggering.

Imagine a podcast host sitting on your own couch.

We aren’t ready for that level of engaging.

Enterprising Creators already use VR to make stuff that boggles the minds of their audiences.

Cheaper headsets and cheaper recording equipment are making this opportunity more accessible to more Creators than ever before.

All of the problems we talked about earlier (hardware, distribution, improving vs replacing existing experiences, etc) still very much apply, but it’s worth revisiting the thought experiment of “what content would I even make in VR?” in the context of a rapidly changing landscape of audience consumption behavior.

II.

Kids today understand platform ad models.

Or rather, they sort of understand that platforms sometimes pay Creators for their content.

They also naturally associate “lots of followers” with “being rich” (a lot of adults do this too btw).

We both know that isn’t necessarily the case, but in VR this is especially untrue for game developers who moonlight as Creators to distribute their games.

Kids assume Meta is footing the bill for their favorite game just because it’s free to play in the Meta Quest store!

They have no idea that Meta actually takes 30% of the money from every sale game developers make on in-App purchases and that might be their only source of revenue.

So the kids ask the developers for more and more stuff for free by default.

This is a crucial point for all builder-creators out there.

Your users often don’t understand how you earn your income and we’ll have to navigate that carefully as we try to grow the things we’re spending all of those blood, sweat, and tears on.

III.

I’m genuinely excited by the potential of VR and AR.

After the Vision Pro was announced, I wrote this short story to imagine what it might be like.

This excerpt shares some of the wonder I think we’ll have at our fingertips eventually.

What we create this year might soon live in that world.

Creating natively for that world is worth thinking about.

(Read the full story)

VR is a strange beast.

It feels like magic when it hits and leaves you deflated (and slightly nauseous) when it misses.

And when I say that out loud... it sorta sounds like creating content doesn’t it?

I’m not quite sure how it’s going to happen, but I think with:

the Vision Pro launch
Meta continuing to expand it’s Quest headset empire
Algorithms driving more competition for Creators

We’ll see a boom in both VR-native content and content about VR stuff by the end of 2024. 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

https://creator3×3.com/p/Gorilla-Tag-made-26M

If you enjoyed this

and if you have any feedback or requests for me just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv

→ I reply to every email ←

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. you can shoot yourself in the face in VR and it’s as goofy as it sounds.

Are TikTok shops a scam? How big is YouTube really? Plus the weird history of livestream shopping.

Cameron Armstrong — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 08:30:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Here are 3 Creator facts from the past, 3 notes on the present, and 3 thoughts about the future of the content economy...

3 FACTS FROM THE PAST

TikTok Shop is taking over.

Or… at least it’s trying to.

But why?

For a lot reasons really, but they all basically boil down to ByteDance thinks they’ll make more money with media driven product sales than with a pure advertising model.

We’ll dive into what that means for Creators later in this post, but for now I want to explore the American media sorta-juggernaut that pioneered this business model.

Introducing QVC 👀

Founded in 1986, QVC still delivers "Quality Value Convenience" to over 350 million households worldwide and is on pace to drive about $10B in revenue this year (that’s about two Snapchats worth of revenue).

You might know it better as that channel your grandma used to watch and buy stuff from sometimes.

QVC (more or less) started this whole media driven shopping, was perfectly positioned to ride the growth of Cable TV subscribers through the 90’s/00’s, and operated in a niche that was mostly overlooked by modern tech companies

(Physical products? Gross. That’s not zero marginal cost!).

The main exception, of course, being Amazon.

And this is the vibe.

But now tech companies want in on these sales.

Let’s figure out why.

II.

Welcome back to 2016!

I was a bit distracted by my deployment to Afghanistan, but the rest of the world was wondering how the Trump presidency would change things...

lol

Except for China - they were too busy buying things on the internet.

Mogujie, and much more importantly Alibaba, launched livestream shopping in 2016.

The rest of the big Chinese platforms got the memo over the next 3 years and by the time COVID hit about 388 million people (or 40% China’s internet users) used livestream ecommerce to shop.

