Instagram, YouTube & TikTok Are Burning Out Their Creators. Here’s How to Fix That.
Creator Wellness Will Be A Key Goal of New Products
Being a modern creator is, for many, exhausting. The falling economic costs of production and distribution have been replaced by a new set of taxes — physical, emotional, psychological — as your community expects new content, accessibility to their heroes and open book authenticity. Paired with the social media platform algorithms, which in themselves reward frequency and engagement, this combination saps joy and agency from the creative process and burns out the creators. Having to perform 24/7 comes with costs, and that’s only dealing with fans let alone the trolls.
What’s a creator to do? I’d suggest a better question is ‘what can these companies do help creators?’ and that we’re about to enter Phase 3.0 of Creator Wellness, one where the products build in their own affordances to assist their supply-side participants.
Phase 1.0 was the earliest days of “user generated content.” Our understanding of impact upon creators was immature or unconsciously naive because the teams building the platforms often didn’t resemble (in all definitions of the word) the creators on the platform. At the same time the huge growth of these audiences meant that “being a creator” and “going viral” were phenomenons that quickly outstripped previous models in scale and volume. Creators were left to figure out their well-being on their own.
Phase 2.0 was the beginning of Creator Health initiatives. Most of these programs were/are one-off but well-intended — platform companies creating teams to work with high profile creators, build relationships that optimized for longterm commercial sustainability. It’s bad business for creators to burnout. The more scaled efforts, like YouTube’s Creator Academy, should be recognized as thoughtful and caring, but it’s unclear if the advice offered here is hard-coded into the platform’s incentives. If it’s not, then it’s like a school counselor preaching balance to student-athletes while also allowing the football coach to continue two-a-day practices through finals week.
So what do I hope Phase 3.0 looks like? It has Creator Wellness built fundamentally into the product itself, in a way…
