CreatorScape 2021

It’s been just over a year since we published the 2020 CreatorScape. It's mind boggling how much the creator economy has grown in a year. The sheer number of companies, creators, and discussion around the creator economy seems to be on a never-ending crescendo.

One of the reasons we decided to compile and publish this list is that influence.co sits at a sort of nexus in the creator economy. We welcome all creators, influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, Substack writers, streamers, etc.. big and small onto the platform. Thus we hear from a large cross section of the creator economy about what they are thinking and what tools they are using. Let us tell you - it’s a wondrous, wild and complicated world out there for a creator right now.

The major platform companies have all jumped on the creator bandwagon and now offer over 54 products between them to help creators monetize. In addition, 7 creator funds were announced and 100s of millions of dollars has been paid out already to creators by these funds. Large VCs have jumped into the space with Andressen leading the pack at 12 deals and over $500 investment in the creator economy themselves. Nothing like having everyone been mostly indoors for 6 months to turn an industry on its head.

Last year the CreatorScape had 290 companies in 15 categories. This year we found 438 companies in 20 categories. That’s a 51% increase and by the pace of announcements every day we expect to see the same or more growth by 2022.

So without further ado, here is our CreatorScape 2021.

(If you’d like to see the base data set for the CreatorScape 2021, please grab it here)

Click for high-res version

For those who are unfamiliar with our category names and some of the rules we used to decide on which categories to put companies, please see the CreatorScape 2020 which outlines our methodology. We used this methodology again so please reference it if category meanings aren’t clear or you’re surprised to see a company listed in a category.

We’ll be writing a thought piece about this years CreatorScape and some of its implications on Substack, creatorscape.substack.com, but for now we’ll leave you with a few thoughts about our findings this year:

• This year we added a number of new categories: Link In Bio, Crypto, Fintech, Newsletters and Publishing, and Audience Building
• We broke Link in Bio tools out from Business Management as the Link in Bio category is definitely its own micro industry. We did not include a number of smaller LIB tools as it seems there are 25 competitors but only a few have notable adoption. Many other companies have LIB tools as part of their featureset (e.g. Luma, Famepick) but per our rules we place companies that span categories by what they are known most for.
• Crypto and Fintech are net new categories reflecting the scale and breadth of who is flying under the “creator” banner now. The fact you can build a credit card company focused on creators is a sign of the TAM (zing!).
• We expect Crypto to have a massive surge in companies in the next twelve months and we’re sure we missed a few NFT minting companies that have been announced since we locked the list down for publishing.
• It is nearly impossible to catalog all the content editing and production tools now. At some point this category should probably become its own taxonomy (ProductionScape anyone?)
• Courses had the strongest surge in major participants and funding. We think there is a high density of knowledge-sharing creators vs. other creator categories to target. Real money moves around in this segment as well. We expect creator edu-tech to get a large amount of the investment dollars in the next 12 months as there is clearly a massive product-market fit for creator-led education.
• We’re starting to see lots of derivative creator monetization companies with little differentiation. In some cases they have nearly the exact same wording on their homepages. This makes us think we’ve reached basecamp one on the hike up creator economy mountain and we’ll see a plateauing of innovation in core creator monetization products for a while. A race to accumulate market share will follow that slow down.
• The more successful companies are starting to gobble up adjacent categories. Digital goods companies like Gumroad offer subscriptions, Mighty Networks is adding courses and events. Not only does this make it hard to categorize a lot of companies but we’re seeing the emergence of real creator economy platforms. The next 12 months will prove out whether creators want a one-stop shop or want to cobble together best of breed products. A lot has to do with the kind of creator you are targeting. The consolidated platform that a streamer needs would be very different than what someone teaching cohort based classes about gardening would need.
• We still don’t have any specific categories for Podcasting or Livestreaming and have included solutions for those (such as Red Circle) in their respective broader categories. It feels like we’re not quite at the tipping point where those categories are big enough to warrant their own breakouts.
• Merchandise should probably be renamed to Merchandise and eCommerce given the growth in creator DTC and live/social shopping players popping up.
• The major players are on the field in a big way. There are 54 and counting creator monetization products from Facebook, YouTube, TikTok etc.. We likely have not appropriately represented them in the 2021 version even though they are the only logos we allow to appear multiple times. 2021 will prove how successful a platform like Facebook can be offering creator tools plus discovery but on rented space versus an independent company offering platform neutrality with no discovery but an owned space.
• While a flurry of big deals have been done by notable VCs, there are a huge amount of pre-seed and seed deals getting funded and only a few Series A opportunities right now. In 6-9 months we’ll see a flurry of Series A deals come across the transom which will bring more familiar institutional deals into the creator economy in a serious way.

That’s it for now! Whether you are a VC looking for deals, an entrepreneur looking for holes in the market or a creator looking to build your business, we hope this work is useful to you. Please send us all feedback at [email protected] and don’t forget to sign up for our ongoing discussion of the creator economy on our Substack.

— Niel, CEO of influence.co