[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. For those new to the show, this is a podcast about building sustainable media businesses. It's something I've been doing for a long time.
I was most recently the president and editor in chief of Digiday Media, where we were building our own sustainable media businesses, and now I'm doing it again with the Rebooting, so it's a little bit meta in that it is
a media publication about building media publications. So if you don't already, please sign up for the Rebooting newsletter. It is available at rebooting.substack.com, and it comes out twice a week.
One is about this podcast, and the other is my own essay about different topics when it comes to building sustainable media businesses. So check it out, please. This week, I spoke to Evan Britton.
Evan is, uh, in addition to being a Philadelphia sports fan, the founder of FamousBirthdays. If you don't know FamousBirthdays, it's pretty much the IMDb of the creator economy.
This is where you go to find out more about the established and up-and-coming stars of TikTok and other platforms.
I wanted to have Evan on for a few reasons, but one important one is that FamousBirthdays is turning its first-party data into an enterprise product, a SaaS product, if you will.
And I think too often the discussion of data in publishing ends up really being a discussion of ad targeting in publishing, and that is not the full story. So I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Please send me a note with your thoughts and feedback, criticisms, or compliments. I am bmorrissey@gmail.com. Now on to my conversation with Evan. [on-hold music] Evan, welcome to the podcast.
Appreciate you taking the time. Happy to be here. So let's get right into the origin story for those who are not into the sort of creator world.
'Cause you were early, before everyone was talking like creator economy, creator economy, creator economy, you started FamousBirthdays. Give us the origin story. I'm... I must admit, I backed into the creator economy.
My initial vision was that on Wikipedia, there was too much info for mobile.
So if I would look up Tom Hanks or Kobe Bryant or Beyoncé on mobile on Wikipedia in 2012, it was way too long, and IMDb's mobile site was not a good experience. So that was my initial vision.
Birthday is always often the first thing people wanna know about a celebrity, but there's other information they wanna know. We were like a mobile-friendly Wikipedia/IMDb, and that was the vision.
Nothing to do with creators. I'm more about user experience, and I saw the user experience on mobile for Wikipedia was not good. I think you don't want a book report on mobile. You wanna get right to it.
You know, I saw that as an entrepreneur because I could be mobile first where these legacy publishers weren't. But one thing I've always told publishers and I've always stuck to is to internal search is the north star.
You can look at analytics all day long, but what people are searching on your property is gold 'cause it's what they want. And a lot of websites, you'll notice, use Google's product where it shows results from your site.
So if I search basketball, it would show any result on FamousBirthdays for basketball. But instead, on mobile, you don't wanna have extra clicks. We took the user right to the page they wanted.
So if they searched for Tom Hanks, they went right to his profile. If they searched basketball, we listed all of the basketball players on our platform.
And by building out our own search, we also had technology where we can see what was being missed.
So maybe in the early days, seventy percent of searches were a hit, meaning we had a result for it, whether it was a celebrity or if somebody searched a movie. We didn't have movies at the get-go, but we did eventually.
If someone searched May 12th, we sent them to the page with May 12th birthdays. Yeah. So we got rid of the- Let's back up. Like, like what year are we talking about? When did this start?
And okay, 2012, you start FamousBirthdays, and the idea was people go to, to Google, and probably the number one search category is porn, and the number two is probably celebrity. Yes.
That was an area where I knew there would be user demand, and there wasn't a good mobile experience. Okay.
So I wasn't into celebrity culture as much as UX, but you know, IMDb was obviously a site I was on, and Wikipedia. So yeah, it was 2012, right as mobile was starting to get mainstream,
and we looked at our internal searches, and those searches showed us that the creator economy had a huge void to fill. Because with Tom Hanks and Kobe Bryant, we were just a resource. Yeah.
With all these Vine stars in 2013 and '14, we became the source. So is that where it really started to go into the creator, is with Vine? 'Cause I think... Look, a lot of people don't remember Vine. We all remember Vine.
