The Creator Economy is a subset of the passion economy; the emerging category of businesses founded by self-employed content creators, supported by the digital platforms and financial tools that make the monetisation of content viable.
“Today, short form content is one of the largest consumed forms of content; in the future it is going to continue to be one of the most consumed content formats with apps like TikTok, features such as YouTube shorts and Instagram reels making it easy for the creator as well as the consumer to stay engaged. This phenomena began a few years ago through TikTok, and now has spread all across the globe, giving a platform to a lot of creators with different genres and talents to freely be themselves and put their work out. This has also made it easy for brands to run their campaigns and get an extreme number of engagement because of its quick adaptability, compared to the long form content. We have also seen the rise of travel after Covid and short content has made it easy for hotels, tour guides and everyone else to promote themselves easily” says Rutvik Lokhande. He started working at the age of 14 in the content industry and was one of the founding members of NoFiltr, a talent management agency that drives India’s creator economy which has been a pioneer in the industry since it began in 2017. He is also a partner at Collabtribe, an experimental influencer marketing company now based in Mumbai, India.
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“The rise of short content gave heavy rise to the music industry and helped a lot of talent explode, and increased the number of active streamers across all music platforms. Currently, India is experiencing a heavy phenomena of street culture and there is a lot of Hip Hop talent emerging from this similar to what happened in America around the 90s. But there’s very little reward to music artists as the revenue from the streams compared to the world is very less and there are very few labels experimenting outside Bollywood which can support such talent.”
It is said that by 2025, content creation is going to be one that is most sought after, owing to the ample opportunities and the need for fast-paced content in today’s world moving ahead, every individual is going to be an influencer in the world, and it would be important to market skills and promote your content. Influencers have become so high functioning that they take care of their finances, content, marketing and what not; which would earlier be done by agencies. The world is leaning to have assets like content and IPs and NFTs are the first example”, claims Rutvik Lokhande.
He also adds, ” There will be lots of opportunities for tech startups to build applications/services for creators to ease their life- some potential blue oceans are around the financial area, community building, and tools that can speed up the creation and connect the influencers with the audience more deeply. There is huge potential for the brands as there would be in-app purchases across all platforms very soon, so the short videos could act as an advertisement. I see a lot of E-commerce doing this in the future”.
Web3 is shifting the whole creator economy to the ownership economy, with developers building apps that can help with tokenization of the content ,fan interactions, marketplaces. With this whole wave, the VCs who saw this industry as something that wouldn’t last much are now the ones pushing for it and funding projects and creators; in the creator economy.
Rutvik believes that we are living in one of the greatest times, because anyone from any part of the world can show their talent and get recognized without having to be on the traditional path to the same. This is the era of abundant opportunity.
Today, everyone can create for their own niche and get incentivized for the same .This is because brands are not only looking to collaborate with people who have millions of followers, but also with creators who can create for a specific niche community around them, even if the numbers are less.
Rutvik, at the age of 21, sold his first Blockchain company – called ‘Believrs’. This platform provides a game changing opportunity for artists to operate with complete freedom. Imagine this – a film director can now, through this platform, share his script, raise money from his audience (believrs) for the movie; and further sell it to an OTT platform. Rutvik believed that there should be no barrier for any talent, so he made a platform where artists could raise money from their fans and create with them, for them – and build a core community around their work.
As of today, he is in the process of launching an angel fund called ‘Moon Capital’- to help companies and individuals in the content creation industry and also the web3 community.
