Digital Creators

A recurring theme across Kyle’s David Perell-era long reads: the internet collapses gatekeepers and lets individual personalities — designers, musicians, founders, photographers — build direct, founder-led audiences and become brands in themselves. Demand for high-quality content outpaces supply because creators scale linearly while consumption scales exponentially (Hyper Publishing).

Where this appears

• Hyper Publishing — the audience side of the modular-publishing thesis; the creator as the unit producing the content.
• Naked Brands- The Future of Fashion — individual personalities replace gatekeepers; identity defined by taste over heritage.
• Naked Brands- The Future of Music — direct fan relationships and shared creative journeys as the new economic engine.
• The Attention Game — creators competing in markets of abundance.
• The Future of Work (Article) — the consumer-connection edge where new opportunity emerges.
• The Magical Touch of Finn Beales — a creator reaching brands and a global audience directly via platforms.

Deep Dives context

Kyle used “Digital Creators” as a top-level bucket in his Roam Deep Dives research index, grouping the creator-facing markets he was tracking: Online Education, Gaming, and community. The connective idea — arming individual creators with direct-to-audience tooling — also shows up as the Shopify for Creators entity idea.

Saved quotes

• There is something interesting happening in the creative space, as platforms like Substack (which hosts the wondermissive) create business models for individual entrepreneurs. One example: journalists at Splinter who quit their jobs in protest at a corporate takeover launched a blog on Substack using reader subscriptions. Jomayra Herrera at Grounded calls this the ‘empowered economy’ in an interesting survey. On a similar note, Facebook is offering TikTok users with millions of followers financial incentives to bring their craft over to Reels, the new Instagram / Facebook competitor to TikTok. TikTok has since announced a “creative fund” of $300 million to be distributed between high-profile creators. Here’s a mind-boggling stat from entrepreneurial economy: “OnlyFans reported daily six-figure sign-ups on its popular cam site. Etsy logged 115,000 new sellers in the first three months of the year, more than double the past two years’ user growth. Teachable, which lets people make and sell online courses, signed on 14,000 new creators between March and July, and in July reported its first quarterly revenue over $10 million.” Digital Creators
  • From Azeem Azhar’s “Exponential View” newsletter; saved in Kyle’s September 10th, 2020 quick capture.
• We’re also finding ways to invest in the rise of the creator class. There’s always been a huge tailwind, especially among younger demographics who want to be creators, and that is almost a viable career path now. And I think what we see is that there is a huge rise in the creative class where you can reasonably be a creator without being super famous, but you can monetize through different platforms like Patreon, Substack, Instagram or TikTok. So I think that is something that is really interesting and ties into this idea of, maybe instead of taking a summer to work a retail job, maybe spending a summer and trying to sell some short stories or get some patrons on Patreon. It’s the modern lemonade stand. We’re looking at that whole stack to find ways of investing, from social platforms to creator tools, and I’ve been spending a lot of time in fintech to understand the benefits and payments flows. Those are some of the things that we think about. Rick Yang NEA Digital Creators
  • Rick Yang of NEA, quoted in Fortune’s “Term Sheet” newsletter; saved in Kyle’s September 10th, 2020 quick capture.