The Corona epidemic has pushed many new faces into the content industry, as remote work, self-employment and self-employment have become basic concepts for many people who are no longer convinced of the traditional job.
Of course, they used social media to promote themselves and their content, but not all social media are equal. Content makers have realized that they have to own their own platforms whether they really want to own their projects, but they also know the possible means of profit whether they participate on these platforms, which in turn pushes Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok and others to provide the fabric income for these makers by sharing profits with them, because they They know that they are the only way to receive people to stay with them instead of going to someone else.
How content creators start their project
Any new content creator wants to build their audience as quickly as possible on the best platform for their target audience, for example:
- Game fans and fans are not on Twitter, so you won’t find a gaming content maker on Twitter apart from to post news and personal updates, but these go to platforms like Twitch and Discord, because they are more suitable for this audience.
- The geographical distribution of users of social media platforms is also important, for example, Facebook is not commonly used in the Gulf countries, while Snapchat is used by more than 71% of the Saudi population, and therefore whoever wants to target this category should focus on Snapchat.
- And historically YouTube (and Facebook in the last three years) are the best places to publish long-form video content, because it’s easy to reach and share to the widest possible audience and is viral.
There are some content creators who don’t have personal websites, only social media accounts. But recently they have begun to realize that having a website for them will increase their chances of penetration and profits, because the platforms keep most of the profits for themselves, and these content creators lose a large percentage of visitors who do not use the communication platforms they are working on and those who search for matters in search engines such as Google Above all, they have to abide by the usage policies of all these platforms.
With the beginning of the Corona pandemic – and where social networking sites were not ready yet – numerous new entrants to the content industry started under the idea of creating their own sites and profiting from them through various means such as advertisements and others , and then sharing their content only on various platforms to obtain additional profit, and this was not The platforms are attractive to them at the time to focus only around them, but gradually the platforms began to pay attention and see that it is better for them to absorb them to abandon this idea and focus on it alone, and this is to increase their advertising reach.
The importance of content creators to any company
Content creators are very important to social media sites, they are the ones who create the content that is followed and benefited by thousands and millions of other steady users on the network.
Most of the social networking sites depend in their work on advertisements, and in order to be able to attract advertisers to them and profit from their advertisements on the network, the category of users that advertisers want must be present on this social network. Which in turn brings us to the content creators box: they create the content that will attract these groups of users to social media platforms, thus enabling the platforms to partner with advertisers and generate revenue.
Which explains this frantic race to attract content creators; Because they weigh in gold for social platforms, they are the ones that make other users stay longer on these platforms and watch more videos or posts, thus allowing advertisers to target remainder of the users for longer and generate more revenue for everyone.
But it has been proven for these platforms that attracting content creators to them is a difficult process and needs planning. For the content creator, it is better for him to create his own separate website, and then attract followers to it through search engines, newsletters, or other means, and make profits separately through programs Ads such as Google Adsense, books, paid courses, or others instead of relying entirely on social media platforms.
Social media giants move to attract content creators
For the above, social media giants are trying to attract these people to them in several ways and means, and each network tries in a different way:
- Twitter is trying to lure audio and podcast creators to it by paying them $2,500 per month whether they meet certain conditions. It proved to them that the process is difficult and expensive, as they closed the door to applying for this program in less than a week due to the large number of applications. Twitter has acquired the Revue newsletter platform and added it to its services so that users can create paid newsletters through their Twitter accounts.
- Facebook has a special corner for content creators that allows them to use different tools and tools to profit from their content on Facebook, particularly visual content. They can profit through the ads that Facebook will display while displaying their videos or content on the network, or through external partnerships with brands interested in the same content, or through the Instant Articles feature to display the content of articles from websites within Facebook itself without leaving it.
- Snapchat also has a similar content-making center with similar terms.
- Tik Tok also has a limited lookalike program for anyone noted on the platform who has more than 10 thousand followers and achieved 100 thousand real views in the last 30 days, but it is still in the experimental stage.
