India Internet Day 1: Creators need to own their audience to keep up growth momentum

Creators should proactively own their audience and distribution they have on multiple tech platforms such as Instagram so that they can keep their growth momentum, especially for those with large followers, according to experts.

On the first day of the TiE Delhi-NCR India Internet Day event on September 23, creators shared that while big tech has helped build community and the whole creator economy, it is a double-edged sword and makes it harder for those with larger audiences to grow on the platform.

Creator economy

This is important. The last few years have seen the creator economy take off as the number of internet users in the country continues to increase. The report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar-ICUBE, a consulting firm, revealed that India will have 900 million active internet users by 2025, up from 622 million in 2020.

For this reason, India is a key focus market for global platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and Google, given the sheer size of users in the country, and are looking to attract more creators to their platforms.

Pooja Dubey, Founder, Turnip, a platform for gaming creators, said that such platforms have enabled the growth of creators across the country and have made it possible for even small creators to monetise content.

But there are also challenges.

Creators and big tech

Videt Jaiswal, Co-founder, Airblack, an online makeup learning platform, said, “My perspective is that it (big tech platforms) is a double-edged sword.” For one, the audience creators don’t get to own their audience and once you reach a certain size, it becomes harder to grow. At the same time, it is harder to ignore platforms as well given the large number of consumers who use these platforms.

“Every single person is either spending time on platforms such as  Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. So you cannot avoid them. One of the things that we have told creators is that you don’t need to think about these algorithms as enemies, make them work for you,” Jaiswal said.

For creators new to the platform, making content in the right format on the platform can help them grow. But this works only for creators, who are small and mid-sized. “Of course as you are growing bigger, we have seen that the bias for many of these platforms is they are reliant on many creators instead of fewer creators, so they tend to sort of slow you down,” Jaiswal said.

Vaibhav Sisinty, Founder – GrowthSchool, an online learning platform, explained, “All these platforms want more creators to come in and these new creators want motivation to be consistent on the platform. So they are incentivized to push their new profiles. Also on the feed, there is only so much real estate one can push out.”

As a result, for long-time creators, growth begins to plateau or even fall after a point. This is why having one's own audience and distribution channel becomes important, the creators said.

“The way I have done it for myself is, from the stage where I have like 20,000-30,000 followers, I started to build my own email list and WhatsApp groups, discord community so that I can own that audience. This is so that you are growing together and tomorrow when you wake up and your YouTube account is locked and you are not crying. You have a parallel thing to do,” Sisinty added.