One of the themes at this year’s NAB is the “Creator Economy.” At heart, all of us are creators and we’ve been creating for a long time. But now NAB is recognizing each of us as a bit special. One of the things I wanted to find out during my interviews is what is the “Creator Economy” and how is it impacting traditional media?
Here’s a transcript of the video, which I cleaned up slightly to improve readability.
NOTE: Here’s the video itself.
One big initiative in that regard is the Creator Lab, which is in the back of this South Hall, and that is aimed at the creator economy, which is a phenomenal thing. It is growing and growing and growing and driving huge dollars, huge advertising money, big brands. This includes everybody from your unboxing YouTuber to Mr. Beast and his massive empire channel that’s grown and grown and grown. And it’s an audience that really represents the future of content creation.
Chris Brown
Managing Director & EVP of Global Connections & Events
NAB
Goldman Sachs shows data that says the creator economy is going to double to 4 million people. Listen to this. 4 million people are going to be earning more than six figures a year with their YouTube and TikTok channels by 2028.
4 million people. Now there’s a lot of people making less …six figures plus is a lot of money. That’s a career, right? When you think about Hollywood, we don’t have millions of people, maybe a couple hundred thousand at most, and many of them don’t make 6 or 7 figures. But the creator economy is an economy that’s growing so fast that it means manufacturers have to build stuff, and they have to be able to sell it to the user.
Michael Cioni
CEO & Co-founder
Strada
And some of that means that those tools now can make it easier for people to come into the business and to become great storytellers. And that’s what I think the NAB show has an opportunity to really attract in coming years.
Karen Chupka
Incoming Managing Director & EVP of Global Connections & Events
NAB
Our division has been focused on the creator economy from the word go. We really, pride ourselves in working with the content creators and helping them develop their businesses in this new creative economy, because, let’s face it, that’s how they make their living, right?
So our focus on creators, our focus on creative community is extremely strong. So we design and develop products around those creators specific for the purposes. Whether it’s the new Z line of cameras, which is designed for vloggers and YouTubers alike, that makes it very easy for them to capture their content the way that they need to capture it.
If you have a look at the way that we design our cameras versus most of our competitors, we design them for the actual use case of the camera or for the creator.
El-Deane Naude
Senior Product Manager, Imaging
Sony Electronics
The creative economy is really important for all of us in the NAB software environment. W e’ve been working with them for years and years and years, so almost all of our artists would have traditionally been what we would call the creator community.
Now, they might have not been using YouTube or TikTok, you know, when Maxon started. But all of our artists are usually freelancers who have made their way up trying to make higher quality content for their audience.
David M. McGavran
CEO
Maxon
One of the things that I think is really interesting about how the creator economy is affecting those traditional broadcast systems is, I see constantly where now large broadcasters, large networks are looking at those clever ways that small creators are reaching their public and they’re looking at repackaging lots of their content, not just from that main broadcast that you would normally see that we all grew up with; to now I can feed them a different version on their phone. I’m going to give them different graphics. I’m going to give them all those things.
We’re seeing the big broadcasters wake up to that and realize that they also need to adopt those same tools so that they can reach those people in all those other mediums that we see.
Chris McLendon
Senior Product Manager
Vizrt
Everybody is very fearful and on their heels about AI because it feels very threatening. That it’s somehow gonna take over the industry and people are going to go away. And I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that what AI is going to do is really elevate the content creation, allow creators to create better, more effective content, and really, democratize the mundane.
That’s what AI is going to be used for, is really to do the mundane so that human beings can really focus on elevated creative content, and really bringing their focus to that.
Sean Lee
Chief of Strategy & Operations Officer
OpenDrives
