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Speaker 1: Welcome to Strictly Business, Variety's weekly podcasts featuring conversations with

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Speaker 1: industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. I'm

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Speaker 1: Cynthia Lyttleton, co editor in chief of Variety Today. My

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Speaker 1: guests are a collection of people who are knee deep

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Speaker 1: in shaping and growing the business of the creator economy.

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Speaker 1: On this episode, you'll hear from seven people who I

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Speaker 1: met on June twenty second at VidCon in Anaheim, California.

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Speaker 1: VidCon is one of the largest mainstream social media fan conventions.

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Speaker 1: It was started by John Green and Hank Green, two

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Speaker 1: titans of the Realm. It has been owned by Paramount

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Speaker 1: Global since twenty eighteen. I went into this year's convention

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Speaker 1: with the goal of connecting with street level entrepreneurs who

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Speaker 1: are focused on making a living in the world of

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Speaker 1: social media. I scouted out a mix of companies who

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Speaker 1: were active on the floor of the Anaheim Convention Center,

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Speaker 1: but these were all cold calls. Nothing was planned in advance,

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Speaker 1: and I got very lucky. The seven people who came

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Speaker 1: to my microphone were uniformly good representatives for their ventures.

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Speaker 1: They were passionate about their hustle. Talking to Nathan Umberto

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Speaker 1: Annette Echo and others about where they're finding opportunity says

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Speaker 1: a lot about how influencers and creators are actually banking income.

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Speaker 1: The companies represented are involved in distribution, technology and visual effects,

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Speaker 1: e commerce, marketing and promotion, and matchmaking between brands and influencers. Now,

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Speaker 1: I'll let my seven guests introduce themselves and their companies.

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Speaker 2: My name is Umberto Farias and the copeny name is

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Speaker 2: fan Hero. We provide a technology for brands and creators

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Speaker 2: to capture up law, managed, distribute and monetize video.

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Speaker 3: Class My name is Jeff Ruby. The company name is Streamyard.

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Speaker 4: Streamard is going to allow you to have the highest

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Speaker 4: quality video stable as well as easy to use interface

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Speaker 4: to quickly stream to all platforms and gain higher engagement.

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Speaker 5: My name is Atkle and our product is called the

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Speaker 5: Pismotic Keyboard. Our product he's a super cool keyboard app.

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Speaker 6: My name is Mike Diaz. Mogle Moves is a company

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Speaker 6: that was started by a consec creator named Ludwig who

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Speaker 6: started it to make merch for himself and a small

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Speaker 6: group of his friends.

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Speaker 7: My name is Anett Lapham and I work with deep Motion.

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Speaker 7: We are an AI technology company. And we specialize in

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Speaker 7: doing AI motion capture.

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Speaker 8: Matt Gray, I'm with Isaiah. I'm our AVP of marketing.

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Speaker 8: Isaiah is one of the first in the influencer marketing space.

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Speaker 8: We've been doing this for seventeen years and so we

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Speaker 8: match brands with influential creators.

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Speaker 9: My name is Nathan and I'm a growth marketing manager

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Speaker 9: for my Shop is a company under a dhgate that

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Speaker 9: allows any content creators to create a sort of like

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Speaker 9: a storefront.

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Speaker 3: Anyone can build a store.

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Speaker 9: And make it like a personalized extension of their brand,

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Speaker 9: select favorite products that they enjoy or accept like recommendations

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Speaker 9: from our technology.

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Speaker 1: You don't want to miss the discussion about how the

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Speaker 1: creator economy works and where it's going. That's all coming

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Speaker 1: up after the break, and we're back with more from

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Speaker 1: foot soldiers of the creator economy. Anyone who spends a

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Speaker 1: day on their feet at a conference hawking products has

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Speaker 1: to master the sixty second pitch. As each of my

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Speaker 1: seven interviewees explained how their companies functioned, I learned more

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Speaker 1: about how the creator economy works.

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Speaker 2: The key to what we offer is we put the

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Speaker 2: creator at this center of everything they do, so instead

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Speaker 2: of working for a platform such as YouTube and or TikTok.

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Speaker 2: Within Hero, the creator is at the center, So the

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Speaker 2: platform is theirs, the data is theirs, and they are

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Speaker 2: primarily in full control over how they monetize. So they

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Speaker 2: have a seat at the table and say I want

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Speaker 2: to monetize by selling content or through advertisement or by

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Speaker 2: doing live events, right, and I also own the data

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Speaker 2: in connection to every visitor and member in my platform,

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Speaker 2: so in a way they become their own publishers.

