Equipping Creators with the Tools to Thrive w/ Reagan Fry (Kajabi)

Is going to be as lucrative or stable or predictable as what creators are used to on other platforms like YouTube. And so with these big audiences, there's more opportunity for brand deals. There's more opportunity to like funnel people into a subscription business.

Hey, welcome to a new episode of the Influence Factor by the Influencer Marketing Factory today with me, Eregan Frei, the director of product. If you're listening on Spotify, I invite you to leave a rating and a review on Apple podcast. It helps a lot. Thank you and enjoy the show. Hey Regan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Absolutely. We have a lot to talk about today. Right. I'm pretty sure that you in our pre call we have telling me that you guys are working on a couple of really cool stuff. So willing to learn more about that. But as usual what I do with, you know, every new guest I ask them in the first minutes. Right. Just to go over a bit more about your career. Right. What did you do in the past? You have quite a good experience like with really well known brands. Right. And companies.

So.

So tell us a bit more about yourself.

Sure. So after college like I went to school in at Pepperdine in order to I wanted to get involved in TV and television and film production. So my first role outside of college was actually for a as a production assistant for a TV show called the Office. I quickly realized that actually I'm more interested and probably better in the actual business side of entertainment and so I kind of switched career paths. I worked for a couple startups and then really got my first big break at Amazon where I did marketing for video games. I did that for a couple years and then switched to a product role for the prime membership program where I was focused on prime member retention. Did that for a couple years and then went to work on Google's growth and behavioral economics team. So that's a team that works with all of Google's businesses. I worked mostly on the consumer side to help them understand how to apply insights from behavioral economics and behavioral psychology in order to build better products for their users and ultimately to grow their products. After that I went to TikTok where I focused on creator monetization and that's where I really got involved inside this creator economy space and been working kind of adjacent and adjacent to a. Prior to that, one of the things that I noticed about my career when I look back is I've always kind of stayed within the media production kind of orbit. But TikTok is where I first fell in love with the creator economy and creator monetization. Worked there for about a little over two years, building stuff like creator fund tipping, gifting, as well as a host of other things that aren't necessarily creator monetization related. And after TikTok, I moved to Kajabi, which is where I'm at now. And Kajabi is a platform that helps creators build online businesses.

Wow. Such a. I mean, great career, right? You saw it a little bit of everything, you know. So I'm pretty sure that you learn many things. Right. On different also, like size of the businesses, right angles, point of view.

Right.

So what would be the. What would be one of the main thing that you learned in the past, let's say maybe five years that you didn't really realize before getting into certain type of businesses and maybe or any myth about things that you did that people think there is something else that is actually the reality. It's totally off.

Yeah. So maybe I'll answer the second part of that question first. Yeah, you know, working on creator funds, we built that very quickly and for a variety of reasons. I think the main reason one is that we wanted to convey to creators that, hey, we're still figuring this out, but we want to make a very solid like billion dollar commitment to you to show that we're serious about creator monetization. And actually one of the things that happened when we launched that we built a very quickly, it was one of the first kind of creator funds of its kind. And ultimately it was intended to be a kind of stopgap between when we could actually offer like some kind of ad revenue share, which is very difficult to do for short form video. And where we were at at that point, it's basically like we could take a year or two to build this or we can offer them some our creator something right now to show that we're serious and that we're committed. There was a lot of things going on at the time, a lot of geopolitical things, a lot of other competitive things, a lot of other YouTube shorts was released, Instagram reels was released, Snapchat, and they all kind of had their own creator funds. But one of the things that happened when we launched is that there was a server migration that caused a lot of people's video views to be depressed around the time of launch. And so people joined Creator Fund and then saw their views go down and kind of had this notion that creator fund was. TikTok was lowering people's views when they joined Creator Fund because they wanted to pay them less, when actually it was a separate issue that was addressed. But that rumor kind of persisted. I think in the early days we were thinking about how do we help, how do we pay creators more? And so there was a lot of things that we learned as a company and that I definitely learned. But that was one of the things that stuck out is like you launch something and something happens and it's really hard to like to disprove those like rumors or for lack of a better word, conspiracies. But there were a lot of people working very hard behind the scenes to try and fix a lot of issues with Creator Fund. And I think recently TikTok announced some changes to Creator Fund that ultimately will help people earn more money. And I think that was the biggest learning or issue with Creator Fund was that there were a lot of people in it, but most of them were not making significant amounts of money, like amounts of money that were so small as to be disheartening in some cases. And so when we launched it, we were like, hey, everyone can join. And that ended up being like, probably not the best strategy.

