Creator Space: Prologue
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Vloggers. Creators. Influencers.
Fifteen years ago, they didn’t exist. Today they’re among society’s biggest players in business and entertainment.
All of a sudden, these seemingly random kids, in some cases armed with a smartphone and nothing more, were becoming famous, rich and successful. By simply posting content to the internet — some of which was getting more views than TV’s most popular shows — they built fanbases that numbered in the millions. They created their own brands. They shaped a new industry.
But what’s their appeal? Why are their brands so valuable? And what do they actually do?
Casey Neistat, the godfather of vlogging, said it best: We do what we can’t.
I’m not a YouTuber. Or a Tik-Toker. In fact, since 2017, I’ve largely kept my distance from all social media platforms.
So on the surface, my qualifications for starting a newsletter on the internet famous and the creator economy being built around them are understandably suspect.
My journey in doing so started almost five years ago, when I first began work on a project then titled “Internet Friends”; a tv series, the premise of which I conceived upon first discovering the world of vloggers circa 2015. The simplified logline:
It’s about a group of young content creators; Their struggles, triumphs, and experiences of chasing success in the internet age.
Since then the pilot alone has went through some two dozen rewrites; The plot has changed, as have characters, storylines and arcs.
What has stayed unwavering through five years of change is the motivation for giving life to such a project in the first place: To explore, and subsequently tell the story of, the remarkable (and still largely misunderstood) world of youtubers, influencers, vloggers; content creators.
The introductory paragraph I started with is actually a slightly edited exert of my pitch bible for the series — which remains entirely unpitched.
So that’s where I’m coming from: A writer, finishing a pilot to a series five years in the making, trying to best understand the universe I’m writing in. As I continue to learn about and do research on everything encapsulating the creator space, I want to share what I discover and unpack along the way.
In their short existence, creators (for the sake of simplicity, I’ll use this umbrella term here on out to cover all factions of content creation— later this week, I’ll write about terminology and the many sub-groups inhabiting the space) have built a reputation as entitled, annoying, mostly untalented kids getting too much attention for talking into a camera. Some of this is deserved. Much of it is not. Like anything, in this batch are bad apples. Also like anything, a rich pool of talented individuals can be found, some already rocketing to major success, others still waiting to get discovered.
The evolution of creators moves at a breakneck pace. Ten years ago they were mostly YouTubers. In the 2010’s an explosion of new companies came online that allowed them to experiment and diversify across platforms. Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, Twitch, just to name a few. Today, most creators maintain a presence on every platform they can— exclusivity to one or even just a few is increasingly rare.
The Youtuber pioneers in the closing years of the 2000s look very different than the “established” creators of 2020. Their celebrity has grown considerably; their earning power and fame (or notoriety) along with it.
There are two angles from which to approach this topic; both of which I’ll write about with equal effort on this newsletter.
The first is the business angle, which is impressive to say the least. The influencer economy is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion right now, putting it on par with the GDP of the Bahamas.
The influence of this industry has already created ripples in the wider worlds of business, advertising, and entertainment, and there’s no end in sight. How this will unfold in the coming years is still anybody’s guess; there’s no playbook to draw from, no precedent to fall back on. Tracking that evolution will be a central piece to this newsletter.
No less impressive is the artistic angle. Money talks, and in recent years attention has been increasingly paid to the business aspect of content creation; deservedly so. Still overlooked, however, is the artistic angle.
Casey Neistat’s 534 straight days of narrative-driven daily vlogging remains a cinematic marvel. David Dobrik created an entirely new style of filmmaking with his remarkably famous vlog. Phil Defranco created his own version of the nightly news, featuring a background that beats any and all news network greenscreens. References to old vines come up in casual conversation just as often as movie quotes. It’s art, and it should be viewed and discussed as such.
Just like every artform that’s ever existed, much of the existing stockpile is garbage. People often forget that for every New York Times bestseller, there’s a hundred awful books published alongside it.
And, of course, it’s all subjective. But I see tremendous potential for growth in the discussion and appreciation of artistic talent we’re seeing across the entire creator space. I will certainly participate in that on this newsletter.
The creator space is still incredibly young, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting. A few paragraphs to the north I briefly referred to the pioneers of YouTube, those that forged ahead through completely uncharted waters in the late 2000s. On a wider scale — a historic scale — we are still in the very, very early days of this novel industry.
Think of the Internet, the invention that has made the creator space possible in the first place, and it’s history. The 90’s were an incredible period of experimentation and excitement, brimming with opportunity and possibility. And yet, since then, so much has continued to change. Many of the biggest players in the game today were just getting started; Amazon in ‘94 and Google in ‘98, for example. Other modern-day juggernauts — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — didn’t even exist yet!
The point is, in the creator space timeline, we haven’t even reached 2000 yet. The coming years will prove instrumental in shaping the industry going forward. Existing players — both creators themselves, and the companies built around them — will continue to grow. Others will soon be coming online for the very first time.
How it will all play out, nobody knows. But it will be fascinating to watch.
There’s a bit of an episodic subplot to this newsletter, too. As the coronavirus rages on, I remain in Minnesota working on a variety of projects. Internet Friends continues to be a top priority among them; my goal is to get the pilot into production by the end of 2021.
One could argue that sharing the premise and details of an unpitched pilot to the world is a foolish play. But in a way, this newsletter is a pitch of it’s own. I’ve always been fascinated with the process by which art gets created; the background of how movies, shows, books, videos, etc. are brought to life. Underlying this whole newsletter is a personal journey in getting content of my own created.
Thanks for checking out Creator Space! In early December I will begin posting daily on weekdays and continue doing so indefinitely into 2021.