COVID, of course, hypercharged online purchases and livestream shopping drove $62B in gross merchandise sales throughout 2020.

That’s like 10 Snapchats worth of revenue!

Livestream shopping activity has slightly declined since then (similar to a lot of other parts of e-commerce post-COVID), but US Tech companies have been side-eyeing that sweet, sweet livestream money ever since.

III.

I just lied to you.

Not all Big Tech companies have been drooling over livestream shopping since 2020.

Amazon has been trying to get that livestream bag since…

2016 actually!

Launched as an “Amazon runs the Livestreams” effort to push their white labeled Amazon Fashion brands, they shuttered the initial program in favor of a “support Amazon Storefronts so they can do the Livestreams” approach that they’ve changed and improved upon over the past few years.

It’s called Amazon Live and it feels… pretty similar to TikTok Live to be honest (and every other live shopping mobile app experience).

The main difference is that Amazon doesn’t have an incredibly engaging content platform to attach it to which makes it really hard to understand how people actually find these livestreams - but apparently some people do!

this is wild to me.

3 NOTES ON THE PRESENT

This pretty much sums up the discourse on TikTok Shop right now.

Also this.

And this.

Opinions are split.

You can’t get on TikTok without getting assaulted by Creators shilling products with (maybe perhaps probably dubious) wild claims, pretty aggressive (40%!!) deal coupons, and people reflexively moaning about the change to their feed.

There’s also some likely very smart people making an absolute killing on their TikTok shop sales.

It’s silly to ignore that latter, but also reckless to ignore the former.

My takeaway: If you have something useful for your audience that you were already planning on selling to them, it’s worth your time to figure out how to get a TikTok shop going - if for no other reason than TikTok is probably going to eventually nerf or disable any links to external shops.

If you weren’t planning on selling something in the near term, I recommend reflecting on if a “scrambled together in a weekend” product plan is the right thing to put in front of your audience.

It could be!

But it might hurt your long term audience trust more than it helps your near term cash flow.

II.

How big is YouTube?

Pretty big - about 13.3 billion videos big according to TubeStats.

That’s up almost 50% from 9 billion videos last year!

Why should you care?

Because that growth rate seems to be increasing over time.

Sometimes it can feel like you missed an opportunity with social + performance media if you didn’t start a YouTube channel in 2010.

But when you look at the data, there’s a lot of evidence that we’re just getting started.

III.

TikTok is pretty big too.

TikTok In The Mix - the first concert of probably many future “live global experiences” - snagged 9.6M live viewers and another 24M subsequent viewers in follow up broadcasts.

That makes this it’s biggest ever live event (so far).

That’s big.

It’s not Cricket Finals or League of Legends big, but it’s still big.

And it’s different.

The vast majority of successful “live” content formats have historically been sports related. A live performance snagging these kinds of numbers gives every Creator a license to experiment with new, synchronous content formats.

Combine these new format experiments with everything we’ve talked about already with content app shopping experiences and you start to get a pretty interesting picture of what we might look forward to in 2024.

3 THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

The reality of TikTok Shop in 2024 is that we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Amazon clearly hasn’t figured it out after 7+ years of effort.

Things are different now post-COVID, post-Twitter, and maybe post-Social??

This could just be a subsidy driven blip on the radar before we revert back to our ad-supported algo-driven feeds.

Or it could be a permanent change in how people think about their relationship with buying stuff through their phone.

Personally, I think two things big things about TikTok Shop.

All major media platforms have a vested interest in keeping you perpetually engaged by implying that the world is ending.
Change is never simple and clean.

I’m excited that Creators have permission to experiment with new ways to bring value to their audiences

And I’m concerned that bad actors will use this permission to sell crappy or dangerous things that will make it harder for good actors to sell stuff in the future.

So it goes.

II.

In the midst of another US centric frenzy, we tend to forget that the rest of the world is also big.

Out of the top 10 most viewed videos on YouTube in the past week, only 2 are from an English speaking channel (yes of course it’s MrBeast and skibidi toilet 69 why do you ask?).

The rest come from Indian, Thai, and Pakistani Creators.

