Desk Notes #2: What’s Wrong With the Creator Economy

And everything else that lies under the hype of this omnipresent term.

Welcome one and all to the second edition of Desk Notes, a weekly commentary column on writing, technology, and human behaviour. This goes out every Wednesday.

In this issue, we will delve deeper into “The Creator Economy” and try to find out what impacts this has had on creators, writers, and all the other kinds of creatives, with a focus on understanding the big picture. Is it really as empowering as promised, or is it a silent disguise?

“Corporations have been designed to protect the rich from any form of legal accountability for their actions, while providing them with all the rights and legal protection of an individual.”

—Thom Hartmann, American radio personality and write

“Don’t you want to feel and be empowered,” shouts the new company in town, joining the moral ethos of all the giants present in the town square.

The Creator Economy has been a thing for quite some time around. You may have heard claims like: It’s here to stay and is the future. Simply put, I don’t see any truth in it.

Foremost, it’s a scheme that benefits companies and corporations more than the creators, who were supposed to be the centre, hence, the Creator Economy. How did companies pull out this brilliant marketing gimmick yet surprise me. It’s like you are running your factory on someone else’s plot of land, without even paying the rent. You are booking your profits without even caring (too much) about the expenses.

Companies are generating eyeballs, and ad revenue, just by making you hooked to the platform. You don’t own it, but you have this feeling of empowerment that forces you to stick with it. They build an ecosystem: creators, viewers, advertisers. Once all three elements are present, it starts to get locked up in a way. The other two elements make it highly frictional for the third one to leave.

This and more benefits the behemoth sitting on the top, directly or indirectly. They promise you “freedom” while trying to cage you. According to them, they want you to go explore the world but aren’t comfortable if you get off their platform. Heck, why would they be? You ate their advertising dollars, after all.

I reject this notion of Creator Economy. It’s a Fallacy Economy.

We all want to chase something which has inherent value to it. And when that comes with survivorship bias paired, it becomes irresistible not to chase. You look like a fool not to go after it, and who wants to look like a fool?

I had first-hand experience of it when I used to write on Quora, which is going downhill thanks to their thirst for AI. I never wrote to earn money, but then I realised I got nothing much of value out of it. My content appeared along with a ton of ads, I had to bear censorship of the platform, and I still had to please the algorithm.

Yes, I got the reach, but no, I didn’t get the loyalty. Most of the platforms don’t want to pass on the loyalty token of your audience. They secretly want all the loyalty while giving you the so-called reach. Reach without loyalty is nothing but a fake notion of growth.

That’s why I call it a Fallacy Economy: It doesn’t promise you independence as a creator, nor does it give you any creative freedom to explore. If it truly were a creator’s economy, it’d at least give you the freedom to create, reach your audience directly, and a tool to take them with you wherever you go. It doesn’t. It is just a gimmick to hype you up for the short term. What it does ensure however is a never-ending stream of benefits to the new and seasoned giants of the town square.

Creators are getting exploited without even realising it. The vicious cycle the fallacy economy brings with itself is alarming. It has been so for years, but it’s only lately that the whole picture is visible to the naked eye. People can see how their content is getting used, be it video, audio, or text. They want fake promises no more, they want a solution.