🔴 Creator shelf-life, creator exits

Do you really want to post forever?

Most creators have a shelf life of three to four years. Platforms shift. Audiences move on. Younger faces emerge. The creators who last aren't the ones who keep posting — they're the ones who see the exit coming ‘round the corner.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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By Francis Zierer

Most creators have a shelf life of three to four years. Driving this expiration date are two forces: shifts in the technology (platforms) they rely on and a steady flow of fresh faces coming up from behind.

I take this notion from Lia Haberman, whom I interviewed this week for an upcoming episode of our podcast. It’s not strictly data-backed, but it’s a useful lens for viewing the creator economy and your place in it.

Look: 90% of startups fail. Even 30% of startups with venture funding fail. The failure rate for creators is likely higher given the lower barrier to entry. Failure here means ceasing to create content under a given concept or account.

Andy Warhol proposed fifteen minutes of fame; to be clear, three to four years is an above-average success rate. Every creator has a peak. How do you prepare for the downslope?

How does a creator exit?

I don’t think MrBeast will ever IPO — Beast Industries, his holding company, might, but Jimmy Donaldson won’t. And certainly, creators are acqui-hired. Look at former Creator Spotlight guest Adam Biddlecombe and his newsletter Mindstream, acquired by HubSpot, or, in the news this week, Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, acquired by Paramount.

For a creator who trades on their face or persona, “exit” means the ability to make a living leveraged by their career as a creator but no longer reliant on their face or persona. Freedom from the public eye.

Our guest on The Creator Spotlight Podcast this week was Caspar Lee, an icon of an earlier era of the creator economy. He posts on social media, but he is no longer an active creator; he is an entrepreneur whose businesses exist because he exploited the opportunities afforded him at the peak of his creator career. His last public YouTube video is dated 2019. His account, with 6.49 million subscribers, is still the 759th-most-subscribed on the platform, according to Social Blade.

Caspar was hugely successful as a creator, and his shelf life was eight years, more or less. This is the length of time formed by the 135 videos on his channel. And it was only late in that time period he founded his first business: Influencer.com, an influencer marketing agency founded nine years ago, about three years before his last video.

He has since co-founded three other businesses: MVE Management (creator talent management), Proper Living (student housing), and Creator Ventures (venture capital).

None of these businesses require him to make videos featuring his face. This is a luxury and the ideal outcome for any creator; a true exit, the ability to withdraw from and not be beholden to public life.

This is one type of creator exit: leverage your influence to start a business using your skills, not your likeness. But the business does not have to be your own.

Last week saw the launch of OWM, a tool built to connect brands in need of promotion to creators interested in trading promotional work for equity. It’s a way for successful, influential creators to exchange work for startup equity.

At the OWM launch party last Tuesday, Austin Nasso, a creator and tech bro whose content makes fun of tech bros, spoke on a panel alongside Steven Wang, founder of dub, an app enabling retail investors to copy-trade politicians, hedge funds, and other investors of interest in real-time. Nasso has a long-term partnership promoting the app — this is the model OWM seeks to propagate. He is also an investor.

Nasso’s comedy works because he is a tech bro. After college and before going full-time on his comedy and related work, he spent four years as a software engineer at Microsoft. He has above-average fluency in the mechanics of startup equity; investing requires diligence and informed bets.

When you join a startup as an employee, you may be able to negotiate your compensation package to include less salary and more equity — betting on ownership over immediate cash. Creators rarely get this option.

OWM was on my mind when I recorded my interview with Caspar last month. I asked him if, in his creator days, he’d ever completed a brand deal paying him in equity instead of cash. No — for him, cash was king:

For creators who’ve already built a few healthy revenue streams, equity-based brand deals may be worth the punt — especially for those creators whose production costs are low. All you risk spending is audience trust at that point, which, if you’re savvy, isn’t even at risk.

A company, a founder, carries more risk in a creator equity deal than a creator. They’re giving away part of their company. Should that creator be on the cap table? OWM founder Jeff Frommer describes three questions founders seeking creator equity partners should ask themselves:

All seem to hold true for Wang vis-à-vis Nasso. Remember: 90% of startups fail, and we can assume creators fail at an even higher rate.

In reverse, for creators, these three questions might be:

Near the end of their panel, Nasso joked that any creators in the room looking to land long-term brand deals with tech companies would do well to go on Crunchbase, the startup fundraising tracker, and sort for companies that recently raised money. Then go on LinkedIn, find the people at these companies responsible for marketing spend, and convince them to funnel as much of that fresh raise as possible into your pocket. Swing big; long-term brand deal.

The best comedy is rooted in truth.

Caspar leveraged his influence to launch businesses of his own; Nasso may yet do the same, but for now, he’s well-positioned if dub hits venture scale — and incentivized to help push it there. The difference between the two routes is risk tolerance and timeline.

Building your own business requires specialist expertise and an appetite for control. Trading work for equity is a gamble requiring market analysis. Cash deals are a safe bet.

What is a creator exit? It’s enough money not to post anymore. Line your pockets and keep an eye on the exit. Tick-tock.

On the podcast this week, we spoke to Caspar Lee, a semi-retired creator who had 15 million total followers at his peak and now operates as an entrepreneur. We spoke about:

And more. Watch below or listen wherever you get your podcasts.