Creator Economy Summit: Content creators are becoming the enterprises of today, say VCs

(L-R) Lal Chand Bisu, Co-founder and CEO, Kuku FM; Madhukar Sinha, founding partner, India Quotient; Chandra Srikanth, Editor, Tech & Startups, Moneycontrol; Mayank Khanduja, Partner, Elevation Capital and Ranjeet Pratap Singh, co-founder and CEO, Pratilipi

Venture capital investors Elevation Capital and India Quotient are open to betting on content creators as they are fast shifting from being just personal brands to building new-age enterprises. The opportunities in the creator economy are further spruced up by newer monetisation channels, the investors said at the Moneycontrol Creator Economy Summit on October 31.

Both Elevation Capital and India Quotient have numerous content-creation platforms in their portfolios. The common one between the two is ShareChat, a leading social media and short video content app.

Mayank Khanduja, Partner, Elevation Capital said, “The way to think of content creators is that it’s an enterprise of today and not an individual. That one person is bringing the labour and entrepreneurial spirit, but there are other tools available to run a business. This could be infra to build content, payment platforms, etc.”

“When one person is creating their own follower base to create a hedge and then build their business over it, why not invest…Now we will look at it as how ambitious the person is about it, whether it’s a merchandising business or a multi-generational business that they are looking to build,” he added.

Khanduja believes that all the tools that help creators build content are fantastic investment opportunities.

According to Madhukar Sinha, founding partner at India Quotient, content creators are bringing a generational shift with what they can do.

“Ten years ago, the only opportunities to make money for individuals was to do business or work at a job. But this opportunity for individuals to do something meaningful for themselves be it singing, dancing, or educating someone, and create an impact, that’s a generational shift we are betting on,” he said.

Monetisation opportunities

Khanduja and Sinha were speaking on the panel, which also had Lal Chand Bisu, Co-founder and CEO, Kuku FM, and Ranjeet Pratap Singh, co-founder and CEO, Pratilipi.

The creator economy has also transitioned from primarily being ad-driven to diversifying into other monetisation channels like microtransactions and subscriptions.

According to Khanduja, real businesses now have the potential to be built in the creator economy space, because monetisation has become real and they are serving creators and their users.

“Earlier monetisation was just through ads, now micro-transactions are getting big – could be 3X more revenue for the creator. They can get revenue directly from users. Now things are settling and new business models are emerging,” he said.

Bisu added, “Monetisation is a lot easier now. It was never the money being the issue, it was having medium and tools like UPI. Now you can make products that can work on micro transactions and subscriptions.”

But along with monetisation mediums, having quality content being produced too has helped the movement, believes Pratilipi’s Singh.

“The bigger inflection was also the need to have a critical mass where you have enough high-quality content that differentiated for people who wanted to pay. UPI as a transaction medium accelerated the processed, but what really started this was Hotstar. Hotstar brought this high-quality differentiated content with Game of Thrones and IPL online and people were ready to pay,” Singh said.

Sinha, meanwhile, gave a reality check adding that a content business can never be monetised similar to a services business. There will be a power play similar to the internet world.

“90 percent of the content will be free, those who are able to provide added value and differentiate will be able to utilise the opportunity. But still, a major chunk of revenue for these businesses will only come from 5-10 percent paid users. Expecting each and every Indian user to pay won’t happen as we are not going to be like the US in the next 20 years,” he said.

AI reshaping content creation

As artificial intelligence takes over the technology world globally and many fear that it might impact their jobs too, especially in the content creation space, Singh and Bisu believe that it will instead open doors for more content creators to come in and increase their productivity simultaneously.

“The big three technologies in the modern age according to me are the printing press, the internet, and now AI. With each of these evolutions, the distributors of content suddenly increased. With AI too, a lot more people will be able to become creators, including for books, and most successful creators will have even more outside impact,” Singh said.

Bisu shared that AI is increasing the output of what creators are producing. Giving an example of his own company, he said, “At Kuku FM, earlier if a person needed 10 hours to create a story, they are able to do it in 2-3 hours now using AI. Creators are able to automate a lot of aspects like thumbnails, fact check, etc.”