It’s a Creator’s World
A few years back, I came across the Japanese concept of Ikagai which translates to the value of life, or alternatively your reason for being. Your ikagai sits at the intersection of 4 areas:
- Profession: What you are good at
- Passion: What you love to do
- Vocation: What you can be paid for
- Mission: What the world needs
The cynic in me rolled my eyes at the notion that the perfect alignment of all four areas was attainable in the real world, but optimism prevailed. Something glaringly obvious, but no less incredible, is going on in the world. More and more people are pursuing their interests and a good number are making money in the process. The lines between passion and profession are fading day by day. People are being rewarded for their authenticity and creativity. Suddenly the concept of Ikagai and a utopian economy where everybody is empowered to pursue their passions, doesn’t seem so farfetched.
The word creator has become something of a buzzword recently. Everytime we hear it, the list of areas that it encompasses seems to have grown, and rightly so. On the internet, everyone is a creator (or at least has the tools to become one). The world operates as a never ending cycle of value exchanges and those who are rewarded most are able to:
- To Create value.
- To Communicate value.
- To Monetise value.
Problem: Truth be told, the world has always belonged to creators, but for a long time significant barriers to entry restricted people’s ability to meet those three requirements. Amongst other restrictions, resources to create were costly and effective mediums to reach your audience were controlled by large corporations. A good example is web development. A decade ago, you’d pay a pretty penny for a web developer to pull your site together for you. Now you can use platforms like Squarespace, Wix & Webflow (my personal favourite) to get your site up and running in a matter of hours, with little to no prior experience.
The internet and more specifically, the emergence of social media platforms have played a central role in democratising the role of the creator. But make no mistake, we’re still very much at the inception of this paradigm shift. To truly support this golden age of creators, the world needs new online tools, infrastructures and economic models to be effective conduits of creativity.
Market Unbundling
When social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube were born there’s no way they could have foreseen the range of creative uses that people would leverage these platforms for. But the unparalleled level of connectivity to millions of other people meant that all of these platforms became more than just hubs for social congregation. Amongst many things, they became online marketplaces. Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, described the internet as the biggest city in the world, home to 2.5 billion residents. I took his comparison a step further. If the internet is a city, then the online platforms are the equivalent of super large shopping centres, with millions of storefronts. Every youtube channel, Tik Tok profile or Instagram page, is essentially a store in one of these shopping centres. What differentiates these online shopping centres from the one that exist in the physical world is that:
- Anyone can set up shop
- The shopping centre has daily traffic in the millions as opposed to thousands
- You can travel across the shopping centre at the speed of a few clicks
- Attention is as valuable a currency as money
When Facebook realised that people weren't only using their platform for social purposes but also commercial, they subsequently rolled out functionality to better cater to the needs of businesses and customers. The problem is no platform can be all things to all people. Because of the vast range of businesses that call Facebook home, the platform’s commerce functionality has to be generic.
Market unbundling is the idea of taking a niche use of an online platform and rolling it out into a new marketplace, one that is better equipped with the necessary functionality that businesses and customers need to exchange value. Fiverr is a great example of this. If I needed a graphic designer on Instagram, I’d first have to search through hashtags, direct message the individual or navigate to their site where communication would ensue. I’d then have to email over the design brief, they’d send me an invoice, I’d send them payment…you get my drift? Fiverr allows you to find freelancers all across the world, review their work, pay for their services and in many cases exchange the work, all without leaving their platform. There’s a market unbundled.
Cotta Unbundled
Now let’s talk Cotta — the vision is clear and simple. We want to improve the representation of black stories within visual media and we want to carve out a space for black photographers in the creator economy. Finding black photographers is hard. Finding images that accurately depict black culture is hard. What occurs as a result is visual content being circulated that poorly represents our community and black photographers not being exposed to the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Going back to my earlier point, the world rewards those who can create, communicate and monetise their value. There’s no shortage of talented black photographers creating incredible content. The problem resides in the latter two areas and this is what Cotta is being built to address.
Communication — It’s easy to find what you’re looking for when you know where to look. Cotta as a central hub for black photographers and their content. We can make a lot more noise when our voices come together. As a photographer, it’s your job to be the most authentic version of yourself and create work that you’re proud of. At Cotta, it’s our job to make sure that as many people as possible see and appreciate what you’ve created. One of the many great things about technology is the tools it provides to scale your message to anybody who wants to hear it, and our product roadmap is packed with features that will allow us to do exactly that
Monetisation — Our goal is to get creators paid. Directly through the licensing/purchase of their images, but also by being a hub that connects photographers with their next gig. Monetisation is the area which I think is most underdeveloped in the creator economy so far. I don’t think the optimal monetisation model has been yet identified where all creators are given their fair share of the spoils from the revenue they enable platforms to generate. There’s a lot of interesting developments around the topic of monetisation for creators, with the emergence of NFTs adding a new dimension to the conversation. I might do a post assessing the different business models across the landscape. As it pertains to Cotta, our mandate is clear. We’re committed to finding the optimal model that allows everybody to eat. Gbogbo wa la ma je breakfast.