Yeah, got it. Now, especially online, it's that easy, right, for one news to get, you know, like sort of dominant effect, snowball effect. Right. And even if there is not the real reason behind that, people really don't care. Right. So I can understand how easy, right. It is for getting a certain narrative and continue with that. I'm going to ask you more shortly about all the creator monetization, but before doing that again in our pre call, you were telling me something also about some new cool stuff about Kajabi. Anything about AI, right? Am I right?

Yeah. So AI, as we all understand is kind of a hot button issue over the last couple of months. And Kajabi has been working really hard to understand how can we empower creators to use this technology to more efficiently run their business, build products and ultimately be more successful. And so what we're launching actually tomorrow is the AI, the AI Creator Tool hub. And that's essentially six tools that you can use to create a course, create course outlines, create lesson details for the modules in your course, create sales emails, social posts to promote your course. It's free for anyone to use and you don't have to sign up to use it. We're really excited about what this technology will, how this technology will empower creators. There are positives and negatives, just like any technology. But we strongly believe that this is a game changer for creators and a good way ultimately.

Yeah, because many people are saying like, you know, AI, especially generative AI, it's bad for not only creators, but also for the audience. Right. That will see all over the same and same information, especially with, for example, ChatGPT that is like, you know, boxes somehow up to 2021, if I'm correct. But why others are saying, yes, let's not only look at generative AI, let's also look at every. There is like editing AI, for example, or tools that can help you automate. Automate certain things. So I guess you're referring to those. Or is it a mix of generative plus editing tools in this case?

So we're definitely looking into multiple sides of the coin right now we have a feature called Creator Studio and Beta, which is a, which is more on the editing side. It's how do you take these long videos and create short sizzle reels for Things platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels to help promote your business and make content like repurposing content easier for a variety of mediums. The creator tool hub is more in the generative, generative AI space. And essentially the problem that we're solving is it takes creators like weeks, months to build a course product, to structure it in a way that provides a lot of value to their users. And, and what we're essentially doing and what generator generative AI essentially does is provide a template or a blueprint for you to work off of so you're not starting from scratch and you can have content to use as inspiration. AI can't do everything for you, but it can definitely help you get things done more efficiently and help remove a lot of those mental blocks like I'm writing a sales email. Where do I even start? I hate writing copy, right? How do I structure all this knowledge that I have in a way that people want to consume in a course product, right? And so things like that, I think it really helps creators have a better place to move forward from. But when we talk about generative AI, I think it's really, really important to understand as a creator that like, it does sound scary, right? There's a lot of concern that it's just going to be people are creating courses with fully AI, but ultimately those are courses that are not going to be successful because what AI can't do is replace you as the creator. When I want to buy a course, I want to buy it from Andrew Chin, who's a leading a thought leader on growth. I've read all his content, I look at all his Tweets, attended some of his like webinars, look, watched him speaks. And so there's like a tacit relationship there. And so what's going to be really important for creators is building a meaningful relationships and connection with your audience, building that trust. Because there, there is going to be a lot of like bad courses out there, but those courses aren't going to do very good because consumers are going to gravitate to the people that they want to learn from. They recognize as experts that, that they have a relationship with. And so I think generative AI is also going to result in a necessity for tools, features and creators needing to do things to help connect with their audience in a little bit more substantial and meaningful way.

