#### The Creator Economy Is Built on Rented Land. Hosts and Agencies, Go Knock on the Door.

Jesse Friedman: There are more than 200 million creators worldwide, building a following on platforms they don’t control. They pour years into audiences they can’t export, connections they can’t control, and income streams that can vanish at the whim of a machine algorithm. And unfortunately, most don’t know how fragile it all is.

These influencers, these creators, these musicians, and craftsmen, and builders are begging for guidance and a home to call their own. No one is speaking to them outside of these closed platforms and we can do better by them and the open web.

I wrote about this recently in an essay about the Automattic documentary Code for the People:

“You are leasing a podium from them, and you get to keep it for as long as you keep the attention of those standing before it. That’s it. You’re a monkey on a box whipping yourself to perform, and if you fail, if you falter, if you make one mistake, you’re often left standing on your podium with no one to perform for.”

Creators are being shadow-banned, demonetized, and buried by a feed that cares little for them. The built-in audience of closed platforms is beckoning creators. The ease of use and shortcut access to millions of viewers creates anticipatory anxiety in the people looking to get started. The closed platforms have a gravity that draws you in but they don’t have to be the only answer. Influencers and creators need to learn of the open web in a language they speak so they can protect the audience they are building and so we can grow the open web.

## Why they haven’t moved

The creators aren’t staying on these platforms because they’re built to help them be successful. They are built to create interchangeable podiums to swap in the most attractive creator for the most attentive audiences. But the creator is a pawn in this algorithmic game and so the foundation for their business is on fragile ground. We need to address the problem by providing tools and services designed for creators on solid ground.

You see, TikTok simply asks a creator to press record. Hosting asks you to learn the skills needed to be a web designer, an information architect, and a sysadmin. That gap highlights the blank canvas problem, and it kills more migrations to the open web than pricing ever will. We need to do better, but this isn’t WordPress the software’s responsibility, it’s the responsibility of those who sell hosting and website marketing solutions. WordPress is meant to be a solution used by millions. The way we present it, market it, configure it, and ship it is how we address specific needs and verticals.

## Build the site before they arrive

I’d like to ask hosts to stop thinking in terms of selling hosting to these types of customers. Agencies, developers, and those working in IT or systems understand hosting and you should go all in on describing your infrastructure for those customers. You should double down on your performance, security and reliability and if you’re a WP Cloud customer, we can help you do that while showcasing that you’re on the best and only WordPress-as-a-Service infrastructure.

Creators, influencers, and those eking out a living on social media aren’t interested in CPUs, RAM, or uptime. They don’t want to learn about WAFs and automated real-time failover. They want to know that they are going to sign up and get something live quickly, and unfortunately the ease of setting up a social media profile is the benchmark they are measuring us against.

Ready-made link-in-bio sites. Consider building a WordPress theme that allows for a single page link-in-bio. Onboard them right into a settings page in the wp-admin that asks them to enter all their links. Give them the chance to add a photo and a color scheme and call it a day.

Creator themes that mirror their content. Give the creators the ability to pull in content from their social platforms. Embed their YouTube videos, and create simple link outs to all their platforms. Make it easy for them to create a content hub on WordPress that they can flywheel out to all social media platforms.

Pre-configured tooling, not a plugin directory. Be opinionated. Include WooCommerce out of the box for merchant solutions. Preconfigure Jetpack to offer super fast image delivery and VideoPress for ad-free video delivery. Choose your favorite SEO plugin and have it on and configured by default.

I talk to hosts all the time that don’t want to make decisions on behalf of their users because they get loud demanding vanilla WordPress. The key here is to segment your customers and send the ones that don’t know how to build a website down a flow that has all the decisions made for them. Help these customers own their connections with their audience by making them feel that WordPress was built for them. The customer list is the connection, and the connection is the whole point:

“You can’t lose your connection to an audience built on the open web. Yes, they can unsubscribe. Yes, they can move on. But the important detail to remember there is that those are individual decisions made by real people.”

## Don’t market to fear but education

Your campaigns shouldn’t instill fear in creators that platforms are risky. If they know, then your marketing is already well positioned. If they don’t know, they need to be informed and you have to address the problem with empathy. We need to raise awareness around how fast someone can have the rug pulled out from under them on a platform they don’t control. Ask them how they would get in touch with their audience to tell them about the new account they created after being shadow-banned. Lead them to the idea that they can solve for this all in advance and take control of the audience they are building on behalf of another platform.

“Own your audience connection” is a stronger headline than any feature list. Agencies, this is for you too. Put together a compelling hosting package with migration services, content mirroring, and launch-day setups. Creators will pay to avoid the blank canvas and if we do a good job of lessening the emphasis on designing a website and pivot towards configuring a profile, you’ll be speaking their language and giving them the tools they’ll need to expand their WordPress later after they have gained familiarity with it.

## The foundation needs to be strong

The entire message we need to get across is the value of the open web and the ownership you maintain with your audience. They need to be made aware that there is another option to build a foundation on top of. And in that argument we can talk — amongst ourselves — of the value of a strong infrastructural foundation. Heed this advice and you’ll be managing the site production and launch for the creators and in that same vein, WP Cloud will manage the entire stack, performance, security and uptime for you.

With WP Cloud you can pitch stability and feel comfortable knowing you can offer 100% uptime even with traffic spikes from viral posts. WP Cloud is purpose built for WordPress at scale. We define the guardrails so we can control the entire infrastructure platform top to bottom. Just as I advised above on going after creators, we do the same. We are very opinionated about the tools and services built into WP Cloud so that we can be absolutely sure we can maximize site speed, harden security and keep sites up even with unreasonably high traffic spikes and bursts of e-commerce orders. Additionally, you can take advantage of our free add-on — golden images — which allows you to preconfigure sites for specific verticals and instantly clone them during checkout so the site is up and ready to go for the creator before they even put their credit card away.

Creators are one of the fastest-growing and wildly underserved small-business segments on the net. They can not only be a strong book of business for any host, they can also bring an influx of content and traffic back to the open web, which is the best thing we can do for our industry and our freedom.

I’m Jesse Friedman — Head of WP Cloud at Automattic — and if you’re a host or agency looking to solve these problems with WP Cloud please reach out to me here. I’d love to chat.