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Speaker 4: You can turn on your phone, your tablet, your camera

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Speaker 4: and go live, whether that's live, pre recorder or semilve,

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Speaker 4: put it into the stream Yard platform at overlays bottom thirds,

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Speaker 4: and by the click of one button, be out to

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Speaker 4: multiple platforms all the same time. It's a free platform

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Speaker 4: as well. And then there's a couple different levels of

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Speaker 4: self serve plans which allow for different features such as

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Speaker 4: multi cameras, multiday donations, and then there's all the way

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Speaker 4: into like an enterprise program that likes of a variety

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Speaker 4: or someone would buy for their creators, their marketing departments.

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Speaker 3: Content creators.

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Speaker 5: Actually, we see ourselves as a content creation keyboard. It's

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Speaker 5: not just we provide our users with a bunch of

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Speaker 5: text rd funds all kinds of stuff. We want to

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Speaker 5: encourage our users to express themselves by creating all kinds

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Speaker 5: of keyboard contents. They can diy their their keyboard theme.

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Speaker 5: They can also diy their text art and we are

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Speaker 5: going to have more DIY functions to have our users

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Speaker 5: uh to to express themselves via our app.

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Speaker 7: Well, if you think about motion capture, you think about suits,

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Speaker 7: dots on your faces, really expensive hardware, right, and that's

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Speaker 7: not affordable or accessible to like most most creators, and

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Speaker 7: so we ended up using our technology to create this

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Speaker 7: service based entirely in a web browser. You upload a

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Speaker 7: two D video, any video, no hardware anything required, and

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Speaker 7: is it into a three DY animation for you.

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Speaker 8: There's a couple of ways people do that. They either

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Speaker 8: work with us unmanaged services will take care of the

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Speaker 8: campaigns from start to finish, or over the years we've

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Speaker 8: built out the platforms and software to help us do that.

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Speaker 8: We give access to the brands to be able to

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Speaker 8: do that themselves through our platforms in the network that

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Speaker 8: we've built our Idea dot Com our marketplace, so you

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Speaker 8: can have a few as five hundred followers to be

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Speaker 8: able to get a profile and find brands because a

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Speaker 8: lot of brands do want to work with micro nano

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Speaker 8: influencers because they have those loyal followings, people that are

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Speaker 8: really engaged, and if you get enough of those at scale,

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Speaker 8: you can get the same amount you would add a

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Speaker 8: larger a larger following. So brands someone to use our software.

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Speaker 8: This is a subscription fee to be able to work

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Speaker 8: with the influencers on the managed services side where we

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Speaker 8: do it for them. It's a program where we charge

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Speaker 8: for the campaign and pay out the influencers and so

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Speaker 8: you know that's where money's made on that part.

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Speaker 9: Thank you. Thanks for d gate, like thirty four million

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Speaker 9: listings available for creators to choose.

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Speaker 3: From, and it goes anywhere from the hell.

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Speaker 9: Fitness, fashion accessories are the biggest ones, but sometimes it's.

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Speaker 3: Like kitchen hacks, home decorps.

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Speaker 9: I mean I can go on and on for hours,

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Speaker 9: but yeah, those are the big, the main ones, I

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Speaker 9: would say.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, So we have a couple of events. Last year

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Speaker 6: we did chess Boxing, which was an event that was

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Speaker 6: here in LA in December, and then we have a

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Speaker 6: lot of events lined up for this year. I'm not

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Speaker 6: really sure if we can say everything we're doing we

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Speaker 6: have a super Smatch Brothers tournament a tappening next month.

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Speaker 6: We have another chess boxing event. I think we have

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Speaker 6: various events.

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Speaker 1: Please explain chess boxing.

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Speaker 6: So, chess boxing is a sport, very niche. You play

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Speaker 6: one minute of chess and then you do one minute

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Speaker 6: rounds of boxing until the opponent is either checkmated in

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Speaker 6: the minute in that timeframe or knocked out during the

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Speaker 6: boxing portion. So you have to be good at both

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Speaker 6: chess and boxing to play the sport. This white and

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Speaker 6: black hoodies those are the chess boxing hoodies. They come

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Speaker 6: with with metal chains instead of the instead of the

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Speaker 6: like string. The drawstrings with both have little boxing little

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Speaker 6: boxing charms on the bottom. Yeah for the for the

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Speaker 6: boxing hoodie and then for the chest hoodie, it has

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Speaker 6: little chess pieces on the on the ends. Those are

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Speaker 6: that's probably our most successful item in one of my favorites.