Creators (and more importantly audiences) are global and that only becomes more true in 2024.

https://creator3×3.com/p/are-tiktok-shops-a-scam

III.

Remember that you don't have to chase a gold rush.

Sometimes it’s the right option - it’s certainly much easier to ride a wave than it is to create one.

But it’s definitely not the only option.

You might make a ridiculous bag on something like TikTok shop or whatever the next quick money trend is (there will always be another one), but if you are playing an infinite game…

It might not be worth it to (maybe) burn your credibility.

Creators have a unique advantage online.

You understand your audience. You know their pain. You get them.

That puts you in an incredible spot to match, discover, and even design a product perfect for them.

That's how you eventually find Creator-Product Fit.

The internet is still undefeated.

It’s undefeated for content.

It’s undefeated for people who want to make a living from their creativity.

It’s also undefeated for making people feel terrible for not doing so in the “right” or “fastest” way.

Things are still very early in the land of content and chaos and remember that your most powerful advantage is persistence. 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

Please subscribe and if you have any feedback or requests for Creator 3×3 just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv

→ I reply to every email!

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. if you’ve ever wondered about the future of AI supported content creation and haven’t heard Glorb’s ridiculously catchy Spongebob raps yet then check this banger out…

Hank Green shares his TikTok earnings, RPM's everywhere, and Creator-Product Fit

Cameron Armstrong — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 08:30:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Here are 3 Creator facts from the past, 3 notes on the present, and 3 thoughts about the future of the content economy...

3 FACTS FROM THE PAST

What’s a good RPM for YouTube?

What’s an RPM?

What’s even happening right now??

As with anything important the answer is “it depends”.

Well…

Not the RPM part - an RPM is a revenue per mille and it means “how much you earn per 1000 views” on your content.

It’s a standard term for the advertising (and by default the Creator) economy because payments per view are generally fractions of a cent - so we multiply by 1000 to make the numbers easier to talk about!

But a “good” RPM for YouTube depends on a ton of factors.

Factors like video category, type of ad, geography, time of year, audience makeup, content supply, advertiser demand, and whether the universe hates you or not that day (mostly kidding).

Note: If you’re an advertiser you mostly care about CPM or Cost per Mille and an advertiser’s CPM is always going to be higher than a Creator’s RPM because YouTube (or whatever platform you’re on) takes a cut.

Here’s some historical top RPM/CPM pairs by category on YouTube.

Some niches are much higher than this and some are a lot lower.

Understanding the RPM difference between categories is the first step to understanding why it’s easier for some Creators to earn a lot of cash with their channels when compared with others.

II.

Games Done Quick is a semiannual videogame speedrun charity marathon that has raised a cumulative $45 million dollars for charity since it was launched back in 2010.

I love GDQ.

It’s a staple event in the speedrunning community and the next one starts on Sunday Jan 14, 2024.

I share this partially to raise awareness, but mostly to highlight something special about the community of Creators in general.

There’s a thread of charity and donation amongst Creators that leads all the way back to the birth of the various content platforms.

Creators have always wanted to improve their communities (and the world) with what they create and Creators made events like GDQ well before it was obvious people could make a living streaming videogames on camera.

They did it for the love of the game and we’ve only just started to figure out how to make that sustainable for them in terms of income.

Here’s one of my favorite GDQ speedruns to check out if you’ve never seen one!

III.

Back to RPM’s!

RPM’s didn’t start with Creator economy. It didn’t even start with the internet.

TV, Radio, and Newspaper ads all used something like an RPM (or really a CPM because they were pitching spots to advertisers not paying out a revenue share to Creators) to charge for access to their lucrative audience's eyeballs.

The internet really supercharged all this stuff though.

The data opportunity, the low implementation costs, and most importantly the speed a viewer could access a web page completely changed the game.

Take Yahoo for example.

This yahoo.

In 1999 this was for many the entire internet…

and Yahoo could charge advertisers a $60 CPM for a banner ad on this page!

And they didn’t even make funny videos!

Adjusted for inflation that’s $112 CPM that they didn’t split with anyone.

But it gets crazier.