Some of us remember Vine. And this was one of the few platforms that really started to develop a, a, a set of stars. Yes. Star, and Vine and Twitter.
And we, one of the aha moments, I remember some actor who had a speaking line in Star Wars, their email and their Twitter would be like so and so's agent or their manager, and that person had eight thousand Twitter followers.
We saw these Vine stars with a million followers, and their G- not even Gmail, their email was right on their Twitter page. So there was just such a gap, and we would email them, "Hey, we'd love to add you to our site.
Fans are searching for you." And they weren't on Wikipedia or IMDb, so they couldn't wait to get back to us.
So we would have a Vine star with a million followers sending us their headshot and their bio, and then at the same time, we had these movie actors that wouldn't respond to us that had five thousand followersSo we saw very early that there was a gap between where culture was but where the industry was set up.
Okay. So the industry was set up, and usually is, to serve the old guard, right? The established. Yep. And the established celebrity world are the Tom Hanks and, and Russell Crowe, I guess.
I don't know, is he still acting even?
Those type of people, but then I guess at the time it was millennials, but moving into Gen Z, they were starting to develop their own affinity for a totally different category of celebrity.
And I can remember the first time I saw there was a line around the block near our offices in New York. I was like, "Oh my God, what is going on here?" And I asked, and someone said, "Oh, so and so is here."
And I'd never heard of the person before, and it was a YouTuber, and there was like 1,000 people, and there was police out to try to keep order. So is that the gap you saw? Yeah, that was...
With traditional celebrities, you were a fan of them, but with social stars, you were really a fan.
It's different when you see someone in a movie acting as someone else versus watching them brush their teeth every morning. So social just had a, a deeper level of fandom, and we always saw that in our, our rankings.
We rank celebrities based on how much passion they have on our site, and someone with a million followers, they might get 30% engagement, where Beyoncé has 100 million, but she only gets 1%.
So there was- they really hit a nerve, these social stars, and we were the first to see it, frankly, because we saw in our data these searches, caps, which were very controversial in 2014 and '15.
Social stars ranked above Taylor Swift and ranked above mainstream stars, and we would get hate mail and emails, and even our team didn't understand it. We're not credible.
Why are these social stars who only a certain subset know ranking ahead of, you know, mainstream stars? But, you know, we just-- I always followed the data, and we saw early on that these social stars had
passion leaps and bounds ahead of traditional. Yeah. And then another good early signal was VidCon.
I was at VidCon in 2014, and I remember seeing a social star walk through who only had like a million followers getting screamed and tears. Yeah. I've heard VidCon is insane. Insane.
Well, not anymore, 'cause now it's corporate. They got bought by- The old days, I remember sending a reporter because it was just nuts. And it was validating 'cause data's what... We saw our data in real time.
I remember Ricky Dillon was not on Wikipedia. I don't even know who these people... Who's Ricky Dillon? I gotta admit, I don't know who Ricky Dillon is. [laughs] I just... He was an old Vine star- Okay...
that broke out- Ah... that got swarmed at VidCon but wasn't on Wikipedia, so it was validating. 'Cause if there's 500 screaming people for this person in a- Yeah...
parking lot in Anaheim, they probably should be on Wikipedia over somebody with a speaking line in a movie. So I just saw that that was the niche, that's the vision, and we're gonna hit our 10-year anniversary in March.
We're still doing the same thing. We're looking at our searches to see who people were interested in, we profile them, and then for existing people on our platform, our rankings change based on user activity.
So I've been able to combine that initial vision with staying in my lane. Yeah. That's interesting 'cause you've bootstrapped this, right? Yep.
Talk to me about that decision, 'cause I think these days there's a lot of money going around, and there's a lot of people raising money. Even people with content businesses are back to raising money.
That didn't work out that great the first time. But talk to me about the decision to bootstrap. The decision bootstrapping, like I thought, we got to a few million users, I was excited.
That's- [laughs] I thought that was the ceiling, and then the creator economy gave us this amazing tailwind. So did you think it was gonna be the, the quote-unquote, "lifestyle business"?
