Hey friends, it's Ellen Yin. Welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle, the CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google. For today's bonus episode, I thought it would be great to do an add on to the interview that we published this week with Tiffany Yu all about how she made $100,000 as a content creator, with that being her side hustle to her main business. And in that interview, we briefly touched on some terms like influencer, marketing, UGC, which stands for user generated content, and the role of content creator. And so I just wanted to add my own perspective on top of that conversation, because I think it's complimentary to the discussion we had.
So if you haven't listened to Episode 188, with Tiffany yet, we'll make sure to link that below in the show notes. Give that a listen. It's really, really insightful. And I think it's so cool how we live in an age where all of us can really participate in the Creator economy. And I think Tiffany's story is just such a great example of that.
So anyways, what is the difference, right between these things, these terms that seem very confusing, there's a lot of overlap, I think between these terms of influencer and content creator and UGC creator, so I'm just going to kind of dive into what I think differentiates between these three things. So at their core influencers, content creators, and UGC creators are all content creators, right? Their product essentially, is content. And so that is the same is true for all three, but how they create the content and how they get compensated for the content. More importantly, I think, is where the difference lies.
So let's start with influencers. When you think about influencers in the traditional sense, and traditional, I say that a little bit ironically, because that term has really only emerged in the last decade. But if you think about early influencers, right, like the early 2010s, when like bloggers were essentially the first digital influencers of our time, influencers, typically are people who create content around their lifestyle as a whole. So they really bring you into their entire lives, not just one aspect of it, you get to see who they are as people who their friends are their family, what they do for work, what their homes look like. They share a lot of their big life events with their audiences. So typically the community around an influencer, the people who follow them follow their favorite influencers, because they actually feel a personal connection to who the person is. And/or the lifestyle that the influencer displays on line is aspirational to the followers. So traditionally speaking, it's all about the lifestyle that they portray.
And I think in their earlier years of influencers, the more glamorous the more luxe, the more almost unattainable the lifestyle was, the more those accounts really were successful, because again, it was aspirational. It was something that people looked at, and it was almost like an escape, right? Like, oh, I don't know what it's like to fly on a private jet, or oh, I don't know what it's like to vacation in the most glamorous places all over the world. But my favorite influencer does it and you know, maybe if I buy the products they use on their hair or on their skin, or that purse that they showed in their last post, I can just have like a little taste of what it's like to live that lifestyle.
So I think in the early years, that really was kind of like the norm. But of course nowadays, we see influencers and all sorts of different types of lifestyles, and I don't think it's always necessarily about creating this luxe sort of viewpoint or or aspirational lifestyle, but typically speaking, it's still going to be around lifestyle in general, and who that person is. So that's kind of my take on the type of content that influencers create.
Now, as far as how influencers get compensated, this is where it really gets interesting. And I think a lot of people don't understand this about influencer marketing. When brands pay influencers for a sponsored post or any sort of brand campaign. They're not only paying the influencer for the content that is being posted. It's not just about getting a you know, a sponsor post on the influencers feed. It's actually about paying the influencer for two things content production and content distribution. Let me explain those two things real quick.
Content production is a brand going to an influencer and saying hey, we have this product or we have this upcoming launch or whatever it is that they want to promote. Right? And we want you to go and generate some creative around it. So creative is imagery, video content essentially, right. And basically, when brands are doing this, they are outsourcing that content production to an individual to an influencer or the influencers team, rather than doing that in house. So rather than going themselves and hiring a creative director and a stylist and a producer to go scope out, you know, a set and build a set, right. Rather than paying for a professional photographer, and videographer and makeup artist and a casting director and paying for talent, aka the models or actors whose time they would need to compensate for to bring in house to do a photo shoot, or to do a video shoot. Instead of doing all those things themselves. The brand is just saying, hey, there's already this influencer, who is really creative. And we can pay the influencer a fraction of probably what we would spend in house to produce new creative, and instead, we'll just have the influence or do it.
And as a bonus, in addition to getting that content production, and now getting these new assets, these new image assets, new video assets that we can also utilize. In addition to that, we now also can get additional reach as well through the content distribution, because these influencers obviously have their own audiences, they have their own platforms that the brands do not have access to. Right, they don't have access to the influencers audience unless they pay them for it. And so now, the influencer is creating the content, they're producing the content, but they're also posting the content on the brand's behalf on their own accounts. And so the brand is getting additional distribution by getting in front of the influencers, audience.
