Transcript
Many people think becoming a content creator is the golden ticket to true financial success.
And you know what? It can be.
But almost every content creator is doing basically everything wrong, including some of the world’s biggest channels.
Everyone is stuck in the Creator Trap.
Let me tell you a true story about a man named Jordan.
Jordan was a content creator.
His goal was simple: reach as many people as he possibly could with his content. He published videos on YouTube, he did social media, he wrote blog posts, all within the niche of video games.
And he made a massive success of it.
Or at least he thought he had. And anyone looking on would have thought he had as well.
Jordan’s gaming website reached over 10 million people per year.
His YouTube channels reached millions of views.
But there were two big problems.
Problem number one: His website received over 90% of its traffic from Google. One day, Google decided to change their algorithm, and 20% of Jordan’s traffic was wiped out overnight. Fast forward a few months, the same thing happened again. And again. All of a sudden, the website had no way to get views and because it earned money via advertising…well, without views, there was no way to make money.
And problem number two: The YouTube channels were mostly entertainment focused.
What does this mean? Well, it means you have to keep uploading if you want to keep earning money. And as we already know from problem number one, all it would take is a simple algorithm change to decimate the views overnight.
There’s no better way to demonstrate The Creator Trap and the problems that Jordan was facing than with this graphic that was shared by Colin and Samir:
If you remove the CEO, the head honcho, from a regular business, the business hires a new CEO and carries on like nothing ever happened.
If you remove the Creator from a content business, the business falls apart. There’s no way to get new views, no new videos for brand deals, there’s nothing left.
The creator is tied in to making videos with no possible escape.
But this doesn’t even cover the worst part of the Creator Trap.
A creator leaving a business or deciding to stop uploading is one thing.
But sometimes – many times, in fact – it’s not even a creator’s choice.
With platform risk, algorithm risk, and even changing trends and relevancy – you could call this ‘audience risk’, the rug can be swept from under the feet of a creator without a moment’s notice, making their ‘business’ – if you can really call it a business – effectively worthless.
This leads to pressure, anxiety, and burn out.
Isn’t the Content Creator dream supposed to lead to wealth and freedom?
Well, the good news is that it can give you these things as a creator with 100,000 subscribers, or 10,000 subscribers, and maybe even just 1,000 subscribers, but you have to do things in a different way – a better way.
A way to truly escape the Creator Trap.
I haven’t been totally honest with you.
Remember Jordan, the man from our previous example? Jordan…is me.
Up until starting this channel, I ran a gaming blog and some gaming YouTube channels and everything was going pretty well. My business, at its peak, generated $42,000 in revenue in a single month, and I had 30 freelancers working for me at one point.
But due to being stuck in the Creator Trap, that business eventually collapsed like a house of cards.
Ever since the cracks first started appearing in that business, I was searching for a better way.
But I was too late, but you don’t have to be – whether you have 100,000 subscribers and you need to make some changes, or if you have 0 subscribers and you’re going to set things up perfectly from the beginning.
I’m calling this better way ‘the Creator CEO’. It’s the exact business model I’m using to make sure I never repeat my previous mistakes.
You can download a slightly more detailed version of this blueprint here.
There are many people that already follow a blueprint like this, they make a shit tonne of money with content creation, and you’ll have never heard of most of them – because they don’t need to chase millions of views to make an extraordinary income.
And if we look under the surface and read between the lines, the Creator CEO is a position that many top content creators are desperately trying to maneuver themselves into after realising they are stuck in the creator trap.
A Creator CEO can be one person and will usually start as one person, the “content creator”, but in reality the Creator CEO is a new business model.
And as soon as you can, you start building this business in a very specific way.
Creator CEO businesses make money both by creating content, and by selling products and services – independently from each other – but they also overlap in perfect harmony.
