Peaked at 19, redundant and stubborn by 22: Is the creator economy misunderstood?

In 2005, a while before the world adapted ‘creators’ and ‘influencers’ to their everyday vocabulary, the first-ever video was streamed on YouTube. A 19-second video named ‘Me at the zoo’ featured the co-founder of YouTube as he stood in front of two elephants that nodded their heads and inaugurated the chaos to come.

While it’s tempting to close the case and call it the ‘survival of the sensational,’ there is more to it than that. We have seen multiple creators like Lilly Singh, Liza Koshy, Prajakta Kohli, and many others that built an empire over consistent uploads of relatable comedy and slowly and unsurprisingly ran their course. 

While their stories of cultivating and losing their enormous fan base can be emotionally narrated as the story of the doomed and short shelf life of the internet celebrities, rationality and logic would suggest otherwise. 

The speed of time is faster on the Internet:

“It’s not short-lived; it’s fast-lived.” 

There are multiple reasons behind your favorite early YouTubers and their content going extinct. 

To begin with, the relatable and easy-to-consume comedy was an era of circus for the internet. A while before there was the genuine utility of the internet or before it became the extension of businesses and education, people accessed the internet. They consumed content for the bare thrill of doing it. The Internet was merely an amusement for consumers. 

As the platform evolved, it became more transactional, and the scope of the internet grew. To put it in perspective, the internet did not overthrow the previous creators and replace them with more viable ones. The audience simply outgrew one niche at a time, as better things were available to them. 

But here is what the critics miss out on – the content creators also moved on to better things. 92% of businesses have employed some level of content marketing to pull consumers towards their products. In fact, content has become a medium for creating a community through which they monetise their businesses and brands. 

Sandeep Maheshwari, an Indian YouTuber with over 23,400,000 subscribers and 1.8B views, has survived on the platform for over a decade without monetising his content. So technically, the creator survived as he adapted to the newer scopes of the platform and used that to benefit his businesses, including his books, courses.

Yet another content creator that built a billion-dollar business with his capacity to share knowledge and add value to users is Alakh Pandey. He produced his first ever video with a whiteboard and a marker under his now renowned channel called ‘Physics Wallah’.

Here is another interesting logical fallacy while assessing the ‘success’ of content creators over time. While studying the general pattern of YouTube and streaming, you often encounter the terrifying case study of Lilly Singh’s demise. If one has the audacity to look at a creator with almost 15 million subscribers and $10 million and deem a failed career result that ought to be an interesting way to fail.

If one perceives ‘relevance’ as 16-year-old fresh college folks hooting, cheering, and screaming their names, buying their face-printed merchandise, or even breaking the internet with every new video they release, the current state of streaming platforms might not be in alignment with their definition of ‘internet success. 

Ranveer Allahbadia, another Indian YouTuber who has remained relevant on YouTube for over a decade, has built a multi-million dollar business solely through content marketing and generation. He started as a fitness YouTuber and evolved to other contemporary genres like spirituality, finance, podcast, and new-age entrepreneurship. 

If you are a budding creator reading this and wondering if content creation is a volatile business and you are doomed to irrelevance, here is what we want to leave you with – Streaming platforms, when used with the right strategy, can become pillars of businesses and viable skills! There is room for more content as long as it resonates with the audience, and it always helps to think long-term and be patient and flexible during your bad days.