Theme:
- As of 2022, the global creator economy is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion. Approximately, there are more than 5 crore content creators worldwide.
What is Creator economy:
- The ‘creator economy’ or ‘influencer economy’ refers to the economy built by content creators with the help of technology. Many platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok allow creators to earn money by sharing creative content.
Benefits of creator economy:
- Many people have got new opportunities to earn money through content creation on social media platforms. Because it is a simple, affordable, and accessible business to start, content creation has a growing potential to generate employment. With the increase in smartphone users, the creator economy will continue to grow.
- Content creators have become a vital part of the business marketing strategy for many firms due to their massive potential to reach a larger audience. They help several small and medium-sized businesses to gain leverage through social media platforms and multinational businesses to remain relevant in this dynamic economy and to create bonds with people.
- Every creator can now reach their target audience directly, without the assistance of a third party. So, the creator economy provides a level-playing field.
- Social media publishers of educational content have opened up education to both urban and rural residents. This has made the continuous imparting of education to school and college-going students possible, regardless of their location. It also provides an opportunity for people to improve their skills or choose to learn new skills and select greater possibilities for themselves.
Challenges of creator economy:
- With the rise in the popularity of short format videos (SFV) like Tiktok and Reels, it has become hard to recognize and appreciate the originality, creativity and talent of the content creators. Its has become a common practice to copy someone else’s original idea and show it as your own. And in case of SFV platforms it is acceptable to pirate content from other apps.
- Traditional monetization methods are unfair toward Indian talents. An Indian talented creator will earn much less than his or her counterpart in the US, even if he or she is more talented or has more followers or views. That’s because certain apps arbitrarily identify Indian creators with low ad values.
- We have seen a rise in the people getting addicted to social media which is very harmful, especially for the children as it affects their productivity and causes not only dissatisfaction of life but also increase depression and anxiety.
- Often creators have to create trend-based content to get views because algorithms of many social media platforms work that way. Some of the content creators, who do not make trend-based content may not get much views even when they create authentic content.
- Because it is so simple to start creating content on social media, the risk of spreading false information is extremely high, especially when the tech companies that own these social media platforms do little to nothing to regulate the spread of false information, preferring high levels of user engagement regardless of the nature of the information being spread. Lack of information regulation is a big challenge.
Future of the creator economy:
- Content creators will have new ways to monetize their content and create more jobs, with advancements in the technologies like blockchain, augmented reality and virtual reality.
- India’s creator economy has the potential to emerge as a soft-power by creating cultural influence on the internet.
- The rollout of 5G will significantly accelerate the growth of India’s creative economy, giving producers new interactive and immersive ways to deliver material that is both informative and entertaining.
Conclusion:
There is no denying the fact that content creators are changing the entertainment, education and marketing landscape globally. The revenue generated by them not only support jobs and income for creative entrepreneurs themselves, but also wider activity in supply chains.
However, it is critical to protect content creators and social media users from content piracy and the spread of false information, because only when originality or intellectual property is protected and false information is prevented from spreading, can creators flourish and common social media users be protected from being manipulated.
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References:
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