This Week: SXSW has become spring break for creators, just like it was spring break for nerds back in 2010. My days (and nights) were packed with creator-related events, so no music this year. Not complaining. Getting home required surviving a 10-hour United Airlines delay. Worth it. Sorry for the late newsletter.
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.
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TOP STORIES
SXSW ON FIRE
I debuted an hour-long talk on the AI-infused future of the creator economy to a packed room Friday morning… more on that later this week. I attended 10+ sessions and four satellite events: Podcast Evolutions, The FQ Lounge, Creator Gold, and Creator Palooza. Traffic was brutal, everything was spread out, and you needed a sherpa to see even 10% of it. Here’s what I learned:
TikTok Wants GenZ: One TikToker who reaches older female audiences showed me how TikTok has been paying 10x bonuses for quality content targeting older women. Perhaps this is how they’ll juice TikTok Shop revenue?
Oscar Who? Sunday night at a big creator economy party, flat screens everywhere showed the NBA, the World Baseball Classic, and the Oscars. Basketball had fans. Nobody cared about the awards. One creator shrugged: “I’ll watch the highlights when I get back to the hotel.” Everyone else watched prestige turn into irrelevance.
Podcasting’s Untapped Market: A new Sounds Profitable study found 25% of Americans have never listened to a podcast… partly because the industry has never explained what one actually is. @Tom Webster’s research preview also found that Facebook remains the best place to grow a podcast audience, YouTube offers a hidden bridge to new listeners (if creators properly label content and stop referencing visuals listeners can’t see), and Spanish-language speakers and car discovery are huge opportunities.
The Great Creator Resettling: Some creators said monetization was down; others said it was up. I think we’re watching a structural shift as brands move from vanity metrics to trust-driven campaigns. Layer on the AI content tsunami, and expect some winners, but many losers. Creators who own their community, know their audience, and build direct connections will be the ones left standing.
Agency Shakeout Coming Soon: Investors and CEOs I spoke with predicted a shakeout in the influencer agency space. Survivors: those with “agency of record” brand relationships, or those who manage to exit soon. Mid-to-lower tier agencies still chasing outdated metrics and fuzzy data will struggle.
TOP QUOTES FROM SXSW
“Slowly, Hollywood is being destroyed because they’re ignoring what’s actually happening.” — @RJ Larese President, Sixteenth. Larese also predicted that Paramount, despite laying him off last summer, will be “the first traditional studio to truly understand and embrace the creator economy”.
“I post data content. Is that the most sexy thing? (Does) that go viral all the time? Absolutely not. But it pays the bills and it pays them very well… Building a strong niche and providing consistent value is a lot more important than going viral because that’s the alignment that brands are looking for.” — @Jess Ramos, Founder of Big Data Energy, proving “unsexy” B2B niches are highly lucrative for creators who prioritize value over vanity.
“The less you care about what people think about, the more people think about what you care about… If it were up to me, every brand that gives us money, they will get 10x return on investment if they just let me do whatever I want.” — @Chris Do, Founder of The Futur, on why unscripted passion beats scripted feature lists every time.
“I don’t even think about the creator economy anymore… the entrepreneur economy is just the creator economy. Creators are just a subset of all entrepreneurs who are recognizing that you can build distribution for yourself.” — @John Hu, CEO of Stan, predicting that the “creator” label dissolves into mainstream entrepreneurship.
“Every creator I speak to… they do things long enough to suck at it but not long enough to transform their lives. Everybody wants immediate results today.” — @Aneesh Lal, Founder and CEO of The Wishly Group, with a tough-love truth about patience.
“…our audience was really looking for some way to support us and they’re like, ‘Can we Venmo you or Cash App you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, please don’t, that’s a little odd. But we’re going to build this brand that we feel so passionately about…” — @Jean Luo and @Cherie Luo, co-hosts of Tiger Sisters, who turned down direct fan cash and instead built “Sisters Matcha”, a sustainable, story-driven product with their community as co-producers.
