The Biggest Risk to Creators' Businesses

(4 min read) Platform changes, the demise of cookies, Apple being mean, and general uncertainty around social media

This week’s episode is about existential risk.

Creators can only control so much.

Algorithms are constantly changing, brand spending changes based on the economy, and there’s even political talk of shutting down platforms like TikTok and OnlyFans.

And yet - Creators abide.

Whenever there’s risk, it’s always better to be aware of it so you can strategize accordingly…even if that strategy is simply “do nothing”.

Here are some of the biggest risks risks to our past guests’ businesses.

Thanks for reading - let’s get into it!

What’s the biggest risk to your business?

Time management is the biggest risk to me personally, like am I allocating my time in the right places to get the the most out of my effort, because with the the revenue breakdown I shared with you, the biggest revenue driver is the membership. I’ve got to be making that worthwhile for members and putting a lot of time and effort into that that comes at the expense of creating really great content that grows the audience. It's a constant balancing act.

So I would say the biggest risk is probably me failing to prioritize time in the most effective way.

I'll tell you it's the inconsistencies of the platforms. So last month, Facebook decided to demonetize my channel. They did not give me a reason why, they did not tell me how to fix it. They just said “Oh you're demonetized” and Wild Vision and I panicked and scrambled for a month to get it fixed. They still, to this day, never told us why it happened or what we did but that cost me dollars in that month, probably 30% or 40% of my gross revenue. So if I'm really heavily leveraged, if I'm spending everything I've got coming in on this content, and I take a 30% - 40% revenue hit, that's scary.

There are things that I can control - how hard we work, how fast we hire, how much we spend on a video - but the things that are out of my control, like somebody sitting in Silicon Valley that just toggles off the monetization to my channel - that's a huge threat to my channel, and they're a huge threat to my business.

Probably OnlyFans wanting to stop the sale of adult content.

Well, cookie tracking is already being turned off on Google, so that’s a risk. The biggest risk, I mean, the internet going out I guess. That seems like the biggest risk if there are no creators and no people to read stories online.

I get hit by a bus. I stay away from busses.

I'd say social media. We don't spend any money on paid traffic. It's 100% social media. So, theoretically, if TikTok disappeared, we'd be okay, but if Instagram went POOF! We'd probably be in some trouble.

We're not nurturing a list, even when we do direct response - it's so off the cuff that people aren't even used to it. It's just like, "Well, that came out of left field. You need to buy this thing." We don't have a nurtured list where people are used to a certain cadence. Even our texting is so off the cuff. If we started texting people, it would really come out of the blue. We can't rely on texting or email.

So, we rely on social media. If the right social media platforms go POOF! We'd be in trouble, which is why we're trying to bring on someone to do nurturing of emails and to build an email list.

I can say something very controversial right now. This is something that only very specific people know. Apple is making the whole digital advertising landscape much more difficult than what we know it to be. They're basically putting in all these privacy rules where, pretty much, if you download a new app, it asks you to allow it to track you. It's super invasive messages that come, but when it comes to Apple's own apps, it'll be the most kindly-worded thing. But basically, what's happening is the way that advertisers are buying ads on Facebook and YouTube is going to become less effective because Apple is completely dropping support of the cookie and also just stripping attribution and tracking stuff. They're blocking that type of technology on websites.

The whole digital ad landscape is going to be restructured, and we might go backwards to how things were done, where you couldn't really measure if this worked well or didn't work well. Like TV ads where you really can't measure stuff; it's a lot of approximation. We're kind of getting back to that type of system because Apple wants this privacy thing to really be their core tenant. But the funny thing is, they're only saying that because they missed out on the ad business, and they're secretly growing their own ad business on the side. That's going to be, I think, a multibillion-dollar business in their first two years.

So, if there's no new way that Facebook and YouTube can figure out how to track users and how to effectively advertise, then it's going to be really interesting to see how YouTube and Facebook and all these companies look in like 7 years.

OnlyFans shutting down or getting kicked off…I don't think they would shut down, but I've known girls who get kicked off for reasons I don't understand, so that's a little nerve-wracking. Same with Instagram…

I don't think they would [get closed down] at this point because of the security measures that Keily’s put in place. I think they're very legally secure, whereas before it was a little bit of a Wild West and you could get in trouble from, you know, the FBI or something like that. But now it's, I'd say, the most secure platform. But obviously, we always consider business risks of this type. What if there's a huge recession and no one buys what our company is making anymore? So we look at the worst-case scenarios, like getting kicked off OnlyFans.

Thanks for reading!

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See you next week!

 

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