CreatorScape 2020

Welcome to the 2020 CreatorScape. Let us start by saying “Wow - a lot can change in a year!”

Last year when Andrew Kamphey built the first CreatorScape, it was dominated by influencer marketing companies many of which were really agencies specializing in influencer marketing. That reflected the nascent and experimental stage the industry was still in. When we proposed working with Andrew to put together the 2020 update, our hope was to accurately capture the emerging diversity we saw and to highlight the growing volume of companies supporting and making a business from the creator and influencer industry. This year the CreatorScape has 290 companies in 15 categories (none of which are agencies) and shows how the ecosystem has developed.

For a full dataset of each company including their website, Instagram and Twitter go HERE

As we put this together with Andrew, it became clear that many companies in - or entering - the creator industry had roots in other areas like social media or production editing. While it was amazing to see so many companies signal the influencer and creator industry as interesting to spend time on, we were hoping to capture as much of a purist view of the space as possible. We decided we needed a simple rule set for how to include or not include companies. 

Here are the rules we used to decide what companies were in the CreatorScape and which were not (for now!)

1. A majority of the company's focus had to be on influencers and creators. This excluded a lot of media editing tools that are designed for professionals in the sound and movie business as well as a lot of social media tools which are used by creators but primarily built for people managing social media accounts for businesses.
2. Does the company make software and can they scale? This excluded companies that are majority services. This knocked out 90% of companies from last year that have specialized in influencer marketing but don't build software.
3. For influencer marketing companies we put them in two categories reflective of how the industry has evolved. The bright line test is do they let influencers and creators sign up for their platform somehow. If so, we labeled them marketplaces. If not, they were labeled Enterprise SaaS businesses.
4. Many companies actually do multiple things. They sell memberships, allow tipping, let creators sell digital goods, etc.. In this case we made a judgment call based on what the company was commonly known for. There was one big exception here - the major platform companies. As they are key players in the industry, we wanted to include them. We decided to include them by their subproducts like Facebook Watch or Twitch's Subscriptions or Amazon's Influencer shops to show which categories they played in and perhaps found valuable to their strategy. This was also intended to show the breadth of product lines these platforms have now for influencers and creators.
5. While there is valuable debate about who is really an influencer or creator, we used a simple definition: an influencer or creator builds an audience somewhere online and creates custom content to keep that audience engaged. This removed self-published authors from our consideration, platforms for experts to sell their time, and many products focusing on musicians or artists. 
6. We distinguished the increasing number of ad hoc or one-off monetization tools with those designed to form ongoing financial relationships. This is the primary difference between the Access and Memberships categories.
7. We focused primarily on non-Chinese companies. China is arguably a vastly more sophisticated creator economy than the rest of the world. It deserves a whole CreatorScape dedicated to it. We didn't have the skills or resources to pull this together so we knowingly excluded many of its companies from ours.

While we think we came up with the right set of rules, the problem with rules is that the world is grey and imperfect. In the end we made a few judgment calls necessary to keep some coherency to the story we saw emerging and wanted to tell. It's a simple story but an awesome one - the influencer and creator economy is here, it's growing like wildfire, and it's not going away. 

We also took some time this year to reorganize our categories. What we saw happening was a clear alignment between companies and the workflow of a creator. First there is production. There is a lot more that goes into making content than many think. From capture to post production, especially with multi-person and distributed teams, there is a lot of focus on this part of the process. Next there is monetization which is proving to be fertile ground for companies who can take advantage of the incredible virality that comes with having customers who are influencers and creators and need to promote those products to their audiences. Lastly we added business management. As the inevitable admin of turning a hobby into doing something for a living creeps in, the need for influencers and creators to run themselves like business has emerged as a new theme this year. We organized the 2020 CreatorScape into roughly those three buckets.

So, without further ado, let us present to you the 2020 CreatorScape. This could not have been possible without the highly detailed research and laborious graphic design efforts of Andrew Kamphey. We also had a lot of help from VCs, industry experts and press friends who gave us some feedback on early versions which was formative. For those that love data, all the companies mentioned in the CreatorScape 2020 (along with websites and social links are listed below) we have also included a link to a spreadsheet with all the data.

We see nothing but an upward trend for 2020 and we expect the 2021 CreatorScape to have at least 2x the companies in it. Please send us any questions, corrections, press inquiries or concerns to [email protected] .