CreatorScape 2021

Last year the map included 290 companies. This year 438. That's a 51% increase.

The map: https://influence.co/go/infographics/creator-economy-companies-creatorscape-2021

The data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nben7N57myNNeAJ1FsYtkjNx-sGGp35DSZpcwrJvpsk/edit#gid=0

Insight from influence.co CEO: https://twitter.com/nielr1/status/1403383934394658817

I wanted to note a few interesting points from the CEO that might be of interest to indiehackers.

Courses had the strongest surge in major participants and funding. We think there is a high density of knowledge-sharing creators vs. other creator categories to target. Real money moves around in this segment as well. We expect creator edu-tech to get a large amount of the investment dollars in the next 12 months as there is clearly a massive product-market fit for creator-led education.

We’re starting to see lots of derivative creator monetization companies with little differentiation. In some cases they have nearly the exact same wording on their homepages. This makes us think we’ve reached basecamp one on the hike up creator economy mountain and we’ll see a plateauing of innovation in core creator monetization products for a while. A race to accumulate market share will follow that slow down.

We still don’t have any specific categories for Podcasting or Livestreaming and have included solutions for those (such as Red Circle) in their respective broader categories. It feels like we’re not quite at the tipping point where those categories are big enough to warrant their own breakouts.