Paul Graham (mega startup investor and 1.8M follower Twitter king) had his startup acquired by Yahoo in the 90’s and he realized something about the types of views Yahoo was charging for.

Today, users are served (usually) very relevant ads that are customized in some way to their user profile, but back then, platforms had very little tracking data about their users.

So advertisers paid a lot more for essentially unqualified (AKA much less valuable) traffic.

Also all the ads looked like this.

3 NOTES ON THE PRESENT

Hank Green is the man.

He’s an OG YouTuber and content creator (he launched his channel in 2009), but he does a whole bunch of other things too.

Recently, he’s been knee deep in short form content on all the platforms and he has some thoughts.

Per usual, they’re very insightful (and he gave me a great insight for a seemore.tv feature about tracking Instagram CPM’s across months), but the three most important takeaways for Creators I think are:

Hank Green is a world class Creator and somehow can barely pull in $9,000 a month from his (really funny) short form content that has 50M+ views.
His total RPM’s for shorts are $0.11 on YouTube, $0.05 on TikTok (although it’s technically $0.55 on “qualified views”), and $0.04 on Instagram.
Hank’s description of the state Creators getting screwed by platforms:
"It's such a fun situation for Creators right now - where the longest YouTube short you can make is a minute, but shortest TikTok you can monetize is a minute and one second long"

It’s worth a full watch (at least on 1.5x speed 🤷‍♂️)

II.

Hank talks a lot about his “eligible” TikTok views in that video and for a Creator (or at least for me) the explanations feel pretty vague.

YouTube must have a more straightforward answer right?

Right?

For the most part, everyone knows that a view on YouTube might not have an ad if the video isn't ad friendly.

But did you know that there a other reasons that a video might not earn even if it’s monetized?

You won’t get ad revenue if you turned off ads for a video (somebody out there just remembered something important they forgot to do I promise).

There also might not be an ad available to show to that particular viewer.

Since advertisers can choose to target specific devices, demographics, and interests, there’s always a chance your viewer may not match this targeting.

Finally, a user might not be ad friendly too. A range of other factors, including the viewer’s geography, how recently they’ve seen an ad, whether they have a Premium subscription, and other stuff like that would make them ineligible to see an ad on your content (so you won’t get paid).

III.

So ads are complicated.

What’s the next best thing? Is it brand deals? Maybe.

I don’t know I’m all confused now.

What I do know is that Marketers spend the most on influencers on Instagram, followed by TikTok, then Youtube (by total quantity of spend).

This might change in the future future, but 2024 so far is looking about the same.

3 THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

We know ads are hard to make money with. They’re hard for platforms too.

Especially for short content.

Elon can’t seem to to make it work (lol).

YouTube pushing their Shorts is clearly a “I’m scared of TikTok” move not a “Ha ha I’m Mr. Moneybags” winner strategy.

So what’s an ad-supported gigaplatform to do instead?

If you watched Hank’s video, you already know.

The platform tries to sell stuff.

TikTok shops are a huge, ongoing circus over on the clock app.

I’m gonna spend a lot more time on this topic next week, but all you need to know right now is TikTok is pushing so hard on shop that they are offering 30% off and free shipping for pretty much everything on the entire platform.

There’s a ton of issues with TikTok shops (some potentially pretty serious too) and whether they really work for Creators long term without the incentives given right now remains to be seen, but if you’re in the market for a drop-shipped foot massager you can get one for a steal right now.

II.

MrBeast and Chucky just launched viewstats - a modernized Social Blade clone with some nifty features like channel comparisons, revenue estimation, and thumbnail a/b testing.

Other people (including me) have talked about its functionality elsewhere, but I’m here to focus on the future.

Creators basically make money in 5 ways right now.

Ad Revenue
Brand Deals/Affiliate/Sponsorships
Merch/Merch-like products
Niche Specific Revenue lines (live shows for comedians/musicians, consulting for education, events for inspirational speakers, etc)
Running a related business with their content as lead generation

#5 has historically stayed squarely in the “traditional business” realm.

Think Epic Gardening or Feastables.

