Digital Creator Business Model Breakdown
Have you ever wondered how digital creators make their living? Sure, you’ll see a sponsored post every now and again. But does that really add up to a full-time income? It can, and I’ll explain how in this digital creator business model breakdown.
Create for the fans
Above anything else, digital creators must create for the fans. The fans and followers make up the audience that gives the creator their most valuable asset: attention. As I broke down earlier, in my blog on the attention business model, attention is a valuable asset that gives creators leverage to make money. And like many valuable things, attention is very fragile. This is why digital creators must keep fans happy as much as they can.
No creator gets their start doing branded posts. Why? Because they don’t have any attention to sell to brands yet. By creating work solely for fans, creators slowly grow their audience and gain attention they can leverage.
Create for the brands
Once a creator gains enough attention to leverage on behalf of brands, they can begin selling some of that attention to brands via branded posts. Creating for fans and creating for brands are two different things. When creators sell a post to a brand, they become an advertising platform. The ad can be creative, and it can look artistic, but at the end of the day it’s advertising, not art. This is jarring for many creators, and the ones who land branded work over the long haul understand the difference.
The key to success here is to do it often enough to make a living, but not so often that you alienate your own audience. If creators only posted branded content, they would lose the attention their audience gives them, and lose their leverage too.
Sell owned products
The other revenue stream for creators is selling owned products. You’ll see this most often in the form of merchandise, but it can also be things like online classes, access to exclusive content, or even private consulting and lessons. With branded content, the brand pays the creator a small slice of the profit they hope to make form the campaign. But when a creator sells owned products, they keep a majority of the profit they generate.
Audiences are a bit more receptive to creators selling owned products compared to branded posts. But again, the reason audiences crowd around creators in the first place is for the free content they create. Creators can never stop bringing free value to their audiences.
Become a production studio
Whatever creators make, they also need to understand photo, video, and social media in order to be successful in the digital space. If you are an excellent pianist, but don’t know how to make a compelling video and post it on social, you’ll never grow and audience online.
I spoke with a skydiving influencer about his process leveraging content as a creator. He told me that he’s not even close to being one of the best skydivers he knows. But he’s the one who makes the most money doing it because he knows how to capture the content best.
Photo and video is the currency of audience building in the digital age. To become a digital creator, you need to understand photo, video, and social.
