Why are you growing an audience? More importantly, why do you want a large audience? With the shift from product first to audience first businesses, the need for a following is more important than ever. The creator economy is built off the back of the attention economy, and the larger the audience, the more attention you can capture.

Today's Highlight:

• HBO's Fake Famous experiments with turning people into influencers
• The creator retention game comes from the highest bidder
• Instagram rolls out new experiments
• I share my high-level approach for growing a podcast (RIP) with Clubhouse

📰Talking Creators

How to Fake Friends and Influence Instagram

Open Clubhouse, scroll through TikTok, or run a quick IG poll and the answers are the same. Everyone wants to be an influencer and be famous. HBO's Fake Famous recognizes this obsession and packages it up into a thought-provoking and eye-opening experiment where they take regular people and making them famous. What would you do for 1M followers? What would you do with 1M followers?
Source: Wired

Former Asana Employees want to take on Discord With a Positive Platform

How do you know if you have an audience or a community? If you stop engaging with your community is it still active or does it die out? The lifeblood of creators is not how many people buy a product from a sponsored post, but how many people are true fans that will join a creator's community. Vibely aims to bridge that gap by providing ways to help creators monetize which currently doesn't exist on other platforms.
Source: TechCrunch

🤳Talking Social & Platforms

TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat are fighting to pay for creators loyalty

Creators have two large pain points; monetization and discoverability. In an effort to retain and acquire creators, social platforms are increasing their payouts. The leader of the pack is YouTube, who to date, has paid out $30,000,000,000 to creators. Expect this trend to extend to all social and non-social platforms (e.g. Webflow).
Source: Business of Business

Teesprings Evolves to Be The Commerce Link for Creators

While Teespring was the butt of jokes for many in the commerce space, its ease of use and integration into platforms was a hit for creators. With the growing number of creators releasing merch and going DTC, Teespring rebrands under Spring to become the link between creators and commerce.
Source: MarTech Series

Instagram Tests Removing The Option To Share Feed Posts Within StoriesInstagram/Facebook is moving at a speed that is nothing short of impressive. The battle to remain the go-to-social platform is fierce and Instagram shows they have no intention of giving up with their recent experiments. Instagram is removing the option to share feed posts within stories to create a new stories feed tab that is similar to TikTok. I expect both stories and reels to mesh into one and eventually integrate into the traditional feed we know.
Source Social Media Today

☂️Talking Drops From Creators

Trends.VC founder, Dru Riley, released his latest trends report (via his newsletter and Twitter) on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and it's one of the best resources highlighting NFTs and their role in the creator economy.  

Source: Dru Riley

🧨Talking Marketing & Monetization for Creators

Growing your Podcast Through Clubhouse

With the explosion of Clubhouse, I expect podcasts to soon suffer the same experience as radio. Rather than edit and polish a podcast episode, use the unplanned 1:1 appeal of Clubhouse. Here's a high-level playbook I advise on growing your podcast with Clubhouse.

1. Submit for a Clubhouse Club with your podcast name. Ensure your club is similar to the domain and brand name of your podcast. This allows people to search for you and discover your podcast both on and off of Clubhouse.

2. Follow potential guests, creators, and clubs on Clubhouse based on keywords in your niche. For example, if you're in the crypto space, search crypto and start following relevant people.

3. Optimize your bio. Use a format of I help x do y through z. Plug your podcast website in the first or second line of your bio. This is important because when people look at your profile while in rooms, they won't see your complete profile.

4. While your Clubhouse Club is pending approval, begin joining rooms of the people you followed. Start speaking in these rooms.

5. Once your club is approved, tap a current influencer on the platform and someone with a large and known audience outside of Clubhouse that isn't yet on the platform. Invite them both to speak in your room. The algorithm will push your room to everyone that follows the influencer which brings more people. On the side, you should also be marketing your room on your social channels and guest's social channels as well.

6. Record each conversation and publish it across social and podcast platforms.

🏄Things you want to know

• Three countries are on their way to reach Mars within the next few weeks.
• Fitness equipment is the new furniture.
• It was only a week ago that we were glued to our seats following the Gamestop saga. Now Netflix is moving to produce a movie on the short squeeze.

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter. If you enjoyed what you read, forward this email to a friend. Just tell them to subscribe. Lastly, I tend to post more short-form content across social, so if you don't already, follow me and say hi.