How The Creator Market Is Totally Disrupting Corporate Training
The Creator Market has been unleashed, eating everything in its path. TikTok’s revenue jumped to $34 Billion last year and this year (2022) it could be more than twice this number. And TikTok, as a company, doesn’t build any content at all.
This new industry, the Creator Market, is responsible for the fastest-growing companies in the world. YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest, and all sorts of platform companies (OnlyFans, Patreon, Substack, Impact and hundreds of others) are essentially building the toolbox and infrastructure to let everyone in the world become a publisher.
And this is very big business. The Information estimates that The Creator Economy (revenues directly derived from creator-authored content) at over $5 Billion in 2021 and I think they’re off by a factor of five. The latest advertising revenues from Google and Meta show a huge slowdown in search advertising and an enormous growth in this new segment. Why? Because this is where the eyeballs are.
And it makes perfect sense. No matter how “creative” you are as an instructional designer, educator, or marketing professional, there’s probably someone out there who has some ideas you haven’t thought of. This is why TikTok is so much fun. Every time you log in you see something new and different.
But the big story is not the content, it’s the platforms. These new platforms (YouTube is the oldest) are becoming more flexible and interesting every day. When TikTok popularized short form video the copycats at Meta immediately copied it pixel by pixel. YouTube created “shorts,” and SnapChat built something similar.
When I first started using Substack I found it very lacking, but they too are adding features like WordPress. So every Creator Platform is growing in features, development tools, and analytics back-ends.
So what about the corporate training market? Here we have a $360 Billion industry with lots of money being spent (much easier to reach than advertisers or “fans”), can it become a Creator Market too? The answer is absolutely yes! And this is one of the most disruptive changes you can imagine.
Consider platforms like Udemy, which have fresher content and faster-growing revenues than LinkedIn Learning. Or look at systems like 360Learning or Articulate, which are unleashing the power of creators inside your company. Our own Josh Bersin Academy is the outgrowth of my own efforts at creating content, and we have almost 70,000 users after only a few years.
If you’re an HR professional or L&D leader you have to take this seriously. No traditional publisher can possibly author all the content you need fast enough. These new creator platforms give you access to new content and internal expertise like never before.
If you’re a vendor, it’s time to think this through. If you sell an open learning platform, maybe you should add more features for authors so your customers can build their own academies for their clients. STRIVR, for example, is now teaching people how to build VR content on their platform. This is what Docebo has done in the “training as a product” domain and now they’re one of the fastest-growing learning companies in the market.
We just finished a big research report on this market, so I want to encourage you to read it. We are still in the early stages of this trend, and I look forward to sharing more (as a Creator of course) as this market continues to grow.
Additional Resources
A New Category Emerges: The Creator Platform For Corporate Learning
Virtual Reality Has Now Gone Mainstream For Corporate Training