Hey, quick break. This podcast is hosted by the Influencer Marketing Factory. We are an influencer marketing agency that helps brands and companies engage with Gen Z and Millennials on social media. We take care of influencer identification, storytelling, creativity, negotiation, contracting, campaign management, error analysis, in depth reporting, content boosting and much, much more. Are you interested in learning more? You can find us at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com or you can Google the Influencer Marketing Factory. Especially, like I was also saying this to someone else in another episode, you're gonna have like in maybe one year's time, you know, so many like AI generated content. But at the end of the day, people want to see other people with their own experience, their own storytelling, their own style that cannot come from a machine, right? Or can maybe can try to imitate, right? But again, you don't have trust in a machine as you can have like an other human being that's been maybe in the same situation as yours, right? Or that, for example, as you said, you being seen speaking live, for example. Or that you met. Or that, you know, there is an authority in the space, right? So again, I think that that is not going to be ever an issue. Like there's going to be a lot of content. Absolutely. A lot of noise. But the one that are going to put their own efforts and time and experience are going to win the game. I'm pretty sure about that. So we talk about how to generate, how to edit, but then something that we were saying at the beginning, it's also monetized content, right? And remember when vine was acquired and then discontinued, what happened there is that amazing concept, but people were not making money, right? And a lot of Viners start moving to YouTube, right? That has one of the best, or at least most stable, right. CPM models out there. Do you think that this can happen also to other social media at the moment. Like, you know, expectation versus reality when it comes to content monetization.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think it's more true for whatever new content distribution mediums might be out there. Um, so in the case of vine, it was kind of one of the first short form videos, video like platforms, right? And now There are several. YouTube's doing it, TikTok is doing it, reels doing it, Snapchat's doing it, et cetera. And all these platforms have really, really big audiences. So I think for short form video and for things that have like lots of platforms offering similar things, creators are just going to distribute their content across all of them in order to build their audience. And in some way there's several ways to do it, but in some way convert that audience to some monetization model. At the end of the day, if you're a full time creator, I think it's more of a risk for a new content platform that's trying to establish kind of a new content consumption medium. Because what happens is someone else with a large audience can copy that medium and then creators are just going to go where that audience is like billion versus 20 million users. The math makes more sense for creators to go where the audience is because ultimately that's how they're going to be able to build and grow their audience. So at the end of the day, I think it's a bigger risk for newer content consumption medium types.

That makes sense. You can easily copy a feature that happens every single week, I would say between social media, but you cannot necessarily copy a community. Right. A way to stay in a sort of close group of friends. You cannot change the way how people talk on a certain social media.

Right.

So, so that is actually an interesting point and you already said this before, but what do you think again, you know, you already said about the TikTok founds that, you know, the first, not like the first I would say version was like not that of a success and now they're doing a number two. But TikTok is not the only one that hasn't done a good job on that. Even YouTube short CPM, it's I think 1/10 or even more like less than what Spotify I think pays right for like a thousand like listings and so on. So like people are complaining about that. Is it the wrong model for shorts? Like it seems that it's not working as if.

Yeah, it's a great question. And I'll start with the way that Short form video is consumed. You have a feed where you're watching a bunch of 30 second videos one after the other. That makes an ad revenue sharing model much more complicated. In your traditional YouTube video you have a pre roll, a post roll. All of that is attributed to the video that you're watching, right? But when you load eight videos at a time and there's one ad every like eight videos, how do you distribute appropriately? Which video is actually like should get the a part of that ad revenue share. And then the second part is that the CPMs are just going to be lower. Like these companies can't sell a short form video ad for as much money as they can sell like a 15 second pre roll. So you have attribution challenges and you have like basic economics of how much these short form video ad videos cost that make that very difficult. And I think what is happening and I think the way that a lot of creators are finding success in short form video is it's a really, really great way to build a big audience quickly. Much more so than YouTube has been able to do, traditional YouTube. And so what people are doing, the monetization that seems to work best is you build this big audience and then you try to transfer for them to watch your full length YouTube videos where the CPM is directly attributed to you and the CPMs are much higher or you try to get them to join your patreon or buy your course. Right. And so I think in a short form video space, the alternatives to ad revenue sharing models are much more important because the jury's still out on whether that is going an ad revenue sharing model in that medium. In the short form video medium is going to be as lucrative or stable or predictable as what creators are used to on other platforms like YouTube. And so with these big audiences there's more opportunity for brand deals, there's more opportunity to like funnel people into a subscription business or to funnel people into like another platform where you're actually focused on monetizing. And so the most challenging part that creators have is okay, I have this big audience now, how do I get them to do this other thing where I can actually be compensated for all this value that I'm providing?