Like if best case scenario, it's a lifestyle business. I, I wasn't thinking those terms. Yeah. I was just passionate to build a platform. I just think the thing about bootstrapping is that nobody cared for a few years.
I mean, like we go to VidCon now, everyone knows us. The first few years, nobody cared. That's an advantage. Yeah. It's an advantage, but like there was never VCs at that time knocking down our door. Okay. That's true.
And another good thing we've done is we've never worked with advertisers. My passion and focus is... [laughs] Well, 'cause it's a focus. My passion and focus in our team- Oh, yeah... is, is on helping users.
So we weren't going out how to hit these numbers on a revenue. It was more how do we serve users and match our searches.
So there was never a time when I needed VC to achieve the vision 'cause we just grew as the site grew. Yeah. So the, the distribution was entirely or mostly through SEO I would assume. Early, obviously Google is key.
We had a cool brand. Our direct traffic always grew well proportionately, so if we were 20% direct, 80% referral, as our site tripled, we were still 20% direct.
So our direct in year five was more than our referral in year one, which was always comforting, if that makes sense. Yeah.
So our direct continued to grow alongside of our referral, even though referral was more than 50%. Google definitely was a key referral source.
We launched an app pretty early, which was good because it was where power users went. And then social became a good referral because it was so key to our creator economy. Social was a great way to grow alongside that.
I would guess the typical thing is someone is like, you know, Logan Paul birthday. Like you see the auto completes, net worth or whatever.
I don't know if you guys do net worth, but like- Yeah, it's not even birthday, it's just Logan Paul. I mean, that's the thing. When we're the first to profile these creators, so they're not on Wikipedia or IMDb.
Remember, if you go to their social platform, you're gonna get a lot of videos of them jumping out of a airplane, but we write a good bio with them, with media, and with popularity rankings.
So often we'll rank for them, you know, for just Logan Paul.
And I do think that one beauty of staying in your lane, people at VidCon told me they used to find us in Google, started going direct 'cause we stayed in our lane and we were the leaderSo over time, we get more and more direct, and the number one search to our site is famous- Yeah...
birthdays, and that's 'cause of our brand. So talk to me about staying in your lane. You've mentioned that a few times. I wrote earlier today about quality over quantity.
People talk about it, but then when push comes to shove, they always go to the quantity at the end of the day.
And I feel like staying in your lane is something similar, whereas in focus, people talk about it a lot, but ultimately eyes wander. [laughs] I've done it. It's been hard. 10 years, I knew there was a big opportunity.
IMDb and Wikipedia are huge platforms, so there was a big opportunity I knew. There's always great ideas.
We can do tri- trivia, uh, you know, we can sell merch, we can sell direct ad sales, we can launch a conference, I mean, every idea was good. Yeah.
But, but I remember the f- the Instagram founder once said, Kevin Systrom, he said no to 99.9% of ideas, I think he said. And to me, w- the missed search is always our North Star.
Today our missed search is searched hundreds of thousands of times per day. A search engine is searched hundreds of thousand times per day.
Maybe we're matching 85% of those searches, so that's 15% that we're not matching. So it, it let, makes it easier for me to focus 'cause I can see users not getting what they want. Yeah.
So why would I go launch Merit Church or maybe do a talent agency? You know, we had Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae in our office before anyone knew them. We were the first company to ever contact Addison Rae.
So could we have managed her? Maybe. But every day I see the missed searches, and that's where we have, uh, white space- Yeah...
in that we're the leader, there's so many talent agencies, there's so many influencer marketing shops, but we are the platform. Yeah. We're the IMDb for creators, so we just triple down.
And I'll also say, I'm also humbled. Like, I didn't think this site would get, you know, to tens of millions of users organically. So I remind myself that, and I don't need to try to be Zuckerberg.
So it helps me not go for the shiny object and just keep hitting bunt singles every day. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about building the business.