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Speaker 1: So my next question is what are the driving forces

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Speaker 1: in the marketplace that guide your strategy. We'll hear from

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Speaker 1: Nathan of my shop a Net of Deep Motion, Umberto

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Speaker 1: of fan Hero, and Mike of Mogul Moves.

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Speaker 3: So this is what we call like social commerce.

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Speaker 9: And right now, the three main problems is like the

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Speaker 9: link sharing is an organizational nightmare. The payments usually every

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Speaker 9: platform pays the same and it's kind of hard. And

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Speaker 9: also the art of choosing the next product you're going

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Speaker 9: to talk about, it's usually a guest work.

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Speaker 3: We want to help you.

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Speaker 9: We have like AI technology that will not analyze content

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Speaker 9: from platforms in Asia, from TikTok et, cetera, and we

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Speaker 9: give you recommended trends depending on your niche. So like,

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Speaker 9: if you're a makeup creator, we'll give you some makeup

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Speaker 9: tools that are viral in Asia or viral other regions

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Speaker 9: of the world that you should maybe consider check out

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Speaker 9: and make content about.

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Speaker 7: So we're actually zeroing in on about a million people

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Speaker 7: right now having signed up. Yeah, so we've been around

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Speaker 7: for about four years now. It was actually a product

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Speaker 7: that was developed from Covid because of COVID realities and

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Speaker 7: we had to really pivot our technology and our business

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Speaker 7: model in order to really address a kind of hurting

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Speaker 7: segment of users who couldn't go to the studios, who

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Speaker 7: didn't have access to this type of technology during that

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Speaker 7: time period. And so it's really evolved since then.

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Speaker 2: We can see the shift in the market right We

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Speaker 2: work with a lot of traditional media companies who are

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Speaker 2: actually evolving into be more sort of gravitating more towards

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Speaker 2: the created economy. So first it just makes up a

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Speaker 2: ton of sense, and we just actually notice and realize

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Speaker 2: that there's significant demand out there for this.

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Speaker 6: It's all mostly the intuition out of Ludwig. A lot

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Speaker 6: of stuff that we do is guided by things he's

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Speaker 6: personally interested in, and I think that mixed with whatever

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Speaker 6: sense of business he has. I mean, I'm not in

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Speaker 6: his brain, but he seems to have done really well

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Speaker 6: for himself.

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Speaker 1: What do you think it takes to be competitive in

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Speaker 1: your specific sector? That was another thing I wanted to know.

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Speaker 1: We'll hear from Jeff of Streamyard, Mike of Mogul Moves,

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Speaker 1: and a net of deep Motion.

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Speaker 3: I think it is tightening a bit.

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Speaker 4: But I think the likes of Streamyard some of these

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Speaker 4: other platforms that allow because we're not competing with the

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Speaker 4: YouTube and the twitches of the world, it's you're using

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Speaker 4: our platform, So it looks more professional when you're producing

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Speaker 4: your contents on those.

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Speaker 3: Platforms, right, So I think it's a differentiator.

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Speaker 4: Right, I could be in my basement with the phone

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Speaker 4: or I could be having very high quality video with

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Speaker 4: my branding, call to actions, brand deals, things like that.

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Speaker 6: Recently, we started branching out into event production and we've

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Speaker 6: been kind of leaning more into that, and that is

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Speaker 6: most of pretty much what we do, and then we've

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Speaker 6: kind of branched down to other companies. There's a another

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Speaker 6: big more like a like a bigger arm to the

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Speaker 6: production side of things, which is what we've been leaning into,

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Speaker 6: called off brand.

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Speaker 1: And yes, wow, but it's so I mean, you're sort

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Speaker 1: of answering my question.

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Speaker 3: It seems like you started.

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Speaker 1: In one area but found opportunity in another.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, So we were thinking about the idea of like

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Speaker 6: adding on more clients what that looked like, and I

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Speaker 6: think we ultimately decided that like the scale up to

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Speaker 6: have a company that's profitable that like is just making

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Speaker 6: work for.

