APRIL 20, 2021

Welcome to The Tilt, a twice-a-week newsletter, for content creators who want to be or already are content entrepreneurs. We talk aspiration, inspiration, revenue, audiences, tech, trends, and more to help your content business thrive.

What’s the news?

A confluence of the explosive gig economy and the growing creator economy is happening.

It’s a second renaissance for content creators, according to Patreon CEO John Conte: “We are literally at the beginning of a new renaissance, a world in which tens of millions of creative people are building businesses and building their dreams and making it happen.”

Isn’t the gig economy like ride-sharing drivers?

Yes, Uber and Lyft drivers get the headlines. But the gig economy is much bigger. It’s really any short-term, contractual work. One estimate says creatives make up the largest group at 14% (Forbes).

What’s the creator economy?

“It’s the class of businesses centered around independent content creators, curators, and community builders including social media influencers, bloggers, and videographers,” according to SignalFire.

How big is the creator economy?

Only 4% (2M) of the estimated 50M content creators are professionals, according to SignalFire. But “professional” by those standards only means making some money.

The Tilt Talk and Advice

What’s the tilt?

Being a content gig worker – getting paid to create content such as freelancers or social media accounts with intermittent ad revenue – is good. Being a content entrepreneur is better.

Are you a content gig worker?

If you’re thrilled to reach 10K followers on YouTube and even more excited to get $100 in ad revenue from those videos, you’re a gig creator or a hobbyist creator.

If you operate as a freelancer whose income depends on clients contracting with you to create the content for them, you’re a content gig worker.

Are you a content entrepreneur?

If your goal is to build and grow an audience through content and eventually make money from that content, you are a content entrepreneur, according to our definition at The Tilt.

As SignalFire explains: “The job has come to encompass product management, design, community engagement, e-commerce, and data science along with being an entertainer.”

What one thing should a content entrepreneur-to-be do?

You should focus on a niche audience and spend every day understanding what that audience needs and wants.

What one thing should an experienced content entrepreneur do?

Ensure you’re developing and following a set of processes to make your content success repeatable and scalable.

What’s the future for content entrepreneurship?

It’s the fastest-growing new business sector, according to The Tilt founder Joe Pulizzi: “These individuals will build massive audiences and monetize those audiences in dozens of ways. They will not only make money as media companies do, but they will sell products and services if they wish.”

As Patreon’s CEO John Conte explains: “People are starting to realize that creativity is a real, viable, sustainable life for people. And that’s a sea change in the world.”

– Ann Gynn

To learn more about the content business community and two more things every content entrepreneur should be doing, read the longer story.

Entrepreneur: Wally Koval

Biz: Accidentally Wes Anderson​

Tilt: Travel stops that look like they could be in a Wes Anderson movie

Channel: Instagram Followers: 1.4M

Money Business: Time to first dollar – nine months; time to leaving 9-to-5 – 2.5 years

Rev Streams: Brand partnerships, book, merch

Marketing Mix: Word of mouth, media coverage

The Tilt’s Favorite Actionable Advice

• Be consistent: Set an expectation with your audience. Though Wally hasn’t missed a day in three years, fans speak up when he doesn’t post at his usual time.
• Have conversations, not posts: Talking with your community is better than posting at your community.
• Create a big vision: Wally wants to build a brand that everybody wants a T-shirt of

Some of the Story:

A fan of filmmaker Wes Anderson, Wally Koval loved to view images that looked like they could be in one of his movies. As a fan of travel, he wanted to visit the places in the images. But the captions didn’t say where they were. So Wally started posting one picture with a helpful caption every day to Instagram.

As his followers grew, Wally added even more locally relevant hashtags and posted submissions sent by fans of Wes Anderson and Wally’s Instagram account. Major international tourist boards and media companies began following him. And after reaching around 3,000 followers, Wally switched his Insta handle and Accidentally Wes Anderson was born.

In the past four years, Accidentally Wes Anderson has become a brand. In 2020, Wally published a bestselling book of the same name. The AWA website now is a searchable destination for adventurers. And it even has its own merch.

And Instagram? He’s still posting every day.

– Joe Pulizzi

All the Story: To learn more about Wally Koval, the content entrepreneur, and Accidentally Wes Anderson, the content business, check out the longer story. They’re also featured in the newest edition of the Content Inc. book this May. Pre-order today.

Know a content creator who’s going full tilt? DM us or email ann@thetilt.com.

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Caught on … Twitter

“I’ve relentlessly obsessed over my videos every day for a decade and reinvested every single dollar back into the channel.” – Mr.Beast​

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Teacher Chris Ulmer and his students wanted to share what life was like living with disabilities/neurodiversities. No publishers were interested in their book idea. So they started creating videos.

Six years later, Special Books by Special Kids is a multimedia experience that has netted over 2 billion views on social. Chris and his wife Alyssa Porter formed the nonprofit fives years ago – the same year Chris left his teaching job to work full time on SBSK.

While direct donations are possible on their website, SBSK has a Patreon community (2,100+ patrons, $11,000 monthly revenue). “The SBSK Patreon will allow us to create video interviews free from the dependency on social media platforms and their ever-changing policies,” Chris and Alyssa write. (That’s music to The Tilt’s ears.)

Check out Special Books by Special Kids: YouTube (2.97M), Facebook (3.6M), Instagram (672K), Patreon (2.1K)

Tilt Takeaway: Don’t let your business’ future depend on gatekeepers. With powerful storytelling, you can grab – and grow – an audience and do incredible things.

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Content entrepreneurs with large audiences can afford to focus on one revenue source, but the creator middle class needs to diversify to survive. Hear what Joe Pulizzi, founder of The Tilt, has to say in his weekly podcast, Content Inc. (It’s worth the five minutes.)

Interesting behavior on social media. Pew Research reports the number of young adults (18 to 29) who use TikTok is about half of those who use Instagram (71%) and Snapchat (65%). In the latest This Old Marketing, Joe and Robert Rose talk about other research that says Instagram is trending down for kids and the long-term implications.

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We’re launching this feature soon. But we need your help. Let us know who to feature (self-nominations are encouraged). Use #TheTilt. DM us. Or email Ann@TheTilt.com.

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Your team for this issue: Joe Pulizzi, Ann Gynn, Laura Kozak, Dave Anthony, and Mackenzie Pippin

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If you create content, please complete this 7-minute survey and get a chance to win some Bose Soundlink headphones.

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