Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fights over Valuable Social Media(wsj.com)
wsj.com
Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fights over Valuable Social Media
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/tiktok-influencers-marriage-divorce-youtube-instagram-a73c0e34
3 comments
https://archive.is/88RI6
TikTok? A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I am honestly surprised at these numbers!
> There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.
> The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. U.S. advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023, according to Statista.
> There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.
> The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. U.S. advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023, according to Statista.
That doesn't even begin to add up. If you say the big bucks don’t come from followers but advertiser but marketing (so that is the majority source of funds), and there is only $27 billion flowing in from advertisers, but there is 44% of 26 million content creators with it as their full time job, you have 11,440,000 whose full time income combined is $54 billion or less, or something under $4,720 for each full-time worker (and its even less if you assume that any of the non-full-time creators get any money at all.
I’m guesssing that the population responding to the survey from which the 44% full-time figure was derived was not even remotely a representative sample of the 26 million content creators.
There's going to be a long tail of low-earners, with the top end of the earning scale being a vanishingly small number of creators.
It's also important to remember something that is perhaps unstated in the context of this article: this is about couples who may continue to have their traditional full-time job, but are able to reduce their hours or efforts through pivoting to self-employment or so-called lifestyle businesses that may even cross-promote their social media work. Also, just because you're getting paid predominantly via advertisers doesn't preclude you from having other kinds of remuneration from the same work, such as ad-free and/or early access to paid subscribers via Patreon. Also, TikTok and Youtube live broadcasts can be paywalled or restricted to only allow comments during the livestream chat by paid subs. TikTok and Youtube also support direct tipping mechanisms, like Super Chats.
I haven't even mentioned other kinds of revenue stream enhancement, like a second channel you can use to cross-promote you main channel. Many creators stream on Twitch these days also, even or perhaps especially if their main content isn't gaming related.
One of my favorite comedians, for example, probably makes a ton more from his Twitch streams than he does from comedy shows, and this is someone who has had multiple seasons of his own sketch show on broadcast tv, which was later syndicated via Netflix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limmy
Then there are people like Ze Frank, who got in early on streaming video online, even before there were payment mechanisms at all, before Youtube even existed. He was able to also end up in R&D at Buzzfeed for a time, a position I'm sure he made some money doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_Frank
It's also important to remember something that is perhaps unstated in the context of this article: this is about couples who may continue to have their traditional full-time job, but are able to reduce their hours or efforts through pivoting to self-employment or so-called lifestyle businesses that may even cross-promote their social media work. Also, just because you're getting paid predominantly via advertisers doesn't preclude you from having other kinds of remuneration from the same work, such as ad-free and/or early access to paid subscribers via Patreon. Also, TikTok and Youtube live broadcasts can be paywalled or restricted to only allow comments during the livestream chat by paid subs. TikTok and Youtube also support direct tipping mechanisms, like Super Chats.
I haven't even mentioned other kinds of revenue stream enhancement, like a second channel you can use to cross-promote you main channel. Many creators stream on Twitch these days also, even or perhaps especially if their main content isn't gaming related.
One of my favorite comedians, for example, probably makes a ton more from his Twitch streams than he does from comedy shows, and this is someone who has had multiple seasons of his own sketch show on broadcast tv, which was later syndicated via Netflix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limmy
Then there are people like Ze Frank, who got in early on streaming video online, even before there were payment mechanisms at all, before Youtube even existed. He was able to also end up in R&D at Buzzfeed for a time, a position I'm sure he made some money doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_Frank
> There's going to be a long tail of low-earners, with the top end of the earning scale being a vanishingly small number of creators
Right, which makes the numbers sillier: flat distribution with the highest possible total consistent with advertising being the prediminant source of money with all the funds distributed to the 44% of content creators that are claimed to have that as their full-time job isn't realistic on any of those points, its just the most generous set of assumptions to the article’s claims, and they are flatly preposterous on those assumptions. A long tail distribution among the “full-time” subset, changing nothing else, makes it worse—the median full-time content creator would then have to be making far less than the $4,720/yr mean.
