Honoring Your Worth As a Creator

Community building is hard work — not a casual hobby.

If you’re thinking about building a community, consider this your warning. ;)

If you’re already a community leader, you know this better than anyone!

Whether you facilitate a large community of contributors or create content for a large community of fans, the key to good community management is being as present in, as engaged with, and as available to your community as possible. While this may sound simple, it’s far from easy. As a community leader, you have to wear a lot of hats. From day one, you’re tasked with drumming up interest in your community, getting to know your members on a personal level, producing and/or engaging with content, creating community guidelines, rewarding good behavior, addressing bad behavior, setting a shining example, and keeping morale high… all at the same time! You have to remain empathetic towards people whose lives and circumstances you might not fully understand, while also acting as an intransigent enforcer of the rules when bad behavior arises. It requires a great deal of emotional intelligence and emotional labor.

And you’re pretty much always on the clock. When you have community members all around the world, your community doesn’t sleep when you do. While it’s impossible to be present for every single interaction, you should always remain aware of what’s being done and said in your community so that you can quickly and firmly correct bad behavior.

Get paid for your hard work — or someone else will.

Sounds like a lot, right?

It is, and you deserve to be paid for it.

Here’s the deal: Your community is already being monetized. If you’re not making money off of your community, somebody else is. If you don’t take ownership over your content, someone else will. The social media giants make billions of dollars every year off the backs of community leaders by running targeted ads in your communities. And even though you are the ones making sure your communities stay safe and profitable for those platforms, they don’t give you a share of the ad revenue… which means your hard work merely subsidizes the wealth of social media billionaires.

At Mesh, we believe that community work shouldn’t be charity work. That’s why we’re the only platform that shares in-feed ad revenue with creators like you. Making money off of ads isn’t ‘selling out’ or ‘selling your soul.’ It’s claiming ownership over what should’ve been yours all along.

Get paid now — don’t wait to win the lottery.

The reason the major social platforms have always excluded creators from indirect monetization is simple: Ad money is easy, copious, and powerful. They know they will make enormous sums of money if they keep it all for themselves, which is why they’ve never done the right thing and divvied up the pie. Ad revenue comprises the bulk of Facebook’s income, for instance, while hardworking creators on Facebook are left with very few and very nebulous options for monetizing their content on the platform. That’s why so many creators have had to directly monetize their content on other platforms in order to make a living. While moving your followers to new platforms and charging them directly for your content is way more work (and oftentimes far less scalable and lucrative) than passively accepting payouts from the in-feed ads that show up next to your content, the social giants have left creators with little choice but to turn to direct monetization.

In recent years, the social giants have recognized not only the bad optics of not paying creators, but also the fact that they run the risk of losing users to the newer digital platforms that allow them to charge their fans for content. Social platforms such as Twitter and Instagram that don’t allow creators to put content behind a paywall have watched many a creator build a massive audience on their platform, only to move that following over to a platform where they can meaningfully monetize it — such as OnlyFans, SubStack, or Patreon.

In an attempt to curb this exodus from their platforms, the social giants have rolled out new tools and programs that purport to right their previous wrongs by sharing their wealth with creators. For instance, many of the social giants have launched creator funds to reward users for sharing popular content on their platforms: TikTok has committed £231 million over the next 3 years to its Creator Fund. Just this summer, Facebook announced that it would allocate over $1 billion to creators by 2022. Until recently, Snapchat was offering $1 million per day for videos that went viral on the app. The YouTube Shorts fund will offer $100 million to creators of popular Shorts over the course of 2021-2022.

While those sums of money might sound generous, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the social giants’ annual revenue. Facebook made about $85 billion in 2020. YouTube made about $20 billion in 2020. TikTok made about $24 billion.

But that’s not the only problem with creator funds… The platforms are incredibly opaque when it comes to describing the criteria for receiving a payout, and they do not share exactly how much an individual creator can earn. This means that, as a creator, you have no idea how you can improve your odds of being chosen, nor how much you will be paid even if you are chosen! Waiting around to be offered money from a creator fund is like waiting around to win the lottery. It as unlikely as it is unpredictable.

Fortunately, the current creator economy offers more ways than ever for creators to monetize, so you’re not stuck fiddling with the social giants’ algorithms in an attempt to go viral. According to The New Yorker, $1.3 billion in investment funding was funneled into the creator economy between January and July of 2021, which is almost three times the amount of funding the creator economy received all year in 2020. So, creators, now’s your time to experiment with all the new tools at your disposal and find what works best for your business.

As the authors of the creator economy newsletter Means of Creation argue, “Rather than becoming attached to one specific persona, platform, or content-type, creators should cycle through different experiments to find a content and business model combination that resonates with their specific audience.” They refer to this as finding the right ‘creator-market fit.’ And at the end of the day, waiting around to win the creator-lottery is never going to be the best way to make a living… Use different platforms for different things. Monetize your content directly and indirectly. Diversify your income. Because Mesh is the first and only social platform that shares in-feed ad revenue with creators, you can indirectly and directly monetize on Mesh while also directly monetizing elsewhere. Win, win, win!

TLDR: Honoring your worth as a creator means getting paid for your hard work. You deserve it!