#61 - IPO's are Booming, Influencers are Making Millions and the K Shaped Recovery in America.
#61 - IPO's are Booming, Influencers are Making Millions and the K Shaped Recovery in America.
In this week's episode, we're talking about the upcoming US election and how the “k shaped recovery” is effecting voters’ expectations, the business of influencers/content creators, and why you need to understand them as the present, and future business owners. Lastly, we touch on the BOOMING IPO market and why it’s not 1999 all over again. This is a great episode if you want some hot takes on where to focus your efforts in regards to content creation and influencer marketing.
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
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💃 Influencers. Marketing. Creators. - Why They Matter And How They Make Money 🕺
MORE THAN EVER, WE BUY THE PERSON, THEN THE PRODUCT. BUT WHAT PRODUCTS DO WE BUY?
That depends on the focus of the creator/influencer, but also the model leveraged. As the creator economy develops, new approaches to monetization are emerging. The framework below outlines the three primary ways creators leverage their audience to build wealth:
promoting other people’s products,
selling their own products, and
investing in their audience or alongside them
1. PROMOTE
Like traditional media businesses, creators have profited from ad dollars. Platforms that solve distribution like Instagram and YouTube have made this viable, as creators are able to capture attention and monetize it in the same place.
The straightforwardness of this model allows it to succeed across mediums. Newsletters like Morning Brew, The Hustle, and Not Boring ensure no cost is directly borne by consumers by making space for sponsors. Podcasts like Revisionist History and My Favorite Murder earn their millions plugging Casper mattresses, without requiring customer payment.
2. SELL
Better infrastructure has enabled creators to sell their own products, both digital and physical. This changes how creators interact with the first wave platforms described above, using them as lead-generation to monetize elsewhere. It also allows for greater imagination — instead of spending time courting advertisers and pondering how to best sell a pair of jeans, creators can devote time to improving or expanding upon the content fans enjoy.
Think of the following as facilitators:
- Patreon,
- Gumroad,
- Substack,
- OnlyFans,
- Shopify
Listen to the episode to hear us talk more in-depth on the topic… and to hear some examples of the 3rd prong.
🐣IPO’s ARE BOOMING🐥
IPO Fever is absolutely happening but the 1999 comparisons are inappropriate… for now.
Below is a chart from Ari Wald at Oppenheimer to show the difference between today’s IPO market and 1999/2000.
📃Politics🗞️
“K” Shaped Recovery? and the Chris SNL monologue:
What has developed is more like a K. On the upper arm of the K are well-educated and well-off people, businesses tied to the digital economy or supplying domestic necessities, and regions such as tech-forward Western cities. By and large, they are prospering.*
On the bottom arm are lower-wage workers with fewer credentials, old-line businesses and regions tied to tourism and public gatherings. They can expect to bear years-long scars from the crisis*
If the K-shaped recovery continues on its present course, the next Democratic nominee will basically be the ideological descendent of Che Guevara.** And the reaction on the right will be who knows what – but certainly something of an extreme in order to counter-balance.
What’s going on right now in terms of economic inequality is so utterly unsustainable that it’s a miracle that every major city in America isn’t experiencing what Portland is.
In Chris Rocks SNL skit he made the point that we may need to rethink the entire relationship Americans have with their government, in light of the fact that government seems not to be able to function anymore. Rock’s joke premise about how we have a Constitution instead of having a king – but that we’ve inadvertently created a class of Dukes and Dutchesses in Congress to represent poor people – is more reality than it is the setup for a joke. Especially when you consider how completely voiceless the working poor have become as a result of the current economic recovery leaving them even further behind.
Black and Hispanic women held many of the restaurant, retail and hospitality jobs that were badly hit by lockdowns. Black women held 11.9% fewer jobs in September than in February, and Hispanic women held 12.9% fewer, according to the Labor Department. White men have been the group least affected, with 5.4% fewer jobs…
By September, workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher had nearly fully recovered jobs lost in early spring. But those with just a high-school diploma held 11.7% fewer jobs in September than in February, according to Labor Department data, and high-school dropouts had 18.3% fewer. The two groups combined were down by 4.4 million jobs—amounting to around 40% of the employment that remains lost since the pandemic began—although they are only 27% of the labor force…
Nearly 30% of white employees held jobs they could do from home in 2017 and 2018, according to the department, compared to 19.7% of Black workers and 16.2% of Hispanic workers did.
The same Labor Department report found that 61.5% of the upper quarter of earners could work from home, compared with 9.2% of the bottom quarter.
🌊 Interesting things and Hot Links From the Week 🌊
Windows 95 launched 25 years ago this week. Watch the launch commercial. Link
Fitting an HD camera and Raspberry Pi inside an Apple iSight camera (I have two of these somewhere). Link
The Lovell Health House is for sale. Link
Fun new iPad note-taking app: Muse. Link
The Celera 500 could have some interesting implications for small aircraft. Link
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