TORONTO -- With the growth of creator-driven social media platforms, online creators are coming up with new and innovative ways to monetize their talents and engage with their fans.
Mohit Rajhans, who is the author of Rethinking Your Content joined CTV's Your Morning on Monday to talk about the "creator economy."
Prior to the pandemic, we saw the rise of the "influencer economy," which refers to how online celebrities were leveraging their fame and reach on social media to sell ads and build partnerships with brands. Now, Rajhans says there's a shift towards creators directly monetizing their engagement with fans, as a result of the pandemic as well as changing algorithms.
"While the influencer economy started to crumble a little bit recently… the economy was born as a direct result of social media platforms starting to create opportunities for people to actually benefit and monetarily make some gains from what they were doing," said Rajhans.
As an example, Rajhans pointed to DJs who can't perform at clubs due to the pandemic, but instead have been performing live on Twitch, a live streaming platform initially targeted towards gamers.
"What's interesting is if you see a DJ on Twitch now, they're not just playing music. What's happening is their interactivities are actually fuelling their bottom line. And when you really like a song, for example, you can actually give money to them in tipping format, in real time," said Rajhans.
Other examples include creators selling T-shirts with their logos and designs printed on them, as well as the rise of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, which are unique digital tokens attached to a piece of digital artwork that leverage blockchain technology. Some NFTs have sold for upwards of millions of dollars.
"(Creators are) putting themselves in a situation where they're becoming more digitally literate about the different platforms that have been created and opportunities," Rajhans said.
Rajhans says he expects creators to find innovate ways to monetize their content and develop niche audiences.
"Creators are not going to let us get away from them making money."