We had talked over the years because you're not spending your time sucking up to advertisers or whatever, but you gotta make money, right?
Advertising is generally a way to monetize celebrity and celebrity adjacent content. Let's just talk about how you really built the business using programmatic as your main method. We tripled down on programmatic.
It has a lot of pros and a lot of cons. So we leaned on that. The one beauty of programmatic, it's automated. So nobody on the team deals with the, the advertisementation. I do it.
We, once we passed 10 million users, we could get every feed, you know, all like we got the direct Amazon, uh, you know, bidder and all of the direct feeds. So, you know, we built the good technology.
You know, our CTOs, we built great programmatic technology to connect to all the programmatic networks, but then we let them do what they do. We don't have any overhead on it.
So instead of complaining about lower CPMs, I was happy that we had no overhead associated to it, and we didn't have to spend any time or effort on it, which is also key.
If you're great at selling to advertisers, your users don't care. In fact, often it'll hurt your users 'cause they don't wanna see a Ford truck driving over your homepage.
[laughs] So I think that's another beauty of programmatic is that you don't have to do something you're, you don't wanna do for your users.
And it's reliable, and we don't have to do collections, and we have enough scale. I mean, we're serving billions of impressions. Could we make a lot more off those impressions? Yes. Yeah.
But I always know I can do that later also. And your costs would go way up, right? Building a direct sales force is e- extremely expensive and hard. Yeah. Right. It's hard.
As our brand grew and became a leader, the other thing about doing direct sales is it competes with programmatic 'cause we're so good at being available and programmatic, that if we did direct sales, my salespeople aren't gonna like programmatic.
So I think the good thing is if somebody wants to directly advertise on us, I'm sure they can figure it out programmatically, and I would say that as our brand grows, that that should help our programmatic CPMs because we have the largest Gen Z audience on the web outside the social platforms.
But when you say programmatic, is it like open programmatic? Yes. Or do you do private marketplaces? Private markets to me is direct sales. Maybe it's kind of in the middle- Yeah... but then you have to woo...
You need a salesperson to do that. They don't just come in- Right... with a PMP deal. Right. [laughs] But you gotta buy some steak dinners and hit the soul cycle. Exactly. Soul cycle. [laughs] Yeah.
And I'd rather make our site extremely fast. If you go to and click the randomizer button, it's lightning fast. I'd rather obsess over that than those steak dinners.
So yeah, so, so programmatic's been good, and it's allowed us to do what we're most passionate about. Right. And so programmatic seems like it was a bridge for the business till this data offering. Yes.
Because people talk about data, they talk about first party data and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yep. And most of it is, is not organized in a way or as valuable as people think.
Explain to me what you saw, because it's very clear that you follow the data.
I'm reminded when you're talking of the episode of Seinfeld when Kramer took over Moviephone and people were calling him asking for movie times. So finally he was like, "Why don't you just tell me what you want?"
And that's search. Search is, why don't you tell me what you want? People just tell you. So explain to me how you came up with the data product. We've always used data on our own end to make decisions. Yeah.
So when we would re- we would reach out to celebrities to get them into the office to shoot video, we couldn't reach out to all 200,000 celebrities on our platform. So we did it based on who users were interested in.
And we had Charli D'Amelio in our office four times before she was going to the NBA All-Star game. You know, three or four times, we did our first ever interview.
We didn't pay her, but we contacted her when she didn't have a million followers. So at that time, our brand was a platform she was excited about.
So, you know, our internal searches have always showed us, uh, what people are interested in. And since we also write bio, we have our own copyrighted bios on the creators, so we can merge that data.
So we know which fitness YouTuber is being searched the most in January.So, yeah, we've always had the data and, um, I was always hesitant to launch an influencer marketing platform for...
You know, I would never wanna do it to match, you know, to be like an agency where I contact, I manually contact the creators, I manually set them up with brands, even though there's high margin in that.
You know, I was thinking more on the software platform side. But you know, though worried about being focused, that I waited.