Yeah, I mean many are using that for like discoverability, right. To drive traffic. As you said, you know before, like you get a lot of visibility and some of them they are like trying to move it, right, for example from YouTube shorts to YouTube. Right. Some others they do it with maybe TikTok and then you click in their bio and Then you go somewhere else. Maybe it could be, you know, a newsletter could be a close community with, you know, subscription models with exclusive content and so on. So I do agree, like maybe the CPM model in that is not the best and you know, since they now might need a better, you know, business model also there also something that I wanted to discuss with you because this is on the more on the creator side, you know, like what they should do. But also in terms of platforms, right? There is also like not, you know, like I would say also like different behaviors, right. In the economics, right. When it comes to how do you think about people doing things online, right. And before, like the idea of giving something to influencers, well, not even like an idea, right? It was like, ah, this is just a hobby. Why should I pay this person? And then now new ways came out and nowadays you have like brand deals and you know, you can get tips, for example, from, from fans that it was like quite big as one at the beginning on Twitch. But then others, right. Platforms also opened up that one before. And also that is different, right? Because giving $1 from one fan, you know, it can be, I don't want to say the same, but could be equivalent of maybe a brand deal because a brand is a corporation giving more money. Right? But for, for the two different entities could be the same effort, right? I'm going to give you $1 or $5 as a tip compared to maybe $10,000 from a corporation there. So why, what are some of the differences there? Like, do you think that is the best way for content creators to diversify them as possible? Do you think that getting like for example, tips and, and brand deals at the same time is for every type of content creator out there? Or do you think that there are different type of content creators, some of them works all well with brand deals, some others only with taping, for example, and so on?

Yeah, I think overall you need to have a diversified, a diversified set of revenue streams. As a creator, there is certain types of content where you're really only going to make money by ad revenue share. And typically that is based on large audiences and, and content that's not necessarily super unique. And what I mean by that is certain types of content are more easy, easy to replicate. So if you create comedy skits, a lot of people enjoy that or create skits about, you know, funny dog videos, those get a lot of views, right? But it's less common for brands to be able to like, say, okay, this is my audience. Like if you have a huge audience it might not matter that much, but if you make that type of content, you might do well in ad revenue share, but you won't do that well on creating a course. Right. Because you're not necessarily having this unique knowledge or expertise or experience to share. And so I really think it depends on the creator, the type of content that you create, and the audience that consumes that content and what they value. I think that for creators, there's really three kind of entities driving these revenue streams. The first is the platform itself, so YouTube. The second is brands, generally brand deals and things related to brand deals. And the third is your audience. So for platform, kind of the mental model is I'm creating a lot of value for this platform. This platform is selling ads based off my content. The value that I provide as a creator, I deserve to be compensated for that. Right. The second is brand deal. There's kind of an association between a. It's almost like validation, right? A certain type of validation where you as a creator are associated with this really, really well known brand. Right. So think of it like working for an name brand company that people recognize there's a little bit of prestige there. Then creators naturally know that like if I worked with Procter and Gamble or Coca Cola or BMW, that opens more. That's proof that I can work with brands that opens more opportunities there. So I would call that one kind of a prestige factor that's a little bit different. Obviously it's the most lucrative one. So it's, it's great all around. But I think there is a prestige factor there on the side. And the third is from consumers. And that's really validation that your audience values you and your content enough to pay you. And so if you look at like one dollar or a hundred dollars from each of these three sources, they're. The hundred dollars is not valued equally psychologically. Right. A hundred dollars from your fans is more important than a hundred dollars from like the platform. Because the platform, yeah, you should be paying me. Right? Look at all this work that I do and you're getting a ton of ad revenue from it. I should have some. I should be compensated for the value that I'm providing this platform. Whereas $100 for your fans are like, wow, people enjoyed my content so much. I've developed like such a good relationship with them that they're willing to support me out of their own pockets and they're willing, they really value the content that I create and the value that I provide when they watch my content. And so that is much more validating and encouraging than, you know, and the value of those two different hundred dollars is different. And so I think that's kind of like an important thing to think about as, as both, both as a creator, but as well as initially. These platforms that are trying to think about ways to monetize, to help creators monetize and become successful and be, have the value that they provide, be appropriately compensated and valued by both the platform and the people that consume that content. I think the biggest problem in the creator economy today is there's so much value that creators provide, but in terms of the people that are getting compensated for it the most, they're kind of at the lower end of the spectrum. And I think that's something that needs to change.