An example of this would be me trying to make money from content creation on this channel that you’re watching right now, but also making money from my YouTube course on Creator Kingdom – a product that’s linked in the description and isn’t tied to my brand on this channel – and I make money via my service, YouTube consultancy, which again isn’t tied to this channel. But they all have overlapping synergy.
That’s an online example, if you want a “real life” business example, you could be a cake making business that sells cakes but then you start creating content showing all your amazing cakes being made, build an audience, and then go on to sell cake making equipment too. And maybe cake making courses.
If you remove content creation from these two businesses, money is still able to be generated because of alternative sources of revenue that don’t rely on views.
If products and services start to fail for any reason, content creation can be used to bring in launch new products and services, or even entire new businesses.
But there’s one thing that truly separates this model from the world of being a regular content creator.
If you build things effectively, your content business can be sold – this is yet another thing that regular Content Creators are unable to do because they are the face and the heartbeat of their business. If you remove the heart, the blood stops pumping.
Content creators might technically own a ‘business’ on paper – as in, they operate as a company because it’s better for tax purposes – but in real terms, they’re more like freelancers that automatically get paid by the platforms that they upload content on.
Someone couldn’t buy Max Fosh’s channel and randomly upload a video one day like “Hello everyone, welcome back to Max Fosh, today we’re going to see if we can breed a carrots and a potato” because even if that idea would be interesting to the Max Fosh audience, there’s a crucial part missing…it wouldn’t be Max Fosh in the video.
A real business can be acquired by someone else.
If you want to build wealth as a creator without needing to get millions upon millions of subscribers, don’t aim to become an entertainment channel. Don’t aim to become a vlogger. Don’t make gaming “let’s plays”. Don’t aim to do anything that doesn’t allow you to sell relevant products and services.
Your product or service could be anything from consultancy, to courses, to community memberships, digital downloads, masterclasses, accelerators, physical products, artwork – any product or training or service that your audience wants or needs, you could provide it.
If you can’t sell a product or service, you’ll never be able to hire other people to do the work for you – or maybe even do the work better than you could – and ultimately allow you to generate revenue in your sleep or whilst you’re tanning on a beach in the Caribbean.
Entertainment-focused creators can have ads, Patreon, merch – but trust me, 99% of small creators do not make any reasonable amount of money from these methods. Why do you think they sell out for so many random brands and scammy mobile games?
And the worst part is these methods of monetisation lock you in well and truly to the Creator Trap.
Don’t wait for two years down the line to build up your audience as big as you can because you don’t want to sell to your audience – I know you’re thinking that because I thought it myself.
The right audience wants you to sell to them. People are willing to pay for things if it helps get them ahead. Trying to get as many views as possible without monetising – you’re not Mark Zuckerberg.
The true test of whether you’ve made it with the Creator CEO model is if you or any other person could be removed from the business and it would be able to still keep running and generating profit.
But there is one other important fact we’re missing here.
You don’t have to aspire to be this big corporation that runs without you to have success as a Creator CEO.
What if you simply make content and sell a service to clients that costs $1,000 per month, and you get just 2 clients from your 1,000 subscribers. A pretty low success rate and very achievable, you could argue.
That’s already $2,000 per month in revenue, the same as getting a million monthly views with a $2 RPM on longform videos. In a video from Jack Craig, that I’ll link in the description, he shares that he earned just over $2,000 from…wait for it…140 million views on YouTube shorts.
Even at the most basic level where you’re creating content and offering a product or service, the success curve as a Creator CEO is completely different. You don’t need to spend years building this audience just to sustain yourself.
You’re not reliant on being “relevant”. You’re not reliant on an algorithm to pay your wages. You’re using content as fuel to the fire, rather than the firewood.
I used to publish gaming content to millions of people each month and I ended up with hardly any profit. It was ripped away from me basically overnight.
And whilst it’s easy to make excuses, it ultimately boils down to being my mistake.
I’m not going to make that mistake again and I don’t want you to make it either.
Subscribe to Creator CEO and I’ll help you as much as I can next time I hit upload.