These are real, potentially very lucrative businesses, but they’re traditional business nonetheless.

Viewstats is different.

It’s software.

It’s the digital promised land of zero marginal cost per customer and infinite upside revenue potential on stuff you build once.

My bet on “why viewstats” is that after Beast Burger didn’t pan out, Jimmy has learned a lot and is now running tests in the app economy by focusing on an area where he, frankly, is the dream user.

The Creator Economy is a place where knows a ton of earned industry secrets…

and no matter what anyone thinks about viewstats right now that is usually how the billionaire B2B tech founder story starts.

https://creator3×3.com/p/Hank-Greens-TikTok-income

III.

In startups, founders are desperately looking for “Product Market Fit”.

They need to find the right solution to a user pain point that hits really hard so they can grow really big and really fast.

Ideally, the solution needs solve a problem so painful that a user will look past a crappy user interface and use the product even if it sucks because they need their problem solved so badly.

Creators have a different, but related problem.

They understand their own pain point already (they have no money).

They have an asset most startup founders don’t have (an audience).

And they have to figure out how maximize the monetary value they can gain from the audience without alienating the audience who is already used to getting a lot of stuff for free (like content, creator attention, and swag).

So Creators have to explore, ideate, test, and iterate across a bunch of different existing revenue and product models to find the one or combination that hits with their specific audience.

I call this Creator-Product Fit.

We’re going to explore this idea a lot more in future 3×3’s so definitely subscribe if you haven’t yet!

(Share to Twitter)

There’s lot’s of opportunity out in them thar hills, folks.

It won’t look like yesterday’s opportunity.

But it won’t be unrecognizable either!

As we step boldly into that wild, blue yonder we’ll keep posting and iterating and improving through it so 2024 is our break out year 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

Please consider subscribing and if you have any feedback or requests for Creator 3×3 just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv → I reply to every email!

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. if you remember Collegehumor and haven’t kept track of their successor company Dropout’s winding, DnD filled journey then definitely check this video out…

MrBeast's terrible first video, Connor Price takes over the world, and the history of Creator Houses

Cameron Armstrong — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 08:30:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Here are 3 Creator facts from the past, 3 notes on the present, and 3 thoughts about the future of the content economy...

3 FACTS FROM THE PAST

King of Content MrBeast’s first video on his main channel is pretty terrible (and he thinks so too).

It has no plot, no payoff, and it takes over 30 seconds of straight narrator rambling before anything resembling content even happens.

Check it out for yourself.

Now just 8 years later, he has 218 million subscribers on this channel alone and another 120M across just his other YouTube channels. He’s got similar stats on the other platforms along with an army of channel clippers that infinitely repost anything he ever does.

This should be a wake up call for every Creator who just released another flop.

You’re doing the right thing - you’ve just gotta get better.

If you’re focused on improving something every time you post, you’re getting your practice reps in as you find your voice, style, and message.

II.

7K → 19.8K → 238K → 3M → 99M → 608M

This is Connor Price’s total streams per year since 2018 from his Spotify Wrapped.

He’s sitting at casual 2.4M Subs on YouTube right now, but for the first 3 years of his music career success was far from certain.

I study Creator history because I think it’s really important to spread the message that “oh man this might not pan out” energy is a universal experience for Creators.

And for entrepreneurs.

And for anyone building anything hard.

III.

The first Creator Houses popped up over a decade ago.

Jake Paul thinks he started it. Connor Franta definitely had one of the first ones. Wikipedia thinks it was Big Brother in 1999 (lol), but I think it might’ve been The Station in 2009?

Creating is a strange profession. It’s simultaneously extremely lonely, but also incredibly collaborative.

And because it’s such a unique experience, Creators can sniff out who “gets it” pretty easily.

Creator Houses have helped Creators find a community, explore new narratives, and (hopefully) increase their content quantity and quality since the dawn of social media.

3 NOTES ON THE PRESENT

Did somebody say Creator House?

Creator anthropologists Colin and Samir were just announced as the council co-chairs (should I read this as Kingmakers??) of a new IRL project by Whalar.

