Key insights about the creator economy from the CEO of ThoughtLeaders

Before becoming the founder and CEO of ThoughtLeaders, David Tintner was a developer, and co-founded a competitive intelligence SaaS platform, which was acquired by SimilarWeb. He then transitioned into content creation, founding Hacking UI, a blog that evolved into a successful podcast. Leveraging on his success, David capitalized on sponsor interest, and built ThoughtLeaders. The company uses extensive data to help brands and creators in their sponsorship campaigns. This bootstrapped venture attracted clients like Fetch Rewards and Monday.com, quadrupling in size within a year. Today, as ThoughtLeaders’ CEO, David remains an important figure in deciphering the dynamics of digital content sponsorships.

David recently sat down with Eitan Koter ??? for his podcast eCom Pulse. In his interview, David shares the journey of building ThoughtLeaders, and also talks about challenges and potential solutions in the digital content sponsorship space.

Here are a few of his insights:

What are the major challenges that brands face when sponsoring digital content? [12:17]?

[DAVID]“One of the biggest challenges is knowing if it's a good sponsorship for the brand and if the price that the creator wants is going to be valuable for the brand. Because in theory, every channel could be valuable or worth it for a brand at some price, right? If a creator says this is a dollar, it might be worth it. But the pricing is completely unstandardized in the creator sponsorship space. You can reach out to two virtually identical channels and they can give you prices that are miles apart. We help with understanding the price and gauging if it’s valuable. Look, it’s a negotiation between brands and creators. And the brands want to get performance for their ad. For a creator, they have valuable pieces of real estate within their content. And it's not their fault if the brand's landing page crashes or the brand's product is just not as good. So finding a middle ground between them both is not always easy. But we try to help both sides with data. Brands can analyze a creator's recent views to find common ground. Similarly, creators can justify their prices with data, showcasing the long-term value of their content. If you have data that shows that your content is really “evergreen”, meaning it will get a lot of views way after the 30-day mark, this is something that can help prove your worth.”

How do you see the future of revenue sources evolving for creators?? [26:00]?

[DAVID] “So I personally think that advertising is going to remain the biggest portion and the most important revenue source for content creators. And let’s talk about the alternative revenue sources for a moment: So you have paywalls, like Patreon or subscriptions, where essentially if you as my viewer pay me directly, as the content creator, then I will give you some new content or some special thing. Well, for me, this is kind of problematic on a global scale. I'm not suggesting that creators shouldn't do this, but I'm just saying if everyone did this, we'd live in a world where only if you're rich enough to pay for creators, you get the good content. Another income for creators is merchandise or making their own brands and selling the products. So merch is something you know, creators should definitely do. But how many shirts can you sell? This income stream is not gonna beat advertising. It can be a nice side source of income for some creators, but it's just not gonna be a bigger thing.?

Another alternative is that creators can make their own brands. So for example, a cooking creator can make a line of knives. Cool. All the people who are watching his content are probably going home and cooking themselves, and they can buy his knife. So, this can work, and again, I'm not saying don't do it, but is this for the vast majority of creators, is this going to become larger than advertising? No way. Because effectively what you're doing is you have to run the entire business:? the logistics, the product, the shipping. Everything. And I know there are companies that are helping creators do this, but you have to spin up a whole new product line, and then you still have to advertise it within your own content… And I find that for many creators, it might not make this whole logistics operation worth it. And just to point to a good example: MrBeast made his own chocolate, Feastables. And in almost every video he does now, he talks about Feastables. But he's still doing multi-million dollar brand deals per video for a completely different product. So I think advertising is going to be a really important revenue source for creators for a long time.”

You can read the full interview here and listen to the podcast here.