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Speaker 3: Other people is.

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Speaker 6: Only only really like profitable in a in a meaningful

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Speaker 6: way at a very high number, which is what we

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Speaker 6: didn't want to do.

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Speaker 3: So this is more of like a.

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Speaker 6: We make kind of like more boutique esque like cut

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Speaker 6: and show items for a small number of creators. Now

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Speaker 6: that's like, so that's what we do.

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Speaker 7: So up until this point, we've been working primarily with

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Speaker 7: game developers and inde developers, so we have video game production,

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Speaker 7: and so we decided to bring our technology to content creators.

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Speaker 7: We thought it was very impactful to be able to

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Speaker 7: enable people to really enter a digital world, create digital content,

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Speaker 7: turn people into digital characters, and be able to create

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Speaker 7: impactful content.

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Speaker 1: What is it about your software your technology? That is

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Speaker 1: what's the spelling point of your technology?

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Speaker 7: The silling point of our technology is easy access to

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Speaker 7: three D animation. You don't have to be an animator,

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Speaker 7: you don't have to be a professional. Anybody with any

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Speaker 7: type of any type of experience level can easily create

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Speaker 7: three D animations and enter digital worlds, whether it be Roadblocks, Fortnite,

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Speaker 7: or anything in VR. Vocal Bar users currently are still

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Speaker 7: a developers, game developers. This is a new group that

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Speaker 7: we are trying to talk to you right now. We

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Speaker 7: actually recently just developed a really accessible mobile application or

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Speaker 7: a mobile experience rather so that so that content creators

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Speaker 7: can easily use it and they don't have to go

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Speaker 7: through you know a lot of you know, red tape

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Speaker 7: in order to get access to the hypotechnology.

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Speaker 1: How do individual creators manage to build meaningful audience in

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Speaker 1: a sea of options. This is something I've wondered about

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Speaker 1: Jeff of Streamyard, Matt of Isaiah, and Nathan of my

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Speaker 1: Shop way In.

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Speaker 4: I think it's better to find the platform that matches

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Speaker 4: your audience.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 4: So, if I'm putting out content about sales, right, I

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Speaker 4: probably want to be on LinkedIn doing that.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 4: If I'm putting things out about gaming, Twitch is a

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Speaker 4: big one, right, So I think there's somebody to be

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Speaker 4: said about finding your niche versus kind of the peanut

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Speaker 4: butter spread across everything. I think it's nice that the

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Speaker 4: platform allows you to go to multiple at once, but personally,

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Speaker 4: I think you should be putting out content based on

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Speaker 4: what lapform you're looking to string to.

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Speaker 8: A lot of creators, they do have like their core

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Speaker 8: place where they are and where their audience is, whether

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Speaker 8: that's Twitch, Instagram. A lot of times it becomes a

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Speaker 8: value add or it's just an additional part. Like well, also,

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Speaker 8: I'm a pretty big following on Twitter. Okay, let's do

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Speaker 8: some posts there. But when we look at the campaigns,

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Speaker 8: we know where the audiences are and go to that

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Speaker 8: creator because they're there, they have that audience there, so

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Speaker 8: that the contents authentic because that's what they're creating and

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Speaker 8: where they are and it all comes together.

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Speaker 9: So fever, it's digital marning. Like we reach out to

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Speaker 9: creators like a lot of creators have their emails and

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Speaker 9: their bios, or we can just direct message them on Instagram.

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Speaker 9: We also work with agencies that are connected to creators

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Speaker 9: that introduce us, And we have creators that heard about

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Speaker 9: their creative friend working with my shop and they sometimes

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Speaker 9: go to us they want to give it a try,

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Speaker 9: or they want to work on an event with us

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Speaker 9: or a product with us. So yeah, it depends.

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Speaker 1: Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back with more from

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Speaker 1: VidCon twenty twenty three, and we're back with more on

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Speaker 1: how the creator economy works. From foot Soldiers in the

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Speaker 1: Trenches at VidCon twenty twenty three. You work in a

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Speaker 1: sector defined by relentless technological change. How much does that

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Speaker 1: drive opportunities for your business? Umberto fan hero Jeff of

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Speaker 1: stream Yard and Echo of face Moji Keyboard consider the question.