“The Lighthouse’s mission to help professionalize creators through education and community.” says Samir and will be a four-year, application-based membership projected to be around $5,750 per year.

They’ll open the first Creator House *ahem* Creator Campus locations in Venice, California and Brooklyn, New York, next summer and have a third location in London slated for 2025.

It’s a fundamental law of storytelling that people love watching other people.

People love watching groups of people even more - the stories get more interesting, interconnected, and dynamic the second you bounce personalities off each other.

If I know anything about this duo, the narrative potential of Lighthouse cohorts is off the charts - so I’m pumped to see where they take this!

It might be a bit pricey for some, but physical stuff is expensive so I get it.

II.

Business and Tech Creators are the mostly likely Creator category to make $150K a year according to Neoreach’s 2023 Creator Earnings report.

This (perhaps unsurprisingly) essentially tracks digital ad RPM by category.

Creator revenue is pretty nuanced as a whole, but often the per unit math is straightforward.

More expensive and higher margin product companies have more cash to spend on Creator advertising per unit of product sold.

If your goal is earnings right now, definitely explore how you can tie the kind of content you’re making to one of these more lucrative categories so you can find brand partners with deeper pockets!

III.

Creator JackSepticEye has raised over $28M over the past 5 years with his Thankmas Charity event.

They hit $6.1M donated in this year alone with their live show from the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles!

The Creator economy has donations at its core - sometimes that’s a great thing (like with this) and sometimes it’s not (Creators forced to beg for tips on livestreams to stay afloat).

There aren’t many industries that are like this and it’s worth reflecting upon.

https://creator3x3.com/p/mrbeasts-first-video-is-terrible

3 THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

All of these future thoughts are pulled from Instagram’s 2024 Trend Talk

1 in 3 Gen Z-er’s say the best way to achieve wealth was through some form of self-employment.

This attitude + content eating the world is going to make for a fascinating next 5 years.

If content platforms and startups (👀) can help Creators replicate or beat their local minimum wage - there's going to be a wild shift in how people spend their working time.

I'm betting on people making content about their passion, but I'm biased.

II.

The majority of Zoomers report that they’ve sent a DM to a celebrity on Instagram.

They shared that sending that DM is “the best way for them to show their support and appreciation.”

Maybe it’s the Boomer in me (we all have one), but this blew my mind.

Message received (lol)

DM’s are clearly an important relationship building channel to invest in alongside your actual feeds (and of course - consistent “Relationship Channels” like a newsletter or Discord)

III.

Gen Z’s top eras for 2024:

Hopefully, it’s gonna be a year of growth for a lot of people.

End of Year surveys naturally tend to lean towards “Self Improvement” themes (surprise surprise), but I’m inclined to believe this one.

A lot of people are looking back on COVID times, perhaps with Rosy Glam Snap filters, and realizing that they missed a chance to really chase something they wanted without much downside risk.

There’s something important there.

We rarely get things right the first time, but we’re really good (if we let ourselves) at totally botching stuff, picking something to improve, and doing it better next time.

That’s what being a person is all about.

That’s really the story of Creating is all about too.

If it makes sense for you, I think people would love to hear that story in your content.

Did you catch the theme this week?

It’s growth.

And the crazy thing about growth is…

The only shortcut to growth is the hard way. 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

Please subscribe and if you have any feedback/requests for Creator 3×3 just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv → I reply to every email!

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. if you’re “behind the scenes” of making content and haven’t seen how the new podcast Gwilym, George Blackman, and Jamie Whiffen are launching then definitely check out the trailer of Making It…

3x3 Special: 5 Netflix lessons from 100 billion hours of viewer watch data

Cameron Armstrong — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 16:15:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Netflix just released 100 billion hours of viewer watch data.

Did you realize that 30% of all Netflix viewing hours went to non-English stories?

The report is full of gems like this… and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow to share them.

Here are the top 5 things you should know about what people are watching on Netflix right now.

The top 30 shows on Netflix only add up to about 10% of total Netflix watchtime!