But what happened is that one of the top social platforms contacted us 'cause they all use our site because they wanna make sure they're reaching out to the right creators that are rising on their platforms.
All the social platforms, their creator teams, and all the talent agencies, they're all over our site. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. W-why don't they have... They have this data. They have- They don't.
They have their own data, so they don't know what's happening on other platforms. Okay, so like YouTube looking for TikTokers to, like, kind of woo away or something like that. We have platform-agnostic data.
We can see, like, we, the per... We saw the Squid Game cast being searched right when the show launched.
It's platform agnostic, so that's the beauty of data is that we have the bio and structured data on them, but then we have the, um, the platform agnost- then we have the ranking data.
So yes, we can tell social platform A who's rising on social platform B. Um, and we can tell a talent agency which of their existing talent's rising and who they should sign.
The other thing we can do is we can see who's falling because if you look at social graphs, it usually just shows followers and likes and engagement. We can see who's being searched less also.
It's important 'cause people lose their momentum or people don't. Give me someone who I might know who's losing momentum. I'm not gonna [laughs] Come on, what are you sucking up to the creators?
They're not listening to this podcast, trust me. Charli D'Amelio, I'm sure she's still doing fine, but she ain't listening to this. That's not my style. [laughs] So, um- [laughs] It's just data, Evan.
I hear you, but- You're like Comscore. They would never give me the good shit, so I always had to get someone's login. Yeah. Right. I hear you.
So this big social platform contacted us, and we started out just sending them spreadsheets, and there, and, like, then we built the platform.
We already had the platform for our own usage and, you know, then we signed a major talent agency.
Okay, so a talent agency is like, "Look, I wanna sign these people, but I can't wait until Charli D'Amelio and her various siblings become massive. I gotta find the Charli D'Amelio before they're Charli D'Amelio."
And we showed them that we knew 'cause we had her in our office when she had a half a million followers. Yeah. So it was... And again, their whole team uses us to learn about creators and to kind of see our rankings.
So the sales has been easy with the companies that are passionate about Famous Birthdays, and that's one thing that was humbling at VidCon for me. It wasn't just the fans, it was here in the industry.
We've built, we're building out the Pro. Now, I will say, without the consumer site, the consumer site is important 'cause it drives the data. Yeah.
So if we didn't have the, the tens of millions of users, we wouldn't keep bioing new creators, and then we wouldn't have the rankings. Yeah, yeah. I will say this, having that B2B model for...
I'm sure you're charging a lot of money. We're gonna talk about specifics. You're gonna talk about specifics about the money in a bit.
But, like, having that B2B side means you don't have to make the kind of compromises on the consumer side that you would have to do if you had to maximize revenue, 'cause that's when you get the Ford F-150 driving across your screen.
[laughs] Consumer business is going well, so we're being convinced from getting feedback from these social platforms when other companies like Creator Economy and the companies that have signed up, talent agencies, that this is a great second way for us to grow the business.
Yeah. And it's not gonna affect the consumer because I don't wanna have the Ford truck driving over the homepage. I don't think I would've anyway- [laughs]... without the Pro.
That said, I like that this new business does not affect the consumer, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. Yeah.
I don't wanna launch a second business that affects the consumer because that's what we do is focus on the user. Yeah.
I always think about, like, DNA a lot, and it seems it's important that data is in the DNA of this company. I mean, you founded it, and you're obviously very into the data.
I'm glad you didn't tell me that you're gonna be the Bloomberg of the creator economy, although you can use that if you do decide to raise money.
That would be like a $10 billion valuation [laughs] just by saying that, I think. [laughs] But a lot of people wanna be the Bloomberg of X because maybe they can get SaaS multiples and whatnot.
But the reality is data businesses are really difficult, I think, for content businesses to pull off because it's not in the DNA of most content businesses to be data businesses, and they're just different.
First party is also key. Mm. We only look at our data, but we have enough users where our data's relevant. We have our own data, and that, that changes the game.
And also, we were already using this for several years on our own. Yeah. So that helps a lot too. Like, when we launched our Pro platform, we already had it built for our own internal usage.
