Creator Spotlight 🔴

Gambling sponsors fund a great deal of the sports media industry today. @joonlee is betting he can build an indie sports media business without them. We spoke about it on today's @creator__spot:

fun fact: ~25% of creator spotlight subscribers read every single issue each month @creator__spot has nearly 400K active readers 🤯

3 moves for the next decade of content: 1. Community over audience. 2. Focus on building trust first; monetize later. 3. Know your arbitrage. Lean into it. @dipietromedia on the @creator__spot pod today. You know him from Hampton, The Hustle, and The Motley Fool.

Billy Parks is a venture parnter on Slow Ventures' $60m Creator Fund and today's guest on the @creator__spot pod. We spoke about creators as founders, red flags in potential investments, and creators building excellent non-media businesses. Go listen wherever you get pods.

An event planner made paper flowers as a special request for a wedding over a decade ago. She began making YouTube videos teaching others to make them; a podcast; digital courses; a book; branded beers. It's now a six-figure business. Quynh Nguyen on @creator__spot today!

@TanyoCopyTG 👀

They have an entire newsletter built around case studies for a key audience segment (creators). While most companies aren't afraid of "upsetting" their audience by emailing them too much, beehiiv takes the opposite approach. They built @creator__spot into a 2x per week newsletter which shares: - Case studies every Tuesday by creators who are using the platform to grow and monetize their newsletters - In-depth analysis every Friday, which gives helpful tips to creators

@beehiiv is the only company that I know that's doing this:

Stefan von Imhof of Alts, on the @creator__spot pod today. A 130,000-subscriber newsletter group with a paid community of nearly 1,000 members paying between $500 to $10,000 a year to join a network of people investing in everything from K-pop royalties to farmland deals.

@FZierer @creator__spot great pod tbh

On the @creator__spot pod today, Jonathan Hunt, VP of HubSpot media. Spoke about their approach to acquiring creator-led media brands, what he's learned about audience development from a career at companies including Vice, Vox, Nat Geo ... and more.

Read it here! creatorspotlight.com/p/defensible-p…

Mimicry, remixing, and plagiarism are all features of the creator economy. They are not bugs. Platforms make commodities of most ideas — speed and distribution comprise the delta. Wrote about plagiarism and building a "defensible personal brand" for last week's @creator__spot

Watch here or listen on any of the pod platforms: youtube.com/watch?v=HA9o3u… pod.link/1734648463/epi…

First month at @creator__spot doing @beehiiv Top 4: 6,450 total subscribers referred. We're rotating it for August. I'll pick one newsletter from the replies. Pitch me!

On YouTube, or search The Creator Spotlight Podcast on any of the apps. youtube.com/watch?v=whzj_2…

There are ~650k people in the Wichita area. 31k subscribe to @LandonHuslig's local newsletter, which brought in over $100k last year. Landon is a perfect pod guest: sharp, excited, transparent. An excellent edition to the @creator__spot local media canon. Full link below.

Read it here: creatorspotlight.com/p/spectrum-of-…

"Influencer" is a dead term, totally supplanted by "creator." More useful now to think of "influence" as something wielded, or "influencing" as a verb. Great work by @_NatmPerez in today's Creator Spotlight breaking it down. Link below.

Today on the @creator__spot pod, Nathan May — one of the few most active paid growth providers for the newsletter industry since launching his agency at the top of 2024. Full disclosure: CS is a client; I stand by his work.

Full episode here and on all the pod platforms @creator__spot youtube.com/watch?v=tf-QQp…