Even the top performing show "The Night Agent" with it's 812 MILLION viewing hours didn't crack 1% of total content watched.

Online content lives (and dies) in the long tail of viewers.

II.

About 95% of the watch hours for Netflix's Top 30 shows were from content released in the past year.

"New-ness" definitely still matters to stay top of mind for viewers.

Viewing Hours for Netflix’s Top 30 Shows

III.

Movies might be dead.

26 of the Top 30 @netflix shows are serials.

15 of those 26 are new shows!

Only 4 of the Top 30 pieces of content are movies.

And only 1 movie broke the Top 15...

Top 30 Netflix Shows by Viewing Hours

IV.

Viewers are very dramatic right now

14 of the Top 30 shows on @netflix are Dramas and another 9 are Thrillers

Gameshows are a distant 3rd.

Maybe this is why Mr. Beast is experimenting with longer, slower stories in his recent videos?

Power law content winners on Netflix still deal with their own power law problems!

The #1 show (The Night Agent) had 5 times has many views as the #30 (Perfect Match: Season 1)

I guess there's always a bigger fish.

Seriously though, the best data point to come out of this Viewer Report has got to be that "Werewolves of the Third Reich" (which is sitting at cool 21% on Rotten Tomatoes right now) got about 100,000 HOURS of watch time.

If they can do it - so can you.

There's ALWAYS an audience out there for your content, y'all.

You’ve just gotta find them 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

https://creator3x3.com/p/5-netflix-lessons

Please consider subscribing and if you have any feedback or requests for Creator 3×3 just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv → I reply to every email!

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. if you want a sneak peak at the future of gaming and haven’t seen Derby VR and their meteoric rise on TikTok yet definitely check them out…

The $150M story of Stardew Valley, TikTok algo changes, and how we're still so early in gaming content

Cameron Armstrong — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 16:11:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Here are 3 Creator facts from the past, 3 notes on the present, and 3 thoughts about the future of the content economy...

3 FACTS FROM THE PAST

Game developer ConcernedApe spent 4 years planning, designing, and coding the 2016 release of the now-famous Stardew Valley entirely by himself.

Almost 8 years later, Stardew Valley has sold over 20M copies across PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android, and is often cited as one of the best games of all time.

Here’s the stats just for Steam’s Game Marketplace!

Stardew Valley Steam Stats

These are numbers any game studio would be proud of, but when you put it in the context of a solo developer (who eventually started working with a small crew) - it’s a mind-bending success.

As Creator tools get better and better, we’re going to see more incredible creations like Stardew Valley built by top tier micro-teams and individuals.

Technology empowers the best of the best to do more with less.

And building a community let’s you share those creations faster than any company could ever dream of.

II.

Since its introduction in 1994, over 100 million George Foreman grills have been sold worldwide.

He didn’t create the concept or even help design it, but he became the face of the product through infomercials where he’d “knock the fat out” of whatever they cooked.

Foreman himself made an estimated $200M from this brand deal - much more than he ever made as a boxer.

I see this story as a prototype for the foundations of a new creator economy.

Both niche creators and those with broad appeal can leverage owned or licensed products that make sense for their audience - and once product companies start to understand the distributive power of creators they can do it on a scale that has never been seen before.

III.

The first online Creators can trace their roots back to the rise of blogging platforms.

Personal diaries shared to internet strangers (for free) eventually turned into media machines fueled by digital advertising.

Sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed were actually born from this early era of the internet to track, filter, and highlight these unfiltered stories.

It’s hard not to draw the comparison to how long form YouTube videos evolved from indie skits and vlogs to ultra high production value content streams… or how homegrown lip sync TikTok’s evolved into incredibly well-produced short form video dopamine loops.

Every new medium professionalizes its content over time - even if the professionalized content is designed to look authentically accessible.

3 NOTES ON THE PRESENT

Long form TikTok Creators (with videos longer than 1 minute) are growing 5x faster than short form Creators right now according to info shared at a private NYC Creator event in October hosted by TikTok.

The TikTok team is even considering increasing their max upload length from 10 minutes to 15 based on the data!