That's how we knew to contact Addison and Charli early. So I think that we've been able to add on the data business because that's how we were running our own business. We got good at it.
And that also helps when we pitch clients to show them how this helped us, and now we're giving it to them to help them.
So yeah, I would say to your point, it would be hard for a content business who data wasn't already part of their way they had a competitive advantage to go then launch it.
Yeah, obviously a lot of people wanna spin out tech or SaaS products from content businesses for the obvious valuation reasons, but it has to be part of your business.
Like, I mean, I haven't seen the Axios HQ, but it at least makes sense that they built some kind of software that enables that smart brevity thing and to then be able to spin out that software. That makes sense.
But if it's just, "Oh, we're focused on this area, and then we're gonna build a data business also because this and this and this, and that'll get us better," I just, I've got a lot of doubts that that ever works.
The, and, and the other real ha- tailwind we've had is that, again, everyone already uses us and knows us. You know, people have asked me, "Why don't you call your data business something more corporate?"
And it might be fun to call it something like-IntelliDate or something like that Constellantis... Const- yeah, exactly.
[laughs] That might be fun, but like everyone already uses Famous Birthdays on the consumer side, and we're only showing them a very small portion of what we have, so that also helps. Yeah.
It's almost analogous to how it's not a paywall, but again, a lot of publishers expose 20% of their articles, and then the rest is behind the paywall.
So I think that if a publisher can do a data business in a similar mindset to there, that can be a tailwind.
By the way, Constellantis is a great name for it 'cause it's like constellation stars and just throwing it out there. Atlantis, like, I mean, it's like a pretty good name. I don't know. N- [laughs] I'm so...
Okay, we've got Constellantis co- you can choose the pronunciation, and we have the Bloomberg or the Creator Economy. Boom, 10 billion. [laughs] But you gotta build them. Okay.
So w- uh, oh my God, we forgot to talk about the numbers. How much are you charging for this, this Pro thing? We haven't released what we're charging. I know, but that's why we're here. Right.
But what I would say is we're going quality over quantity- [laughs]... for sure. You know, so, so, so, so we're really adding value for our existing clients and, um- This isn't like 300 bucks a year.
This is like- No, it's not. We didn't go to retail... thousands and thousands If it was, we'd have a checkout on the site. Yeah. So it's not. Yeah. We're not going retail. We're going enterprise.
Remember, the first two clients we had were giant org, and they were happy, so we're not going- Okay. But do you, do you sell seat licenses? Like, what, how do you- Yeah, right now we do it based on, uh, usage.
Okay, based on usage. And they're annual contracts? Um, we started out, uh, month-to-month because, again, you know, that's another advantage we have. We have the consumer platform that's growing.
We wanna drive ROI with Famous Birthdays Pro. So we're not concerned with locking our clients into long-term contracts. It's all first-party data that we're have, so we're happy right now with month-to-month.
And I think that's been another tailwind for us because we don't need to lock in an annual contract to hit some metric. We wanna be about ROI. Okay. And so how big is the overall company?
We have about 50 people working on the team. People? I meant money. Oh, yeah. Okay. [laughs] We don't look, we don't get into- [laughs] We don't get into money. I like when the founder's like, "We can't talk about this."
I'm like, "What are you talking about? It's you, and yes, you can." [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, it is. [laughs] So I don't- [laughs] Okay, there we go. Thank you for that, Evan. Yeah. I, I w- I'll give you that.
[laughs] I don't get into the numbers. It's not, it's not about the numbers. We're not, we're not numbers-driven. We're... If we were, we'd have a sales team. Yeah, but it, it helps. So you got 50 people.
Like, what percentage is the Pro product gonna be at the end of the year, do you think, of the business? That's a good question. [laughs] Thank you. Yeah. No, no, I'm saying the nuts. Um,
yeah, I would say at the end of this year, Pro might be like a third maybe. Okay. [laughs] But again, those are, um... And look, that we just launched that, and those are, you know, enterprise contracts.