So that's how influencers are being paid when you're thinking about brand deals, both sides have to be accounted for. And that's I think, the big mistake that a lot of influencers make. And when I say influencers, I'm not referring to people with a certain size account, I'm not saying, Oh, you're only an influencer, if you have, you know, 500,000 a million plus followers, really, in my opinion, all of us in one way or another influence the people around us, right, whether we do it online or or in person, anybody can have an influence on their network. And if you identify as an influencer, in terms of the work that you do, whether you have 500 followers or 500,000 followers is actually irrelevant in terms of the consideration that either way, no matter the size of your audience, you should be getting paid for both things content production and content distribution, if you're going to be posting what you create to your own accounts, whether through stories, videos of carousel, post, email, blog, to your podcast, write anything you're creating and posting to your own channels. That's distribution.
And I think the easiest way to think about this is to relate it to a more traditional form of sponsored content or advertisement that we may be all familiar with. So let's just take Superbowl Sunday, for example, right? We all have heard before that if you want to play like a 30 second ad during halftime, at the Superbowl, or honestly, anytime during the the whole programming, it's it's going to cost you a pretty Buck, like millions of dollars. And the reason it cost so much is because advertisers and brands understand that on Superbowl Sunday, a large majority of the country of the United States is tuning in live to this programming. So they want access to those eyeballs, right, they want to get in front of 10s of millions or hundreds of millions of people. So for them to be able to do that they have to pay for access to the audience, they have to pay for distribution.
And so it's no different when brands are paying influencers for that distribution, it's it's them just saying, Hey, we don't have access to your audience, we don't own your audience, but we would like to get in front of them. And so for us to do that, you're going to have to make a post about us on your account or to your email newsletter, or on your blog or talk about us on your podcast. And therefore, you know, that has a value to it. There's an inherent value there. But in addition, there's also an inherent value to you actually creating the content. And this is where I think smaller influencers should feel more confident negotiating for themselves is even if your audience is small, and your distribution is not as valuable per se to a brand, the content production still has value to the brand. And you still have to account for that in what you are pricing your packages app because you still have to think about if I'm creating, let's say, you know, three posts for a brand.
That's a lot of time to create those images to come down. Like let's say each one is just a single image. You have to come up with three final images. I'm assuming they're all going to have to be different, right? And how many photos are you going to have to create to select the final three images? And how much time are you spending on the production side of things of mapping out the idea the concept behind the shoot, of setting up the shoot? Are you shooting this yourself? Are you hiring a photographer to shoot this content for you? Will you have to pay for an editor? Are you going to do the editing yourself? Are you gonna have to buy any props for this image? Right? All of these production things are exactly what the brand would have to do themselves that they did this creative in house. But since you're taking care of the content production for them, that needs to have a value associated with it. So don't just price your packages based on Oh, I have five and followers. So therefore, my post is worth $50. Right?
You have to also think about, okay, what is the actual image like, what is the actual content and the production of that content worth? That's just something I really wanted people to understand. Because I think most people only look at the distribution side of things, and they don't look at the production side of things.
So moving on from influencers, if we go to the Creator side of things, I'll kind of divide this into two portions. But the biggest difference between the type of content that creators make versus influencers is creators tend to focus their content on one specific topic or shared interest with their audience. So instead of their content, being about who they are as people holistically, or about letting their audience into their entire lives, they typically are focusing and picking one specific thing that they're creating content around.
So you know, there are some creators, for example, where maybe their entire thing is like, some of my favorite accounts, there's something so satisfying about watching a dirty space become clean, right? So there are some creator accounts where all they show is them cleaning, like a bathroom, or a room or a kitchen or whatever. And making things go from dirty to clean. And you may not even know who's behind the account, like you may know nothing about who they are, where they live, who their family is, what interests and hobbies they have, it's irrelevant because you're following that account, because you care about that specific type of content, which is claiming content, right.