The trend is clear. TikTok wants to be more like YouTube and YouTube wants to be more like TikTok (even though Shorts are still capped at 60 seconds).

It’s probably worth cross posting versions of your content that can fit within whatever size guidelines they both eventually settle on.

II.

Swedish YouTuber Simone Giertz smashed her fundraising goal of $50K for her foldable “Coat Hinger” invention…

by raising (as of this writing) $475,216 to fund the manufacture and sale of the product!

It’s abundantly clear to me just how powerful creator/product fit is - when your audience sees how much you can do for them (because you understand them so well) they’ll demand it loudly… the rest is just execution.

III.

Tyreek Hill, current wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, announced his retirement at the end of his 2025 contract so he can focus on a yet-to-be-launched esports franchise,

“Gaming is a part of who I am” says Tyreek (who currently has 1.2M subscribers on YouTube)

Esports is still extremely culturally nascent (despite some bonkers prize purses out there) and the cross-pollination of traditional athletes into the ecosystem will undoubtedly help normalize the legitimacy of the industry with classic sports fans.

3 THOUGHTS FOR THE FUTURE

There is a new content platform being built out there right now.

Probably multiple.

It won’t feel like what we’re used to.

It might even be built natively for the Vision Pro. Who knows!

The only constant is change.

II.

Cozy Games have been mentioned 110M times this year on YouTube.

The triple whammy of COVID lifestyle shifts, shifting player tastes, and the tidal wave of gamer girls has dramatically changed the landscape of gaming content.

YouTuber Eeowna shares her experience from just a few years ago in 2020 with the YouTube team

“Every single time I was interested in a game and I'd go to look it up, the feed was just full of men”

So she became the Creator she wished she could watch.

FPS Battle Royale videos aren’t going away, but there’s definitely a lot more to come from cozy games.

III.

TikTok is shutting down their Creator fund next week.

Let’s be real though - it wasn’t paying the bills for most Creators anyway.

You and I both know you can’t rely on platform revenue.

It should be a nice bonus to your income, but the risk of de-monetization, platform changes, or even algorithm shifts is a noose around your neck waiting to happen if you’re not building a connection (and an income stream) with your audience beyond your current platform.

https://creator3x3.com/p/the-150m-story-of-stardew-valley

Things are changing.

It’s not a good thing or a bad thing.

It’s just a thing.

It’s super clear to me that most of the changes are tilting in favor of highly effective individual Creators and small teams.

All this might seem overwhelming, but I’d encourage you get energized.

Stuff is gonna change whether you like it or not 🫡

Want to share this issue of Creator 3×3 via text, social media, or email? Just copy and paste this link:

Please consider subscribing and if you have any feedback or requests for Creator 3×3 just respond to this email or reach out at Cameron@seemore.tv → I reply to every email!

See you next week,

Cameron Armstrong
Founder of Seemore.tv

p.s. if you’re a basketball fan and haven’t seen how Jordan Haber (legally) snuck into the 2023 NBA Draft then check him out…

3x3: Bill Gates can't explain why the internet is useful, a booktok audience breakdown, and more

Cameron Armstrong — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:33:00 +0000

Welcome to Creator 3×3!

Here are 3 Creator facts from the past, 3 notes on the present, and 3 thoughts for the future of the content economy...

3 FACTS FROM THE PAST

In 1995, Bill Gates couldn’t convince David Letterman why the internet was going to be useful¹ .

Bill Gates: “You can now listen to a baseball game whenever you want!”

David Letterman: “Do tape recorders ring a bell?”

Sometimes even incredibly smart, capable, and well-incentivized people can’t explain or predict what’s gonna happen next…

I often wonder what I’m completely wrong about in the creator economy.

II.

Substack invented the modern independent newsletter and it’s only 6 years old.

It’s upstart competitor Beehiiv is just 2 years old.²

We’re still in the very earliest days of the evolution of online newsletters.

III.

In 2022, over 98% of Spotify artists make less than $36 every quarter.

Only 2% of creators on Patreon earn the equivalent of a monthly minimum wage.³

We haven’t even come close to solving Creator monetization at scale.