And that's not because the ad business is not growing. The ad business will also grow. Yes. Okay. No, the ad business is very stable. I think for ad business to really grow grow- Yeah... we'd have to get the salespeople.
I think, look, programmatic is not falling to zero, but it's not going to the moon.
So I think that's the exciting part about the enterprise business is once you have tens of millions of users and you're saturated in programmatic, it's either we start doing ARB, which we don't do, we don't buy traffic, or we get direct ads.
So I think the enterprise business might be more than a third, the enterprise business. S- So I, I, I think that's definitely a tailwind for growth.
I always hear people, whenever there's any sort of privacy regulation being suggested or third-party cookie or something, they're always saying that it's gonna, like, kill publishers like you.
I've been hearing that, Brian, for 10 years. [laughs] Yeah, like- Yet somehow I'm not stepping over the bodies of these publishers when I leave my home. So I'm wondering where the gap is.
Well, the gap is maybe in the business model. Like, I'm realistic about it. I just told you we're not gonna double our programmatic revenue. Yeah.
So, you know, so, so, like, we don't have all this overhead associated to it. Um, and we strong brand in the community, and users care about us. So that's, you know- How many people visit a, a, a month?
I think we're about 25 million uniques, all organic, but that number changes a lot. You know, we're growing our app, which has less uniques, but it has, like, really stickiness.
And, um, you know, on social sometimes we'll drive more or less traffic based on factors. Yeah. So I don't wor- I don't worry about the headlines. [laughs] I remember the ad blocking apocalypse, and then- Yeah...
tonight it's like we have a strong brand. I know. Users and- We whipped, we whipped up some of that hysteria. It's a good time. [laughs] It was a good time. It was a good time.
Also, the hysteria goes the other way, too, and I, I know you know this. Publishers that changed their model to suit... We don't do e- suit a tailwind, like how, you know, by making certain content platform.
We make it for users, so it works both ways. Okay. So right now the, the revenue portfolio is programmatic ads and then enterprise, more of a SaaS model. Yeah. And you haven't, you haven't branched into...
There's no content studio. There's no OTT. No, we make our own content for, like... We make our own content for YouTube and our site, but we're not, we're not looking to, like, um...
You know, we have, we actually, we're doing a Snapchat Discover- Okay... show, which we haven't announced yet. There we go. We just announced it. Yeah.
We're doing, we got a, we've, like, Snapchat approved our- Fi- okay, finally. [laughs] Well, Snapchat approved us for Discover, which was exciting because that's- Okay...
that's more of a walled garden than YouTube that, you know, anyone can publish. So we, we're, we're making, um, fun content, but, yeah, we're not going to the studio. We don't wanna be an agency.
And the other unique thing that we've done, we wanna be agnostic to all creators, which is, like, our rankings are based on users. They can't be bought.
And, you know, if we signed one talent, other people would say, you know, "Why this other talent?" And I'm sure...
So we're just careful to kind of treat all creators the same.And use our rankings to dictate everything and be agnostic, and I think that's one of the reasons why users love us. Yeah.
And you also, I mean, just by bootstrapping it to this point, 'cause it's really hard, right? Like, you have so much more the VCs would say optionality.
'Cause I wonder, when you're talking, I think back to, like, Rap Genius, right? Yep.
And that to me is, like, a perfect case study of, oh, great product, they landed in a great space, and it seems to me, just from the outside, that talk about not staying in your lane.
Like, they just tried to do all sorts of stuff. I'm not familiar with everything they did, but I guess... Look, I think that... Look, obviously media companies got- Well, they pivoted to video.
They were gonna make their own, like, shows and stuff like this, and it's like, it's okay. People are coming to you for lyrics. Like, double down on that. Well, remember, like, if you have an ad-based model, it's not...
The great thing about enterprise SaaS, it's scalable. You know, like, we- Yeah... add more clients and it just grows.
