Social Media Needs To Be Generous To Content Creators

There are many ways one could try to measure if social platforms care for creators but one of the simplest is to listen to how often these firms talk about creators during their quarterly earnings calls.

Photo Insert: "Bogart the Explorer from Davao City" is one of the pioneering content creators in the Philippines.

Based on recent calls, one might get the impression that Snap and Meta are deprioritizing creators, while Alphabet (via YouTube) can’t get enough of socials’ main characters, Alexandra Sternlicht reported for Data Sheet.

In the latest Meta earnings call, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg only mentioned creators once.

As he talked broadly about artificial intelligence opportunities across Meta’s family of apps, he noted “I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses.”

Meta beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, earnings, and users in the first quarter with year-over-year revenue growth after three quarters of revenue declines, as per CNBC.

Snap mentioned creators when prompted by investors in this quarter’s earnings call.

Downplaying the investment into creators and highlighting the income squeezed from their content is a far cry from this time last year when Snap called out “creators” a hearty 16 times during the first quarter earnings call.

Snap clocked revenue at $989 million this quarter, down 7% from the same period of last year when it generated $1.06 billion. After posting results from Q1 2023, the stock plunged.

YouTube operated at a loss this year. The $6.7 billion it generated in the first quarter of 2023 advertising dropped 2.6% from this period last year. It’s a less brutal decline than the 7.8% drop it suffered in the last quarter.

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