Deep Dive: Creator Economy - The Next Phase of Media

How do consumers make decisions today? How are influencers reinventing demand generation? What legacy businesses are being disrupted? Why is Elon the world’s first mega influencer?

Every day, we make decisions about which products and services to consume. With countless options and categories to choose from, how do we end up selecting certain products over others?

More than $60T is spent annually by consumers on various products and services so this month’s deep dive focuses on the changing nature of how consumers are influenced. In a world where we often lack the time or expertise to evaluate every option, the media initially drove consumption decisions by selling advertising about which products and services were best, most valuable, or most suitable.

To understand how media will drive consumption decisions in the future, we look to the past to investigate the underlying economic dynamics that have driven its evolution. Through our investigation, we uncovered four distinct phases of media:

Each new phase of media disrupted the previous as content consumption habits changed and the rise of the internet led to an explosion of content and information online. TV was disrupted by the rise of streaming and the web. As social media rose, it took a growing share of time spent online. And today, some influencers on social media have begun to eclipse the size of social media sites themselves, resulting in a radical shift in how demand is being generated for products and services. This leads us to the current phase: the creator economy.

While putting together this deck, I was surprised by the sheer scale of the opportunity in the creator economy. With a global GDP of $100 trillion per year, and more than 60% of this driven by household consumption, influencers are creating a seismic shift in how demand is generated for trillions of dollars of goods and services.

We are already seeing evidence of this today, as influencers like MrBeast and Kim Kardashian build massive consumer goods businesses on the back of their captive audiences. But they aren’t the only ones. We end our deep dive with an analysis of Elon Musk, the world’s first Mega-Influencer, who has built several massive businesses by following the playbook we outline in the deck.

You can read our full deep dive in the attached audio file and PDF, both of which are available to our paid subscribers at the end of this post.

In future months, I will publish deep dives into other crucial sectors of the economy. These will cover five main themes:

1. Deep Tech

2. Energy Transition

3. Healthcare & Life Sciences

4. Economic Analysis

5. Socio-Political Trends

If enough people are interested and subscribe, we can invest in hiring more researchers. We will also look to you, our subscribers, to influence our research topics and share insights with others.

I hope you enjoy reading this and let us know how we can improve.