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Trending The Market
Repeat Creator Partnerships Multiply Success
The Influencer Marketing Factory released its annual Brand Deals Report last week, highlighting the biggest trends across the brand-creator economy.
The Big Pitch: The data is in — brands that secure longer-term creator partnerships across platforms drive stronger relationships with talent, deeper customer retention, and higher earnings potential.
The Fine Print: Analyzing over 316,000 creator accounts and 7,800+ U.S.-based creators, the new Brand Deals Report came away with three key findings that underscore the need for long-tail creator partnerships.
Across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, one-of creator partnerships dominate the deal landscape, but YouTube organically has a stronger retention advantage because of deeper creator loyalty.
YouTube’s retention advantage also extends to how creators get paid — affiliate deals are the top way creators partner with brands on the platform, which incentivizes a longer-term relationship for both parties.
Naturally, that has led to YouTube being the best place for longer-term deals — the report found that the average brand partnership lasts 13.5 months and has a 50.9% repeat rate.
These takeaways don’t mean that brands should funnel their entire creator-sponsorship budget into YouTube. Instead, it highlights what YouTube is doing right and the ample opportunity to change the status quo on other platforms. A multi-creator, multi-platform approach produces strongest results in the aggregate.
The Analysis: When brands and creators work longer and more deeply together, they’re co-building a company’s online reputation.
That has dual benefits:
Repeat deals with creators provide a content consistency, better campaign performance, and increased brand safety because your customers start to view the creators as ambassadors. There’s power in familiarity.
45% of creators surveyed “value stability, consistency, and deeper brand alignment over one-off campaigns,” especially since brand partnerships now account for nearly 13% of their annual income. They want to feel like part of the team.
Not every company has the budget to hire a MrBeast or Mikayla Nogueira. But by offering longer, more-lucrative partnerships, the top-rung creators may be more incentivized to work with a brand.
Who knows, it could be the beginning of a beautiful — and lucrative — friendship.
Building The Stack
LinkedIn Wants To Join The Creator Party
LinkedIn is reportedly planning to host up to 4,000 paid events featuring content creators in the second half of this year. The professional-networking site has evolved into a multi-modal media platform focused on thought leadership in recent years, with original content from influencers like Steven Bartlett and Rebecca Minkoff. So, the company sees events as a multi-billion opportunity to capitalize on expert talent and organic brand relationships.
X Plans To Play Middleman To Brands And Creators
X has historically not been a hotbed platform for content creators, but the social platform is hoping to change that narrative with a new feature called “Creator Connect.” It uses AI to connect brands or campaigns with relevant creators on X, and even pinpoint what format the brand wants the creators to work in — video, text, audio, etc. The hope is that Creator Connect will give more opportunities to smaller, niche creators on the platform.
YouTube’s Shorts Revenue Goes Long
According to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, the platform’s vertical short-form video product, Shorts, has now reached revenue-parity with its traditional long-form content per hour watched. That’s due to increased ad-impression opportunities, an overall surge in usage, and better algorithmic targeting using AI. Overall, it shows the explosive growth of vertical short-form video… and the power of YouTube in competing with TikTok and Reels in the format.
Social Updates
YouTube is rolling out its deepfake-detection tool to all users after testing it with celebrities and select members of its Partner Program.
YouTube is also testing a new distribution feature dubbed “Top Fans” that lets creators only share their videos with their top 1% of engaged followers.
TikTok reports that 67% of consumers use TikTok Shop to search for new brands and products.
X is trying to push users toward its paid-premium tier by capping free accounts to just 50 posts and 200 replies a day.
LinkedIn is introducing new Premium Business profiles in a boost to entrepreneurs.
Meta debuted a new Reddit-like community app called “Forum” that acts as an extension to its Facebook Groups feature.
Spotify is hoping to rival Patreon by introducing a creator-focused “Memberships” product.
Wrapping Up
Last week we told you we had an announcement coming. We meant it.
This week we're putting the final touches on it. A hint: It's something we think will matter to everyone building inside the brand-creator economy.
So, stay tuned. It’ll be worth the wait.
Back in your inbox next week with the latest on the brand-creator economy.
— The Authentic Team