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Speaker 2: So, I think that one of the key aspects of

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Speaker 2: this is just ease of publishing contents and making it

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Speaker 2: available and monetizing. So we've seen some amazing success stories

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Speaker 2: how we have creators now make it as much as

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Speaker 2: eight figures a month through the platform. And they started

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Speaker 2: as a one man woman shop and the continuum persevered

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Speaker 2: and if they became like almost like a media empire.

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Speaker 4: Right because it's so easy we all have phones in

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Speaker 4: our pockets or in front of a computer, you can

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Speaker 4: really go a lot of different ways with it. We're

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Speaker 4: seeing big businesses look into the creator economy a lot

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Speaker 4: more than we had in the last couple of years.

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Speaker 4: So it's not just the likes of you know, someone

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Speaker 4: in their room streaming a video game. It's the likes

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Speaker 4: of big companies understanding of how can we create content

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Speaker 4: that's very high quality, high engagement to put out our

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Speaker 4: brand In their case, I think it's it's already big

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Speaker 4: within the consumer space.

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Speaker 3: It's very well known. I think that the next move

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Speaker 3: is to how.

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Speaker 4: Do we put this in the hands of marketers and

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Speaker 4: content creators at larger companies.

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Speaker 3: We are a global app.

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Speaker 5: We have a lot of different users from different places

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Speaker 5: around a world. But you know, inn I says, we

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Speaker 5: are beginning to grow our user base right now. We

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Speaker 5: hope we can see a big user girls in the future.

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Speaker 5: We want to communicate more with our audience target audience,

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Speaker 5: and we want to know what they want from keyboard,

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Speaker 5: what they want from their apps.

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Speaker 1: This is also interesting. But at the end of the

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Speaker 1: week or a quarter or tax year, can you really

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Speaker 1: make a living as an influencer or a creator? Nathan

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Speaker 1: of my shop gives me a straight answer.

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Speaker 9: I wouldn't say you can make a living even though

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Speaker 9: you're like a small creator.

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Speaker 3: I don't want to sell a dream where it's not.

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Speaker 9: Our community is. It goes anywhere from established creators making

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Speaker 9: a good percentage of their earnings from my shop to

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Speaker 9: the college students who makes a little bit of money

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Speaker 9: or who's trying to build a resume, Like we have

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Speaker 9: a lot of business school students that are trying to

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Speaker 9: learn how to sell, how to talk about a product

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Speaker 9: on a video or on a live stream. So really

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Speaker 9: it's everyone is welcome, But our current community is very

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Speaker 9: a vast array of profiles, going from like the teenage

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Speaker 9: college students to creators in their forties fifties, Like, it's

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Speaker 9: a very wide spectrum.

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Speaker 1: There's no going to VidCon in twenty twenty three without

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Speaker 1: hearing those two little letters on everyone's lips. AI here's

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Speaker 1: our legally obligated section on the rise of generative AI

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Speaker 1: with echo of face, Moji, keyboard and a net of

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Speaker 1: deep motion.

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Speaker 5: Customation is one of our main feature and while the

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Speaker 5: feature that checks a lot of users was but also

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Speaker 5: I think phones text art are also the features that

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Speaker 5: attracts users most and recently we are going to have

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Speaker 5: our actually we already have it our AI features. You

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Speaker 5: can use our app to write your captions, write your bios,

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Speaker 5: given your emails.

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Speaker 3: By our app.

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Speaker 7: Even recently, we know there's been a lot of talk

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Speaker 7: about generative AI technologies. We see it as a tool.

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Speaker 7: People can use it as a tool, even animators. We

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Speaker 7: work directly with animators and they use it as a

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Speaker 7: tool to really cut out a lot of that hard

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Speaker 7: work that can now focus on the elements of their

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Speaker 7: craft that can involve like polishing and make is really

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Speaker 7: you know, refined. But your to your to your other

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Speaker 7: question as to where we're going generative AI. We're about

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Speaker 7: to announce a new product of ours, generative AI Animation,

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Speaker 7: and so we're you know, if we think about how

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Speaker 7: easy it would be to do, uh, just input text

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Speaker 7: alone and create animation. That's kind of the direction where

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Speaker 7: we're going, so we'll be excited to talk more about

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Speaker 7: that about a month or so.

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Speaker 1: Let's go back to the human element. What was the

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Speaker 1: spark that led to the launch of your company. Here's

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Speaker 1: Mike of Mogul moves a net of deep motion, Umberto

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Speaker 1: of fan Hero and Matt of Isaiah.