“Next week I have 10 posts coming out on my short form account… All 10 of them were written by our AI… I took out my camera for an hour and I filmed all of those scripts…No human touched them… Our beta engine (then) edited everything for us without a single human involved… it scheduled (the posts into) the content calendar. It’s posting. And then at the end of the week, it’s going to track all those analytics and use that to refine the hooks for the following week.” — @John Hu, CEO of Stan, announcing Stan’s fully autonomous Instagram AI content engine.
QUIBIS
PLATFORMS
- For the Love of the Game: Roblox launches a new incubator to jump start creators (Roblox)
- Banding Together: Top platforms will collaborate on battling scammers and other threats to their users. (Axios)
- Expanding Likeness Detection: Props to YouTube for expanding its fight against deepfakes by adding journalists and “civic leaders” to its likeness detection algorithms. (YouTube)
- We Hear You: YouTube launches a new select-like ad program for podcasts. (Tubefilter)
- The Natives Are Revolting: YouTube added unskippable ads to its TV app, and the reaction is decidedly negative. How long before enshittification costs them real share? Clearly not yet. (9to5 Google)
- Older and Wiser: I noted this two weeks ago, and Harris’ latest poll confirms it. GenZ is getting older, likes TikTok less, and wants to go outside. (The Next Big Think).
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
- Canary in the Coal Mine: Digg’s ambitious relaunch gets derailed AI slopbots. @Kevin Rose says they underestimated the problem and will work on a relaunch. Scary foreshadowing for every comment-based platforms. (The Verge)
- Creators Are Different from Writers: New platform invites creators to submit video and text content on spec. Drawing strong distinctions between the two. Personally, I see no difference between a video creator and a text one. (Zavienta.com)
- Revenge of the English Nerds: Want to thrive as a creator in the age of AI? Take @Sarah Lacy’s advice and tell stories in every medium, every genre, every format. Stretch those muscles! And sub to her newsletter. It’s stellar. (Bookwars)
- Subsidizing Creators At Cannes: I was skeptical last year, but I’m coming around. Glad to see FiveTwoNine and Billion Dollar Boy bring back their creator-to-Cannes subsidy program… and great to see Patreon involved. (FiveTwoNine)
- Now I Want to Wash My Clothes: A great case study on using a subreddit to hyper-grow a meme (but not really a meme, we need a new word). (Community Catalysts)
- Make Lemonade: Whalar doubles down on becoming a media company with Lighthouse Studios and a first partnership with Lyrical Lemonade. An MTV-style play building lifestyle content around a music-video-rich channel. The logo even looks like MTV. (Variety)
- Go 90 (The Other Way): Disney+ launches a vertical video feed called Vert. Likely the future home of their Sora 2 partner videos. (TC)
CREATOR TECH – AI, AR, VR, MORE
- To Bubble Or Not to Bubble: Stratechery explores how a compute layer on top of agents (middleware) could blunt LLM commoditization, and flags Apple Neo’s paltry on-board RAM as a strategic mistake. I think the old client-server model could return, with agents running locally and calling cheap cloud models. Watch this space. (Stratechery) .
- Agents of the World Unite: China officially has OpenClaw fever, as many thousands rush to build local agents. Privacy and security be damned. (SCMP)
- Faster, Cheaper Brainrot? Netflix buys Ben Affleck’s AI tools company, presumably to accelerate production. (NPR)
- Pot Meet Kettle: President Trump bashes Iran’s use of AI to generate misinformation. Hopefully this leads to broader government and corporate efforts to tag and identify AI-generated images. (Reuters)
- Suno as Songwriting Companion: The upside of AI music generation, as songwriters use it as creative tool, not end-product. (Billboard)
Where’s Jim? Still sitting at the airport. Our new plane will be here “soon”.
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100% written by me. AI used very sparingly for edits.
I’ve built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies – including an MCN to Discovery and VidCon to 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.