You know, ad businesses, it's not as scalable because it's more, you know, if you, you pivot to video, your content, you have to create that content and, you know, and then you get some, you know, margin on top of it.
So I think ad-based businesses aren't, um, you know, it's exciting, and I think that's also obviously... Look, there's also, you know, consumer SaaS.
You know, we could have charged our users a few bucks a month and gave them extra functionality, but we went the enterprise model, which is good, because then we don't have to gate anything with our users.
But I do think that, um, part of the reason that you're seeing so much tailwinds with subscriptions is because it's just more scalable than an ad-based model. Yeah. So final thing is just the creator economy.
It's getting a ton of focus right now. Um, explain why this is a long-term trend and not just, like, the latest fad. It's definitely not a fad. There's many tailwinds. A, platforms. They are...
Look at their cap and look at the time on site and engagement. The new age of entertainment is not watching...
It used to be two-hour movie, then half-hour Seinfeld, then five-minute Netflix video, I mean, you know, f- like five-minute YouTube video, now it's a 15-second TikTok.
Remember, on TikTok, in three minutes, you get 12 pieces of content. So just, it's just more efficient. This is why I stay away from TikTok. I don't think my analog brain can, can take it.
I think it would be the thing that breaks me. It's where mobile consumption is, and at the same time, you have iPhones getting more powerful, 5G is getting more powerful, and then the creators.
Users have found that that's a great way for them to be entertained, and TikTok and the AI algorithms make it so easy- Yeah... that it's just, that's not go- We're not going backwards.
We're not going from a two-hour movie from a 15-second TikTok backwards. Yeah. And, and, and from that, and I also think the social platforms, as you know, have been burnt by news. They want to stay away from there.
Creators is much more evergreen for them. So the social platforms have all... For years, they wouldn't prioritize creators. That's completely flipped. I mean, even Zuckerberg has mentioned creators multiple times.
They all have funds. You know, YouTube keeps announcing how much they're paying creators. So, like, Snapchat's pay, was paying a million dollars a day for a highlight.
Creators have a lot of leverage because there's five or six social platforms that are, that have scale, and they're all growing, but creators are the fuel to their engagement without news.
So from that has came a lot of leverage and tools and business models supporting creators. Yeah.
And I also think it's, like, probably not to be underestimated, or maybe it's obvious, is that, you know, we've got, like, genera- a, a generation is growing up that, like, they were growing up with, like, Jake and Logan Paul, with PewDiePie and stuff like this.
So who they aspire to be is, is, is not, like, the Hollywood celebrity necessarily. I mean, like, there's a whole group of, of a lot of people, a lot of kids who wanna be like MrBeast.
No, yeah, I think there was an article that said the number one career kids want is a- Yeah... is a social star, a YouTube star.
But the other thing to double down that, even the traditional stars like J.Lo and Will Smith are going on TikTok because that's where it's headed. Yeah.
So it's not only that the new people don't aspire to be traditional, traditional sees the leverage of... I mean, Jimmy Fallon does TikTok, uh, you know, videos with these stars, and he's like, you know- Yeah...
he was not doing that two years ago. So yes, it's definitely... The creator economy is not a fad. There's engagement and money and, um, attention there. Got it. All right, Evan, we're gonna leave it there.
Even without talking Philly sports, we're just gonna have to leave that for the next time, when you come with real numbers. [laughs] I would like to say something in closing, and I'd like to say,
I'm gonna say this in closing, and I'm saying it at the end so you know it's not brown-nosing. I am a huge fan of all the work you've done, Brian. Oh, thank you.
Like, when I was starting Famous Birthdays, there was no podcast that really talked to key execs making the decisions about where the industry is headed, and you were always fair without being too on either side, and you also made it fun.
Okay. So I just really appreciate all the work you did for the industry. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you for that, Evan. Thank you for the conversation. Check out Famous Birthdays.
You've probably ended up there anyway in your travels and trying to figure out who the latest TikTok star is, at least if you're me. Yes. And we'll be back next week with a new episode.
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