- Historically, Google is the real mastermind of content creators; The renowned Google Adsense program and Google ads for advertisers moreover to the presence of YouTube (which shares a percentage of the profits with content makers) allowed Google to have a fantastic dominance of the entire advertising field, and more than 80% of the income of Alphabet (the parent company of Google) is from advertising.
possibly the most comfortable company with regard to the current state of the content industry in 2021 AD is already Google, as it controls them from several sides; Its search engine controls 86% of the search engine market in the world, a market that pushes website owners to focus on improving their sites for Google and its policies to avoid interrupting one of the largest sources of visitors to them, and Google AdSense is the most generous program for content makers, where Google pays 68 % of advertising revenue to publishers on Google AdSense.
The social media giants are trying to pull the rug out from under the independent website owners to lure them in instead of opening their own, but it seems that this process will be very difficult for them, nothing is better for a content creator than to have control over all of their content than to be subject For a particular network, having a separate website for the content creator allows them to diversify their income sources instead of relying on ads alone.
In the worst case, Google can simply increase the 68% of the profits it shares with advertisers to a higher percentage to avoid any possible loss.
Some social networks are still building themselves and their audience before turning to their profit model, including Telegram. There are 550m monthly active users on Telegram , but Telegram does not earn any penny at the second because all of its services are free. or provide paid features to its audience.
Social media platforms are not the only competitor to content creators
There are plenty of other niche platforms that are already attracting content creators to it:
- Also, Patreon , a popular subscription platform, is widely used in the West to support content creators on a monthly basis with or without payment. Lots of content creators like to rely on Patreon because it frees them from the burden of searching for a regular source of income or the whirl of ads…etc.
- Clubhouse is also an app for audio rooms, and it’s the one that blew up the interest in the idea lately from the rest of the social media platforms.
- Professional writing and blogging platforms such as Ghost and Medium also have no interest in keeping users on the platforms, but they are smaller and less able to compete with the communication giant with billions in budgets.
These and other services make the content creator realize that he has a lot of options available to monetize once he builds his audience, and therefore he is not limited in the platforms on which he can publish his content.
The future of the content industry
There are currently about 50 million users who identify themselves as content creators. This is a large number, but not a large number whether each network were to split them up to serve billions of other users on each network.
This means that in the future:
- We can expect more initiatives to encourage ordinary people to become content creators, and this is the best way for social media to keep them there; To be the one who made them.
- We can also expect more acquisitions by large companies of smaller companies specialized in providing and serving content; That’s why you understand that PayPal bought Pinterest for $45 billion, even though it’s just a financial company far from the field, as well as the field of Pinterest itself, whose audience is 70% of women , and this is because it understands that payment methods are no longer limited to PayPal and there are other competitors in the arena It is necessary to diversify the sources of income and reach potential customers more than before.
- This will also mean an improvement in the payment methods and paid subscription capabilities of the platforms, because content creators want to make payments from their subscribers. This is what YouTube if, for example, through paid subscriptions after the Corona pandemic, whereby subscribers can join YouTube channels for certain amounts per month, and Facebook provided it by selling products .
- Some companies, although they have a brilliant ability to reach users and achieve results like Reddit, they do not succeed in making profits from ads, the average Reddit user brings the platform only $0.30 profit , while the average user of social media platforms brings from $3 to $9. This means that it either acquires such platforms or transforms its advertising model and fixes it to achieve greater profits.
Conclusion
Whether you are a content creator – or want to be – then it is good to know that the future is bright for you, everyone is competing to arrive you and provide payment methods and communication solutions to make you able to profit from the wide audience that you have built, which means that the entire content industry is on the verge of Moving to a higher stage in the next few years.
Then it remains for you to focus on building your audience, in the end, this is what matters to the content creator regardless of the means, platforms and tools. The large and loyal audience of the content creator is what makes its value these days on the network.
