This Week: New study shows how low-cost AI studios are rewriting content creation in the creator economy and the broader media as well. Plus, how to combat the flood of AI Slop.
Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you are either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If the latter – and you want to subscribe, get it here!
AI CONTENT STUDIOS – THE FUTURE IS NOW
Despite the doom and gloom – and head-in-sand mentality – innovative new studios are rewriting the rules of production. FBRC.AI analyzed 98 AI-focused production and development studios, then did a deep dive on nine of them. Their industry “snapshot” shows an emerging new class of creative institutions, with 7 in 10 bootstrapped and more than a third under three years old.
Interestingly, most of the studios aren’t building models or front-end apps but instead focus on custom workflows, proprietary datasets and character-specific LoRAs. They’re also building flexible and modular tech stacks, which allow components to be quickly swapped in and out – like lip-dubbing or language translation – as technology advances. And the most successful studios blend open source with more closed models to create customized workflows and tools. Nearly two-thirds of the studios analyzed have 5 or fewer employees, showing how rapidly these low-cost AI-fueled studios are changing content development.
- Related: Hear FBRC Co-Founder @Todd Terrazas talk about AI as a creative partner on Monday April 7th at Creator Lab at NAB Show in Las Vegas – which I’m producing/hosting. DM me if you want a free exhibits pass and come be part of the four-day summit.
AI SLOP EVERYWHERE
Scary story about how AI slop, married with “brute force” hacking techniques, is rapidly destroying social video algorithms – and creator revenue. Money Quote: “If you can figure out how to post content at scale, that means you can figure out how to exploit weaknesses at scale.” – and that’s what these algorithms are doing.
This is just the beginning of what’s likely to be a HUGE problem for existing creators and will drastically reduce views and revenue for many. How to compete? If you can’t beat them, join them. Use tools like Opus to auto-generate (and hopefully post) trend-specific videos cut from your back catalog. Clone yourself like @Iconic Becker did with 11 Labs and HeyGen (as we explored 3 weeks ago), and build an auto-create stack to generate your own high-quality slop. Or double-down on your own playground for your superfans, far away from the slop-infested platforms we’ve come to know and love. Ignore it at your peril – brutal AI slop is coming for you too.
PREYING ON CREATORS
Interesting profile of Alchemy, a new company offering essentially payday loans to creators. The company gives you an upfront amount of cash based on expected earnings – and then takes a 15% fee. The example in the profile – $30,000 upfront with an expectation of $34,500 paid within six months – equals a 30% effective annual interest rate. That’s more than 20% higher than the average max APR for new credit cards, although equivalent to the worst cash-advance APRs. ICYMI, credit card debt is notoriously bad and can quickly spiral you into bankruptcy. At least in this case, if you don’t make the revenue, you don’t have to pay back the loan. Yes, it’s something for creators – who are woefully underbanked. But it’s still a terrible deal.
TAKE MY BOOK, PLEASE
Lots of authors and creators are upset about Meta training its models on their books and articles – in part because you can now search for your name in a new database called LibGen to see if you were compromised. One of my books popped up – but I’m not mad. Frankly I’m happy that someone finally got some value out of it – it didn’t sell all that well. On the list and unhappy about it? The Authors Guild has your back. I wonder how Abbie Hoffman would feel?
CARE FOR A SPOT OF JELLY?
What if BitClout, Zoom and BeReal Had a Baby? It would probably look a lot like the new social app JellyJelly. @Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures was an early investor and has been hyping it up. I gave it a whirl and am intrigued by its unique mechanics. It records video from both of your mobile phone cameras simultaneously – or lets you connect with a friend and have a short conversation. It will also grab your Facetime calls, cut them up, caption them and post them for you. Videos max out at 60 seconds, and feature either a full vertical video, or two stacked videos – one each from your front and back camera, or yours and a friend’s. Instead of likes, users get Jelly tokens.
It’s still very much work in progress – I had to run it in a browser, as there’s no Android app. It also oddly kept telling me to tap DONE at the top right – but there was nothing there. I did get it working on my Ipad but couldn’t find any Jelly-enriched friends to test it with. After posting just two videos I earned 56.20 Jelly coins, worth $1.67 according to the app. If it takes off, then early adopters stand to make a fair bit of Jelly – but so far, the preponderance of nostril shots left me vaguely uncomfortable. I’m looking forward to having some pals on the platform (hint hint if you are reading this).
BEAST A BAD BIZ?
Speaking of @sam Lessin, in an appearance last week on TBPM, Slow Ventures founder @Sam Lessin says that MrBeast has done great stuff for creators, but his audience is too low value for the company to go public anytime soon and it’s “not a money printing machine”. @Alexis Ohanian from 776 Ventures pipes in in the comments saying, “Yall coulda asked me – the guy who led the seed”. And as more data comes in, TV insiders are calling Beast Games a “Mid”, rather than a breakaway hit. Its success level won’t dim Hollywood’s infatuation with creators – nor should it. I’m still convinced we’re headed for “Peak Creator TV” – because after the peak comes the inevitable fall.
- Related: Beast Games renewed for a second season with a 50% bigger budget and 50% bigger prize.
SPONSOR: Creators do punch well above their weight! Nielsen reported that Whalar campaigns had a ROI of $2.41, surpassing all other media channels. More importantly, creators are efficient – while making up less than 1% of total media, they contribute 3x the impact. Check out the full Media Mix Model (MMM) study here to learn more about how creators are media investments.