So that's an example of like how a creator account would be different than an influencer account. Same thing maybe like there's some accounts, I know creator accounts where you do see the person like you do know who the person is. A good example of this would be someone who, let's say, I think there's an account on tik tok, I can't remember what it's called. Because I don't personally spend a lot of time on tik tok, but I've heard of this account before, it's this woman who always shows like, what they're eating in their fridge like leftovers. So it's like lunches, but always like leftovers, right. And you may kind of get to know this person a little bit through this content, but you're only seeing one aspect of their lives, like you're literally seeing inside their fridge and what they're eating for lunch with you. And it's their leftovers, but like you don't know anything else about them, you don't necessarily know, you know what they do for work, you haven't seen the rest of their house, you don't really know their relationships or other parts of their life.
So again, I think Creator content is very centered around one specific interest or one specific aspect of someone's life versus the whole. So that would be I think, the biggest difference between a content creator and an influencer in terms of what type of content they create, now, how they get compensated. This is where it can get a little interesting because a brand can work with a creator, just the same, right? They can also say, hey, I want you to create this content for me, and I want you to publish it to your own platforms. If that's the case, then the compensation factor is really no different than how influencers get paid, you have to charge for both the distribution and the production.
However, there's this new class of content creators, called UGC creators. And again, UGC stands for user generated content. And this specific class of creators really focuses on only creating content for brands but not posting it to their own channel. So what's really cool is like UGC creators don't even have to have any sort of established audience presence of their own, you could be a very successful UGC creator, making six figures a year, right or more, and literally have zero followers online, because the distribution is irrelevant to the brand. They're just hiring you for that content production service. They're just hiring you to make the creative, the videos are the images, and the you're sending that creative to the brand and the brands using it on their own platforms.
So again, in this instance, it's no different than if a brand went out and hired a professional photographer videographer to create or capture some sort of content. And the photographer and the videographer don't have to share it to their own channels, right? It's like we're creating this product, this content and giving it to you the brand and then you the brand can decide what to do with it. So that's essentially what UGC creators do is they create content for brands in a specific style. So UGC gets its term from as the name as the name assumes user generated content.
So we've all kind of do this whether knowingly or unknowingly in our lives. Anytime we document anything in our lives, any experiences in our lives that are in some way, shape or form associated with a brand or a product. So, for example, let's say you go out to dinner with your friends at a new restaurant that opened in town and you love it, and you take a little story and you share, you know, your dinner and like what is on everyone's plate, even though you may not be thinking about that in terms of like, Oh, I'm trying to get paid for this, because obviously, in that instance, you're not you're just sharing your life, right. But that's user generated content, that's powerful, that is content that the restaurant would probably find valuable, and go, Oh, my gosh, like, it's gonna be more powerful for friends saw you eating dinner there, and seeing your recommendations, they're more likely to go visit that restaurant next weekend with their own friends or their own family, than if the restaurant themselves made this really polished piece of video creative, like a commercial and posted about it right.
It's that word of mouth type of trust and credibility, that can only really be felt when a peer creates a piece of content versus when the brand creates a piece of content. So brands are more and more recognizing this. And they're recognizing that there's power in more organic type of content where the user is authentically sharing their experience around something. And so they're hiring actual professional creators now, like UGC creators, to create that style of content where it's just a random person, it's probably not someone famous, it's not someone necessarily that you would think of as an influencer. It's just another person like you creating content about a brand or a product that is in that very authentic style that then gets shared with the brand. And the brand gets to utilize that in their own ads in their own social content, in their own marketing.
So that's kind of the high level breakdown of my opinion on the difference between UGC creators and creators at large, and then also how that differs from influencers. I hope that this dissection was interesting to you. Again, this is just my opinion, there's many many opinions and definitions out there of you know, what these different roles look like. But I think that we can all agree that at the end of the day, they're all content creators is just about how they approach content and maybe how they monetize their content. But I love talking about this stuff. Because I think it's so important for all of us to understand whether or not you participate I think in just an understanding it it makes you more aware even as a consumer of you know, the type of content you're seeing and how that may influence or impact your decisions. So anyways, you know, I can nerd out about this stuff all day. But I will leave that with you to process if you learn something new. I would love for you to share this on stories. Tag us @MissEllenYin @CubicletoCEO, and share with us what you've learned or if you have an additional layer you want to add to this conversation. Please share your hot take on this and layer it on top of what I've shared here in today's episode. Thank you as always for listening and I'll catch you next week.
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