Eric Siu explains why short-form platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts don't make money. You need to move your audience to newsletters or courses where you can actually monetize, but most creators don't have the engagement to pull it off.
Every creator is thinking, how do I build deeper engagement with my community that can eventually turn to monetization? For example, short form, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels have taken over a lot of creators' focus over these past couple of years. And they're so hard to monetize because you don't even form a connection to the creator. You just form a connection to like, here's this like very fungible 5-second clip of media that I'm gonna swipe through. And maybe if I see it 5,000 times, I'll start to like give a shit about the creator who's making it. But if you stay focused on that upper funnel, it's like from a business POV, that's just leads. You're not doing anything with it. If you're able to get a creator to sign up for your newsletter or for your course, that's the bottom part of the funnel where you can actually monetize and support yourself with it. And so yeah, we're seeing tons of people start newsletters. What's really hard, a lot of creators are realizing though that they've never really built the engagement they needed to do that.
