I found this interesting since I’m a writer with a day job.
This is really thoughtful and I think I’ll pull some of this for my upper grade art curriculum since it’s so clear. Yancey and Josh Citarella did a short podcast series I liked as well
It’s an interesting article, but it kind of lost me when it started talking about Creators. Which is unfortunate, because it’s definitely just an issue of language detracting from the overall point of the article. It reflects a mainstream misunderstanding of what the word “creators” means, because everyone only ever thinks about Mr. Beast or someone like Jake Paul, but maybe that’s a bit dated now. Maybe “Influencers” would be a better word, but even that doesn’t really feel right.
My issue starts with this paragraph:
Also unlike artists, creators are explicitly commercial in what they do. They want you to smash that like and subscribe button. They launch courses and new products to further monetize themselves. They see their work as inherently commercial, even industrial. The opposite is true for most artists.
This may be true for the top 1% of creators that make it into mainstream consciousness, but I don’t believe it’s true of most creators or at least not to a degree that reflects such a definitive statements like “creators are explicitly commercial in what they do” or “they see their work as inherently commercial”. It just feels like such a bleak and nihilistic view on the creator space. Especially when followed by statements like this:
Rather than a traditional boss, they have an algorithmic one that implicitly and explicitly shapes their output.
Which is contrasted with definitions like:
An artist is a self-directed artistic expressor. They work for themselves and express what they want. There’s no one beyond their anxiety looking over their shoulder telling them what to do.
Most of the creators I follow do, to a large degree, work for themselves and express what they want. There is a level of commercialism that comes from needing to rely on things like subscriptions and sponsors, but I really don’t see it as that much more commercial than an artist posting their commission prices or something along those lines.
The article mentions that creators answer to themselves and their audiences, but it seems to lack an understanding that creators build their audiences. They release content that they’re interested in, and people who are also interested in it gather around them. This then allows them to potentially show value in what they’re creating which then allows them to profit from it. For some, this is the goal, but for a lot of them it’s not and the same could be said for artists.
For every Mr. Beast who is chasing the numbers, there’s an MKBHD who, when asked about the profitability of one of his channels, responded along the lines of “I don’t know, but we’re going to keep releasing it, because I want to”.
All of that to say, I don’t think that the main conceit of the article is wrong, I just think it’s just not quite hitting the mark on what lessons can be learned. Yes, artists need to be able to break free from the institutionalized funding they’re forced to rely on. No, creators aren’t able to do that because they’re commercially minded. They’re able to do it, because platforms, like Patreon and Ko-fi, or features, like memberships and subscriptions, were built with creators in mind.
Artists need better ways to find their audience. I think, in a lot of ways, we’ve started to work in that direction, but it’s not perfect. Etsy opened the door for making handmade goods more accessible, but it’s gotten steadily worse over the years. Vgen is opening doors for digital artists to make money, but it’s still new and finding its footing. And there’s still so many different kind of artists that can’t be served by platforms like Etsy or Vgen.
Not really sure how to end this. Sorry I went on a bit of a rant, and thank you if you read it this far. I think it just struck a nerve as someone who wants to be a “creator” because they want to create content that sparks joy and not with any expectation that I’ll actually make money from it.
I personally think the main difference is that creators are tied to platforms while artists are not tied to anything.
What would MKBHD without YouTube and the other social media platform do? If you’re a writer, a photographer, a painter, a sculpture, and you love the process of creating you’d likely do those things regardless of the economic outcome.
But creators would likely not do that. I don’t think MKBHD would make tech reviews just for the sake of making them, to keep them on his computer. the way I see it is that content creators are result driven while artists are often simply guided by their desire to create.
Do they though? Do they really have a say in how their audience is built? I think YouTube for example has a lot more power in how an audience grows around creators than the creators themselves.
I agree, this is probably the most concise difference between an artist and a creator, because “What would MKBHD without other social media patforms do?” could very well just be write or create in a form that’s not tied to platforms. In the cases of reviewers or essayist type creators, there’s an easy line to where they could write articles or books, give talks, or in a more 1:1 translation you might start a local club or community to discuss topics in person.
For variety Creators, like Mr. Beast, or people who have built their brand around lifestyle content, though, it’s definitely something that couldn’t really exist without platforms. Daily vlogs could only really be translated into blog posts, but that’s still a form of content creation tied to a platform.
It’s entirely possible he could, actually! It’s something I’ve done. Reviews are a bad example, since things like book logs and the like are a pretty popular personal hobby, but even just with general content creation. I have things I’ve created that I’ve only shown to friends or made just to get the idea out of my head. And, it started when I was a kid, before things like Youtube were even really a thing. Back in ye old days of lugging around a camcorder as big as your head.
Humans have an inherent desire to create, regardless of commercial benefits. The only thing that changes is the methods. Maybe creators wouldn’t have created their content if they couldn’t post it, but that kind of feels like a bad faith argument. There are content creators out there who are so uncomfortable with the idea of taking money from their audience that they apologize for it when they’re in legitimate financial distress. The act of creating in those cases involve posting, but I have a hard time labeling them as people who are solely results motivated.
It’s my belief that they do. The only one that controls the content that they put out is themselves. There’s a youtuber whose entire niche is talking about the realism of video games in regards to things like if waterways make sense or if GTA5 signs are legally compliant. Maybe it’s just wild optimism but, in my opinion, that’s content that can only really be born from a desire to make it. And the audience that grew around it was because he released content that would attract people interested in it.
The one piece of consistent advice I hear from creators is that it takes time and consistency to build an audience. You need to have some respect for the algorithm, but ultimately what form that respect comes in depends solely on what you want out of content creation. Whether it’s A/B testing thumbnails to appease it or just understanding and accepting that it will mean inconsistent numbers or slow growth of an audience, if your goal is to grow an audience.