Creators are the new users

This week, Spotify announced that it'd begin following Apple Music's lead in offering podcasters the ability to offer paid subscriptions in its app.

On the same day, reports emerged that Facebook would be following a similar suit for creators on its platforms, with plans to roll out a new range of tools to enable everything from brand partnerships to ecommerce sales.

For the longest time, relentless focus on "the user" (or the audience, rather) was the prototypical playbook of rapidly scaling media platforms.

But increasingly so, we see a significant paradigm shift brewing beneath the surface, with creators now attracting the attention and focus that users and audiences were once singularly adorned with.

In other words, in a post-user acquisition world, creators are the new users.

This is something we've observed across the attention economy for quite some time now, and believe is the natural next step in the evolution of the new media growth playbook.

With the user acquisition thesis now largely proved out by the biggest players in the attention economy, we believe the natural next step is to ensure that the value being offered to all users - audiences and creators alike - is being pushed to its full potential.

Somewhat unintuitively, the best way to accomplish this may not be to shun monetization as some sort of corrupting force (as has been historically implied), but rather to embrace it as incentive to inspire a new class of creators to emerge and take their production to the next level.

As longtime proponents of this, we're very pleased to see this expansion of focus underway, and look forward to seeing how it shapes the new media platforms of tomorrow.