And some of these content creators, right, they do brand deals, they get maybe tips from fans that they get money thanks to CPM models. But some of them also, they're like, you know what? I feel that my community is there for me. They are already like, you know, helping me out and supporting me. I'm ready now to move, or at least not just to move, but like to in addition to my content creation, also becoming an entrepreneur, right? So I'm gonna put my face, my name to create maybe a line of a product, for example, think about makeup and be beauty. Or I can like, you know, maybe collaborate with the brands and create something in collaboration with, I can collaborate with another influencer, you know. And a lot of content creators are open up llc, right, Companies to manage themselves, right, as not individuals, but as again as a company. So you can write off expenses, you can have a team with you and so on. How do you see the management of inflation into this dichotomy between creation of content and managing a business? Where do you see a good balance between not getting to a sort of like, you know, in a loop where you have to create content but also manage your business, but then you finish like doing more of the business bureaucracy than creating content. How can you balance that as a content creator?

Yeah, that's a huge challenge because a lot of people that aren't involved in this space don't really realize how much work it actually is to do all this stuff. And so at some point in your career as a creator, when you decide, hey, I could do this full time, I could actually create a business, you kind of switch from doing this because you like it to doing it because you like it, but you also need to pay the bills, right? And so I think the balance and where I see a lot of innovation in the industry coming from is companies that are building tools to help creators more easily and efficiently manage the business side of things so they can focus more of their time, effort and attention on building a relationship with their audience that's meaningful and authentic and also doing what it is that they actually like to do, which is create content, be creative, right? And so I think as creators, you finding the balance is about finding like the right set of tools and support to offload as much of that as you can so that you can focus on what your viewers need and want and value and delivering that to them. So you kind of have to think like a CEO or a product manager in that sense. Who is your audience? Where are they, where are they? What do they want? How can I provide value and then focus on doing that as efficiently as possible. And if you are the creative behind it, you need to find tools and people that support in a cost effective way the business side so you don't have to spend as much time on that. Very difficult to do. But I see a lot of innovation in the industry from companies like Kajabi and others that support creators. A lot of focus on helping, making that running the business side of things a lot easier because of this.

Right? So you said that for example, your company is helping, doing that through like, you know, AI tools we said before. But I know that also you guys are really famous for funnels, landing pages, right? And ways to drive right, traffic right from, you know, the noise right off social media to actually something is going to be, you know, at the end of the funnel and all these tools. But how overall, like from a helicopter view, how do you actually change the perception of the creator economy? Because for some people, right, the creators are still doing like just a hobby, while instead, as we said before, it's, it's a hard job, right? You have to create content, you have to manage your community with new ideas. If you start a company, you have to take care of all of that, right? But still a lot of people still look at that as this niche thing for a bunch of people that are still trying to figure out what to do as adults, right? Well, instead it's a profession. How do we change that perception to people that still don't understand what the creative economy is?