> It's also important to remember something that is perhaps unstated in the context of this article: this is about couples who may continue to have their traditional full-time job, but are able to reduce their hours or efforts through pivoting to self-employment or so-called lifestyle businesses that may even cross-promote their social media work
It's not, though, sonce the calculation assumes all the money — both the $27 billion from the predominant share due to advertising the additional $27 billion that is the most that could also be in the market if the advertising was the predominant amount — was split between just the 44% that are supposedly full-time content creators.
> Also, just because you're getting paid predominantly via advertisers doesn't preclude you from having other kinds of remuneration from the same work, such as ad-free and/or early access to paid subscribers via Patreon.
It means there isn’t more from other sources, which is all the calculation assumes.
> I haven't even mentioned other kinds of revenue stream enhancement, like a second channel you can use to cross-promote you main channel. Many creators stream on Twitch these days also, even or perhaps especially if their main content isn't gaming related.
Having multiple streaming channels that are monetized doesn't change the calculation unless you are arguing that the claim of 26 million unique content creators is not accurate, and is actually a count of channels, not people, with some people accounting cor multiple of those channels. But then the significance is not what the article was portraying.
Right, which makes the numbers sillier: flat distribution with the highest possible total consistent with advertising being the prediminant source of money with all the funds distributed to the 44% of content creators that are claimed to have that as their full-time job isn't realistic on any of those points, its just the most generous set of assumptions to the article’s claims, and they are flatly preposterous on those assumptions. A long tail distribution among the “full-time” subset, changing nothing else, makes it worse—the median full-time content creator would then have to be making far less than the $4,720/yr mean.
> It's also important to remember something that is perhaps unstated in the context of this article: this is about couples who may continue to have their traditional full-time job, but are able to reduce their hours or efforts through pivoting to self-employment or so-called lifestyle businesses that may even cross-promote their social media work
It's not, though, sonce the calculation assumes all the money — both the $27 billion from the predominant share due to advertising the additional $27 billion that is the most that could also be in the market if the advertising was the predominant amount — was split between just the 44% that are supposedly full-time content creators.
> Also, just because you're getting paid predominantly via advertisers doesn't preclude you from having other kinds of remuneration from the same work, such as ad-free and/or early access to paid subscribers via Patreon.
It means there isn’t more from other sources, which is all the calculation assumes.
> I haven't even mentioned other kinds of revenue stream enhancement, like a second channel you can use to cross-promote you main channel. Many creators stream on Twitch these days also, even or perhaps especially if their main content isn't gaming related.
Having multiple streaming channels that are monetized doesn't change the calculation unless you are arguing that the claim of 26 million unique content creators is not accurate, and is actually a count of channels, not people, with some people accounting cor multiple of those channels. But then the significance is not what the article was portraying.
I found the reports so we can dig into this with some more specificity.
https://www.keller-advisory.com/creators-uncovered-insights-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240912125625/https://www.kelle...
https://www.keller-advisory.com/_files/ugd/70233f_e15057a63d...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240912232256/https://www.kelle...
I think this is the source for the $26 billion number:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1414663/influencer-marke...
> In 2022, influencer marketing spending in the United States equaled 22.19 billion U.S. dollars, which was less than global spending by close to 7 billion, which stood at around 29.14 billion in the given year. During 2023, global influencer marketing spending reached 34.08 billion, while in the U.S. it amounted to 26.09 billion dollars.
https://www.keller-advisory.com/creators-uncovered-insights-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240912125625/https://www.kelle...
https://www.keller-advisory.com/_files/ugd/70233f_e15057a63d...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240912232256/https://www.kelle...
I think this is the source for the $26 billion number:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1414663/influencer-marke...
> In 2022, influencer marketing spending in the United States equaled 22.19 billion U.S. dollars, which was less than global spending by close to 7 billion, which stood at around 29.14 billion in the given year. During 2023, global influencer marketing spending reached 34.08 billion, while in the U.S. it amounted to 26.09 billion dollars.