Saturday 14th November: My Media Roundup by Mark Stenberg, Reporter, Business Insider

November 14, 2020

Every Saturday morning, we invite a publishing pro to put together their top media links. This week’s guest editor is Mark Stenberg.

Mark is a reporter for Business Insider in New York who covers entrepreneurship and, more specifically, the creator economy. His writing focuses on exploring how people with unique skill sets use software to monetize their expertise. He also writes a chill newsletter about media innovation, called Medialyte.

You can find Mark on Twitter.

Mark says:

"The pivot from an advertising-based model to a subscription-based model has been critical for the media industry to survive, but it has also helped fuel the rise of the creator economy. The parallels between the two worlds offer a lot of insights into each other, and that crossover is an area of special interest to me. What can Substack writers learn from OnlyFans sex workers? Why do Patreon creators fundraise like nonprofit newsrooms? How can the success of Cameo inform your publication’s social strategy?

"The below articles offer an introduction to the creator economy, as well as some of the possibilities it can unlock in the world of publishing."

The foundational article for understanding the creator economy. Li Jin wrote this essay last year while working at Andreessen Horowitz, and in it she coined the term “creator economy.” This explores the economic and technological innovations that allow for the creator economy to exist in the first place, and predicts how the new economic trend will grow in influence as labor continues its transition to a “post-company” state.

This article, from the only business newsletter I actually enjoy reading, lays out the concepts of business-as-a-game and business-in-a-box, which help underpin the creator economy. These concepts are valuable tools for understanding what the future of work will look like, which publications can use to make smart decisions about how to create, price, and market their product offerings.

In this piece for my newsletter, I chronicle the rise of several new publications that share many characteristics of creator-economy entrepreneurs, including a focus on curating an opted-in audience and user-generated revenue. I also look at how a cottage industry of new businesses have cropped up to help enable creators to build products to fit these new criteria.

The rise of the creator economy coincides with the rise of the writer –– rather than the publication they work for –– as the new atomic unit of content-creation. This has led some new media companies to adopt more horizontal hierarchies and strive for greater pay equality, as writers themselves now have the leverage to start media companies simply by banding together.

For all the potential benefits of the creator economy, the trend raises some serious labor-related flags. Solopreneurs might have the means to make a living off their own work, but in doing so they take on extreme risk. As work and companies decouple, watch for new labor policies and issues to arise to accommodate the shifting power dynamic.

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