That's a really, really great question and it's also very challenging to solve. But I think everyone in the industry is partially responsible in some way for changing that narrative. And I think it's about elevating like typically. And the reason people have this perception is because a lot of what gets a lot of attention are these mega creators that are really influencers that create dance videos, they create comedy skits and people, you know, they get millions of views and people say, oh, that's what a creator is, that's what an influencer is. And I think we need to elevate more of the success of people that aren't like these mega creators but are still running very successful businesses. For example, on Kajabi there is a, an individual that coaches people seeking to transition their gender at birth to their, the gender that they identify with. And what people don't realize is part of that transition, there's a lot of things that go into that. One of them is like changing your voice. And so she realized that hey, there's a huge need for this and I'm going to help other people because you know, this is something that I've experienced in my life and help teach them how to create a course and teach them how to manage that transition. And she's been very, very successful. You probably are sorry. This individual has been very, very successful. But it's not necessarily a story that we hear about. We hear about the Khabil's of the world, we hear about the Charlie d' Amelios of the world. We don't hear nearly as much as we should about the individuals that are highly successful, but they don't have these like a hundred million follower audience. These are people that found a niche, found a real need and leveraged their experience, their expertise and their passion to fill that need for a large number of people. And it's important to understand that these are always going to be niches. And when we start to transition the zeitgeist culture of Zeitgeist from those stories that we've historically had to some of these more stories, some of these other stories about these successful creators that are actually like businesses, real businesses and start to frame thing around these are people running legitimate businesses that provide real value to a lot of people. And by the way, it's you know, anywhere from 50 to $200 billion of industry depending on how you calculate it. This is, this is a real growing and important part of the economy. And these are real businesses. They just look a little bit different than your traditional brick and mortars. And so I think we need to elevate that type of success a little bit more so that people, when they hear a creator, they don't just think of certain as like certain popular creators are like one small aspect of the creator economy.

I mean I think that Is easier, right, to talk about the gossip and the drama of the big ones. Right. And only, you know, for people that either come from traditional media or people that are really not open to the idea that social media can be useful to just say, is a bunch of kids, you know, like people that go there and take all this money for a 15 seconds dance video. And sometimes, yeah, I mean like there are some that are really not put in that much effort and instead some others are like took them like what I think all the time that people miss. The point is that even if you see someone that is doing a video that in your opinion doesn't take that much time, maybe it took them 12 years to figure it out how to make that video, right? And at the beginning of their career, maybe they were doing like, you know, two views, right. And not making any money. Maybe for TikTok it's different, but definitely for YouTube, right. When we ran our own creator economy report, we found out that the majority of the people making a good amount of money, right? So it's not a game changer money, right. But something that it's like, you know, would be the equivalent of a good salary. It took them an average of six years to get to that point. And in the, in the early, like the initial six years, majority of the people didn't see a dime. So, you know, like, not just because now you're making the money. Used to be, you know, like ashamed to do that because it took you so much, right, to figure it out to, to do a certain type of videos, how to create a community and so on. So again, I think that it's easier just to, you know, point to certain people and be like, oh, these are the creators that are making millions. As you said, there are so many good examples, right, of content creators and influencers working on, you know, actually interesting and important aspects in life and society. So agree with you. Like again, there is, there is so much to do in the narrative space and also how media sometimes are picturing, right, all the influencer marketing in a negative way and start wrapping up on the episode. What else does like, you know, is exciting you lately either in the, in the industry or something that I didn't ask you today that you love to share with us.

We're seeing these platforms take the creator economy and creators a little bit more seriously. It's probably not as fast as we would like or immediate, but we're making real progress in the industry. Like even YouTube launching ad revenue share for shorts, regardless of how we feel about it. Now it's better than nothing, and they're going to find ways to improve it. And so I think that plus the narrative that we just talked about starting to shift a little bit more is really exciting for the industry. Taking it into the mainstream does a lot of things that historically haven't been available to creators. It has ripple effects beyond what we just might think about. I can give you an example. So any business can typically go get financing, go get a loan, whatever. Right. In order to expand their business, run their business, they need to hire people to do a thing, whatever. Creators, because they aren't traditionally viewed as like, legitimate businesses, they don't have access to those kinds of opportunities historically. But what we're seeing today is a lot of these companies like Carrot and Linflow and others are providing kind of these financing opportunities for creators that haven't traditionally been available to them. And that might be a small thing, and that might not apply to all creators, but it's a sign of the industry shifting towards more legitimacy than has previously been afforded to it. And I think that things like that are a sign that we're taking that narrative and we're taking the creator economy, that narrative that we talked about, we're taking it in the right direction.