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Speaker 6: I'm one of the first employees of the company. I

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Speaker 6: when when Ludwig get started, I was shipping his merch

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Speaker 6: out of his garage. Uh So seeing the growth that's

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Speaker 6: had now is yeah, it's pretty uh pretty surprising.

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Speaker 7: The study was founded by Kevin He He is a

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Speaker 7: early engineer. He came from places like Blizzard Roadblocks and yeah,

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Speaker 7: he founded the company back in twenty fourteen and it's

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Speaker 7: been developing ever since.

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Speaker 1: And what's the size of it in terms of like

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Speaker 1: staff right now.

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Speaker 7: We have about fifteen people and it's a global company,

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Speaker 7: so headquarters are in the Bay Area, but we have

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Speaker 7: team across team you know Poland and China and the EU.

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Speaker 2: So we were I come from the software industry and

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Speaker 2: I own a software agency before, and we started to

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Speaker 2: have a lot of creators coming to us asking us

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Speaker 2: to build our own platforms because they wanted to be

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Speaker 2: in charged. They wanted to be in control and they

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Speaker 2: wanted to set the rules. So that happened once, twice

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Speaker 2: and three times, and then we visually said, O, it's

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Speaker 2: time that we put this together and be there because

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Speaker 2: there's a lot of demand for this. So we put

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Speaker 2: this coming together around five or six years ago and

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Speaker 2: it became what it is dead.

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Speaker 1: What did the folks behind Isaiah c. Seventeen years ago?

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Speaker 8: Yeah, they just saw the opportunities people that were building

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Speaker 8: audiences in a new a new era. And at that point,

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Speaker 8: the original company was called paper Post and was focused

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Speaker 8: on bloggers and it was a really different time there was.

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Speaker 8: It was basically at a time where bloggers were coming out.

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Speaker 8: It was the future of future of journalism is what

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Speaker 8: a lot of the what people were looking at like

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Speaker 8: citizen journalists. So the idea of bringing money into the

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Speaker 8: influence into that space, right, you know, we'll get the

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Speaker 8: kind of well and the idea of paying bloggers to

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Speaker 8: write about product really shook people and it was there

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Speaker 8: was there was that we had to overcome that. I

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Speaker 8: think we see that even with like today with AI

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Speaker 8: where it's really shaking people up. But it's like no,

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Speaker 8: if you use it right and what what what it

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Speaker 8: could be and how it can help and like where

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Speaker 8: it's going, you know, And so that's sort of like

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Speaker 8: what where it all started Prasia. Yeah, and but obviously

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Speaker 8: there weren't any of the social networks at that time.

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Speaker 8: But that's we stay agnostic to the platforms. It's really

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Speaker 8: just about the core creators and wherever they are and

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Speaker 8: wherever their audiences are and will go and be a

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Speaker 8: part of it.

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Speaker 1: Matt's experience going back low those many years to two

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Speaker 1: thousand and six offers good perspective. He also made a

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Speaker 1: strong point to me that I think is a good

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Speaker 1: one to close on. It's a reminder that while the

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Speaker 1: creator economy is very different from mainstream entertainment, at its core,

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Speaker 1: it's not so different. It's a business of hits and

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Speaker 1: it's a business of fans.

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Speaker 3: Well.

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Speaker 8: I think being at VidCon is my first time being

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Speaker 8: here and just seeing the like genuine love that the

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Speaker 8: fans have for their for the creators. They feel like

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Speaker 8: they know them, and you see that people lining up

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Speaker 8: to meet them and just it's it makes it real

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Speaker 8: in the sense of like, this is what's happening online

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Speaker 8: every single day, and we get to see it in

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Speaker 8: person and just how these connections and how powerful that is,

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Speaker 8: and what a draw that is, and how important these

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Speaker 8: creators are to the people that follow them and seeing

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Speaker 8: that it just makes influencer marketing make complete sense to

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Speaker 8: be able to tap into that, and like I said,

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Speaker 8: champion the creators. That's what we're all about. So if

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Speaker 8: we're able to get a creator to do what they

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Speaker 8: do for a living and make money at it, then

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Speaker 8: it's a great thing.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Be sure to leave us a review

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Speaker 3: In b C, T P, t TERA