Help Creators Become Middle Class Citizen

How We Empower Underdogs at Spoon Radio

$ money earned/month by creator (Black: current, Pink: possibility)

• Middle class creator means creators being able to live off of creating content online without doing other things to make a living

Why we help creator middle class at Spoon Radio

Spoon Radio was born 6 years ago in South Korea when a small team of 6 people tried hundreds of different things. When it took off, they released digital currency stores where listeners can reward streamers by sending hearts 😍, claps 👏, even spaceships 🚀 to reach $90M/year in revenue. It was never easy, and we still figure things out everyday to make customers happy.

How Can We Increase the Creator Middle Class Population?

The aggregators such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are controlling what people can view. It’s impacting the world view of each digital citizen. Just to give you a simple example, I only see puppy photos on instagram. Kitties don’t exist in my internet world. Is Information discrepancy disappearing? Yes, in someway as long as you know what to search for. The attention discrepancy is massive when we passively consume digital content. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Content diversity can be easily disregarded when platforms want to display only what you are willing to pay attention to right now. On Spoon, top 1% of streamers are generating 50% of the revenue. As Li Jin noted in HBR, on Patreon, only 2% of creators made the federal minimum wage of $1,160 per month in 2017. On Spotify, artists need 3.5 million streams per year to achieve the annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker of $15,080, a fact that drives most musicians to supplement their earnings with touring and merchandise. In contrast, in America in 2016, 52% of adults lived in middle income households, with incomes ranging from $48,500 to $145,500. Due to this discrepancy, casual and part-time creators have to try really hard to grab users attention by copying what’s popular, and consistently pushing new content every day hoping today will be the day they get millions of following. It’s easier to give up after trying for months or years. So the question as a platform is, how can we help them to gain more attention? How can we help creators to be middle class citizen as a result?

* As Eugene Wei pointed out in 2020, I respect TikTok is doing a better job by detecting what can be the next viral hit in a few seconds with their algorithm across different countries.

How Part-time Creators Build More Fanbase

So how do part-time creators grow?

Stages of creators from Build for creators by Peter Yang

The simple answer- they keep at it. In other words, they post new content every single day. It’s easier said than done. My respect for them grows stronger as I talk to more of them. The biggest pain points are consistency and creativity. When it’s too lonely and depressing to do it alone, they look for support in their niche community to brainstorm and share tips and ideas. As you can see below, collaboration with fellow creators is a great way to become full time by sharing fan base to gain exposure as well as by creating interesting content together.

Creator’s hierarchy of needs from Build for Creators by Peter Yang

How we are helping creator middle class at Spoon

Creators know collaboration helps them grow fast. However, not all creators can live in the collab house.

Hype house and the LA tiktok mansion by NY Times

They need to feed their family and pay rent. Furthermore, collaboration is time-consuming as they have to find the one that works for their niche and schedule the time to do it and discuss ideas for the show.

Help creators to collaborate faster and easier

So we are creating a platform where creators meet like-minded creators to collaborate as fast and as easy as possible. The new platform is called rooftop. I’d love to hear feedback if you are building for creators, and if you have thoughts on how to help creator thrive. Sign up for early access here.

More Ways to Generate Revenue

We are also providing more revenue source to reward time and effort such as audio ads and subscription model. At Spoon, creators establish unique repertoire to encourage listeners to pay them, and interaction with them in an interesting way via virtual currency. For example, creators say, “ I’m hungry.” then some of fans send donuts, pineapple and a piece of cake stickers (converted by virtual currency). Thus, the type of creators who can make money on Spoon is very interactive with fans. We expect different type of creators will also thrive by adding monetary value to their time spent and the number of audience.

Expose Middle Class Creators in the Spoon Radio

We are also optimizing the home screen to introduce mid-level creators to gain traffic. We noticed that mid-level creators are not only generating more money but also engaging wider segment of listeners. In addition, machine learning is helping personalize listeners’ experience further. Connecting various type of content creators to more relevant listeners.

Again, sign up for early access at rooftop, the creator collaboration platform✌

Shinyoung is a Chief Product Officer at Spoon Radio and a EIR at 500 startups. DM her to discuss anything on creator economy, 0-to-1 product development, and leadership. We, human are wired to connect with each other to thrive. Sparks of new ideas by one person becomes reality with two.