Do you have an idea, more or less, of, like, what is gonna do if it is, like, gonna be fast process since, like, every day there is or every week there's a news about social media changing things, or do you think it is still gonna take time? Because it's a combination of technical gaps plus behavioral, you know, like changes in each different society. Also because something is happening in the US but it's different from Europe, it's different from China, it's different from Indonesia. Right. Certain countries are actually better when it comes to treating content creators. For example. Do we have an idea there?

Yeah. I think it's a mix of the technical work that it requires to build out these new economic models and then these distribution platforms, they're businesses too. So they have to figure out how to make these economic models work for them as well. We also see differences in the types of models that tend to work well. And one example is Livestream. Yeah. Outside of gaming, it hasn't, you know, Twitch and gaming, it hasn't really caught on in the same way that it has in China and Southeast Asia, where Livestream is everywhere. People spend a ton of time on it and people are making billions of dollars off of Livestream in Western markets. It's been challenging for that medium to break outside of a couple different niches. But I think that is going to change and that's also exciting. But ultimately, I think the most exciting thing is the shift that's driven by these technological changes is going to require a lot more relationship building, audience building and authenticity when it comes to finding your audience and providing value to them and building a relationship with them and figuring out as a creator, how can you solve their pain points and needs, what can you do to help them? And I think shifting back towards that being a little bit more important than a race to the bottom for clicks and views is a good thing for the industry overall. Yeah.

Especially on the long term.

Right.

Because it's easy to fix something on short term. Right. Just, yeah. Little feature here, some money there. Right. But we already saw in the past that can actually backfire. Right. I won't say majority of the times, but it happened. Right. So I think that now after a little bit of fight between social media and different platforms, I'm pretty sure that they're going to figure out that they cannot just come out with like patches. Right. And short fixes. That doesn't work on the long term, I would say. Right.

Yeah. I think that the challenge with platforms providing these monetization models is one, they always want to take a cut. Two, as a creator, it becomes easier to take one piece of content and make it work for a variety of mediums. So take one 30 minute YouTube video, cut it down for a one minute short form video, take the transcript, clean it up, make it a blog post. You can create lots of different content for different types of mediums. But these platforms that are the big distribution platforms, they want kind of a walled garden experience. But creators are increasingly realizing like, I need to be multi platform to reach all these audiences. And so you might have YouTube, like have a membership or a paywalled video on YouTube and then on Twitter you have Twitter blue and on Instagram you have like a slightly different form of the same thing. And as a creator, like how do you manage that? And so I think this, it's going to become important for creators to own those different monetization mediums as opposed to relying on the distribution platforms to build those. Because the incentives of these distribution platforms in the incentives of creators are not necessarily always in line.

Absolutely. Yeah, I can see why you say that on the multi, like across different social media also ownership. Right. Of their own community where possible. Because if not, you are always sort of like, you know, having to do with algorithms or you know, end of the funnel. Right. So you have your people following you and only a little percentage is going to see you. So I understand totally why you say that. Fantastic. Well, I think we had like a lot of interesting point of discussion, so thank you so much for joining me today for sharing more of these and also wanted to say good luck with the new launch of the new tools. Kajabi. I'm curious to see them when they're going to be live.

Yeah, I'll send you the link. You can share it if you if you want, but definitely try them out. Let us know what you think. It's very early stages. There is so much potential for how these tools can help make creators lives easier. When we talked before about how do you manage those two things, I think AI is a technological advance that helps you manage the business part of being a creator much more efficiently. And I think that is an exciting thing for creators. It's not just generating content, it's generating insights, finding audience, helping cut up content for different distribution platforms which you used to have to do all manually. So I think it's an exciting time to be a creator.

Perfect. Can't wait to see that. Thank you so much again for joining me today. This was the Influence Factor by the Influencer Marketing Factory and I'm going to see you in the next episode.