PLATFORMS
YOUTUBE
- Safe House: YouTube’s Creator Insider says they are testing a safe overlay in the Shorts video editor. Why don’t all video editors do this for all platforms? I habitually burn my captions into an obscured area of the LinkedIn frame – and don’t get me started with TikTok!
- Skip End Screens: You can’t block ads on YouTube, but soon you may be able to block end-screens. Guess what’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the gander. Sorry creators.
- Marketing Shifts: Most brands want to work with YouTubers, according to a new EMARKETER study.
META
- Just the Facts Ma’am: Big Blue begins testing its community-driven fact checking system for IG, FB and Threads.
- Money, Money, Money: Facebook adds monetization to stories.
TIKTOK
- Nothingburger: It might be illegal, but it looks like Oracle will get more TikTok oversight and Bytedance will remain involved. In other words, mostly business as usual.
- Deal Could Be Done Next Week: However, JD Vance says that a deal could be done by April 4th and there are 4 bidders in the mix.
- Tilting At Windmills? Here’s how Perplexity would rebuild TikTok as an American platform – if it wins the bidding war. Based on this, I hope they do!
- Gaming TikTok: Comprehensive sponsored guide to buying “shares” on TikTok to jump-start your content reach. It’s sad that this is a thing, and I hope whoever buys TikTok moves quickly to shut these services down.
QUIBIS
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
- John Green’s Latest: Congrats to John for releasing his latest book “Everything Is Tuberculosis” – and his sold-out book tour!
- Sports Disruption: YouTube golf channel and league “Good Good Golf” raises $45M. Another sign that creators are now disrupting the last stalwart of traditional media – sports.
- Related: The round was led by new investment firm Creator Sports Capital, started by ex-YouTuber and industry stalwart @Ben Grubbs.
- The Rise of the Chief Content Officer: BCG imagines 2035 – a world where traditional advertising fades and brands become storytellers first and advertisers second. I think it might happen even sooner.
- Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Yahoo unloads TechCrunch to Regent, who also snapped up PC World.
- Follow the Money: Spotify releases its annual update, claims $10B paid to the music INDUSTRY in 2024. It’s unclear how much of that flowed out to creators and musicians but back in 2020, @Rex Woodbury showed how artists and songwriters split less than 25% of Spotify revenue.
- Weird Science? Mark Rober’s Tesla self-driving tests riles up the Tesla-faithful and apparently eschewed scientific principles too. Whatever. FWIW Rober drives a Tesla – and I do too.
- Africa Insight: Good interview with @David Adelke, top creator economy researcher and strategist in Africa.
- India Ascendent: Wish I could be there – the Social Nation Festival for Creators happens April 4-5 in Delhi. Maybe next year!
- Giving Back: So great to see @Lilly Singh back in the creatorverse with a new creator network called HYPHEN8 that will help South Asian creators scale
- Article World vs. Post World: Garbage Day has an interesting take on today’s media landscape, saying that the article has been subsumed by the post (which is true), and this is the cause of all the trouble in the world (which is a stretch). I think it’s more about gatekeeper media vs. today’s two-way open marketplace, but it’s still a useful rubric for explaining our world.
- New LinkedIn Analytics: Now you can use custom date ranges in your post analytics – which is good – but it’s not available for me yet. Also, new analytics for newsletters. That’s good, but the data raises some disturbing questions – like why do so few of my subscribers actually get this newsletter emailed to them each week? And my demographics suddenly seem wonky – are there really 554 people at Atomic Cartoons reading my email every week? If so, let’s talk site license! And at over 2,500 readers, I’ve apparently cornered the key “Cashier Creator Economy” cohort.
CREATOR TECH – AI, WEB3, VR, MORE
- Discord’s First Step: Discord launches a social SDK to allow game publishers to bring the popular community app into their games. Hopefully the next step will enable creators to build Discord into their experiences too – like how Roblox embraces creators/builders along with vibe coders.
- Creators First: Roblox lays out its 2025 roadmap for creators, plans to lean into better discovery, updated recommendation algorithms, ways to incent your fans to share with friends and more – along with tips on how to grow your presence on platform.
- No Copyright for AI Art: US Appeals court agrees that AI-generated art with no human input cannot be copyrighted (but what, exactly, constitutes human input and where do you draw the line?). And many Google and OpenAI asked the government to let them train on copyrighted material due to “Fair Use”.
RESEARCH
- Creator Craft: New research from Influencer details how brands can work more effectively with creators. Note, we’ll be diving into this topic at the Industry Day at Open Sauce – if you want to be part of it drop me a DM or email.
- Longer is Better on TT? New research from Buffer indicates that videos over a minute get 43% more reach and over 60% more watch time. But even though they looked at 1.1 million videos, that’s only 3% of the average number of videos posted EVERY DAY. So directional – but not predictive (HT @Lia Haberman).
Where’s Jim: Getting excited for The Creator Lab – the 3.5 day summit at NAB Show that I’m building with Robin Raskin. But first I’m doing an online streamed discussion on Wednesday with my old friend @Carlos Gil (from Get Response) to talk about one of my favorite topics – how creators can future-proof their businesses by owning their audience. Join me here → https://the-blueprint-to-success.getresponsewebsite.com/. Oh and if you want a free exhibits pass to NAB Show – which is all you need to attend Creator Lab – DM me!
100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!).
Like this free newsletter? Buy me a coffee and say thanks! Or let’s do a meetup in your town.
I’ve built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies – including Discovery and Paramount. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to get this newsletter every Monday.
Let me know what you think – email me at jim@louderback.com. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.