You vs. You | The True Nature of Competition for Creators, Staying Motivated, and Playing the Long Game

What time of the week is it? It's that time. It's that time for digital creator with me, your host, Dylan Schmidt. And I just recorded a whole introduction to this episode and I look over, missed the button completely. Didn't even press it. So we're off on a good note. Before we dive into today's episode, I just wanna highlight something real quick. I know he listens to this podcast. He's also a member of the Creator Club, Kush. If you're listening, shout out to Kush. If you're not familiar with the Creator Club, it's an awesome online community where us creators get together once a week on a live call and we talk about what's going on, problems, opportunities, solutions, challenges, things that we just need support around and also sharing what works. It's fantastic. And then we also talk throughout the week, on various discussions. Super cool. On our weekly live call which took place just about an hour ago, Kush said something that I want to highlight because it was so offhanded and he has no idea what I'm about to say, but he said something right at the end of a share. He was like, I might hire a YouTube strategist and I want to highlight the fact that he said, I might want to hire a YouTube strategist because I've been speaking with so many people lately that are hesitant to the fact of accepting help to get better in an area. And in the fact that Kush said that seems rare. I wanna elevate because I would love to see more of that across the board with everybody of just accepting help but accepting help from qualified professionals. It's like I wouldn't go to a therapist for YouTube strategy because unless that therapist is an expert at YouTube, I'm not gonna get quality advice, right? That's not their domain area of expertise and, yes, I just wanted to highlight that from Kush. I thought it was awesome and something we should all just be mindful of and remember. So let's dive right into today's topics. I'm gonna be talking about number 1, what's the difference between virality and success as a creator? Obviously, virality and success go hand in hand. Creators are always looking to boost their numbers, but what is boosting their numbers actually do? Let's break it down. Number 2. Let's talk about what the future of content creation might look like. I'll take my best guesses. Let's toss around that and please share if you have any thoughts on this too. Number 3, what's going on with podcasting? Not specifically this podcast, but podcasting as a whole, the industry for both the host and the people who work on podcasting. Last week, I was interviewed for a newsletter and he asked me, like, what's the active state of podcasting? And I shared some numbers and what I see happening and I'd love to share that with you because something interesting is going on and I wanna dissect it with you. So let's get into it. 1st, we're talking about what's the difference between virality and success as a creator. Like I said, obviously, success means different things to different creators, you know, for one person it might be getting millions of views. For another person it might be making money and they could care less about how many views they're making. They just want to make an impact, grow their business, whatever that is. And what I've learned is while getting views is fantastic, that doesn't equate to getting you more money. I've seen it happen time and time again with content clips where they want to chase both. They want to chase the views and they want to chase the money and that ambition is fantastic. There's nothing wrong with wanting both but the speed at which you go for both could be detrimental to your brand. Let me explain more. Branding is how I view it as somewhat of a relationship between you and the people you're speaking to. Long term, people either have a positive or negative association with your brand, whether that's a personal brand, business brand, whatever type of brand. It's either a positive or a negative. Right? It leans in that direction. No one's really truly neutral in their feelings towards something. They might have a slight positive or a slight. It's like a spectrum. Right? But I don't see really ever just like neutral. It's usually slightly if you really dig into it positive or negative And when you chase virality, when you chase, these numbers, it can have you doing things that always don't lift up your brand. Right? If there's a trend going around on TikTok and it's outside of what you normally would do for your brand, it could have a positive or a negative effect for your brand. I see the danger in chasing those trends. I also see there's a possible huge upside. And if you're the type to experiment and do thing new things all the time, then it makes sense. You're, like, not really taking a risk as much. But if you continue to not take some core values into those trends and you start alienating the people who are interested in what you're doing, you can really become disconnected from long term benefits like building the relationships with people that would be sticking around for years to come. And I'll use myself as an example. So, you know, if you follow me on social media, you know, I post short form videos regularly and that's my thing. But if I totally switch that up, started doing, like, dancing videos, and you could just tell I'm talking about brands and doing, like, nothing but sponsored things, you would probably start to question my intention behind what I'm doing. Or if this podcast became filled with ads, you probably start questioning what is going on here. And that's one example using myself of, like, if I totally switch it up because I'm so consistent in doing it another way. And so you can really define yourself what your brand becomes. The pitfall I see happening with certain creators is that they are using especially with, like, podcasts or people that are really focused on the numbers is they can start using other brands as a way to elevate their own brand, and it creates somewhat of a negative equity. Let me explain more because this is, like, nuanced and I don't exactly even know how to put this in a short form video. This is the beauty of being able to talk about this on a podcast. So what I mean is if you had, your brand that you were building up but your face isn't a part of it and your ultimate goal is to sell more coaching, consulting, some type of your program. When people come across your content and they're only seeing, like, images that don't contain your face or videos that are repurposed from something else or it's only podcast guests, it's gonna be difficult. Right? Their brand association is maybe with the values that you promote and support, but it's not with you, your face, your expertise. You're using others expertise as a way to elevate your brand, which actually an example comes to mind. Jay Shetty is someone who has done this right. He would use all these trending videos. He still does. And then intersperse videos of himself. What I see happening is no intersperse videos of the person that wants to grow their own brand. Lewis Howes is another one that has done this. There's a few people out there. Jay Shetty being, like, one of the biggest probably where he'll post videos that will make you feel and, you know, they go viral and he's been accused of things, you know, so I'm not saying right or wrong. Not going there, but it's definitely a strategy. But there's a part that he incorporates that I just see missing from other people, which is including yourself in the content. And if you build a brand just based on using other people's expertise, but you're not included in it, your brand isn't as valuable as when you're included in it because they're following all of these other things. They're not just following you. You know, like, if I only posted inspirational quotes from other sources and you never heard from me, you're not really following me. You're following inspirational quotes and sources and things like that. Right? And it is, I mean, I'm coming from 0. Right? I didn't start with any boost. It's a slower grind when you're coming from nothing. And, sure, it could be beneficial to throw in and intersperse other sources and borrow other people's expertise to the future that, not pass it off as your own, but just feature that so it gets shared and things like that. So when it comes time to share your own thoughts and expertise that, you know, there's already a bit of an audience there, I could totally see the value in that. It's just I see a lot of the person missing from it, and I would love to see more creators include themselves in the success that they're creating. And if you find yourself chasing virality, let's say pressure you, but I would challenge you. How can you include yourself in more of your content creation goals? Not from a sense of ego, not from a sense of it needs to be all about you, but to increase your brand equity, to increase the longevity and flexibility that you'll have with your brand later on. So that when you wanna do something else, people are already associating you with it and they start to understand more of your values. Right? Hopefully, you know, you trust me. If you're listening to me for the first time, then hopefully, I earn your trust over the more you engage with my podcast and and social media content and newsletters, but that trust is earned. Right? And just like any relationship, it takes time. You can't instantly increase that unless there's probably, like, a traumatic event Like, if you were in a car accident and someone saved your life, you're gonna trust them obviously automatically. Any other time you're gonna have to, like, just put in the time and people aren't getting enough time with the creators who are just not there. It's just featuring other people. Alright. I think I've exhausted that topic. The challenge is to include yourself in more of your success. Alright. 2nd, I got an interesting topic I wanna dive into with you here. What is the future of content creation look like? We know what it looks like right now which is a lot going on. Right? You open up YouTube and you're, like, woah, there's a lot going on. So we could probably safely assume based on today and just looking over at the past few years that there's not gonna be less content. We're not gonna see a decline. Right? Probably only gonna see an increase in it. I'll tell you what I think. I think there's gonna be an increase. I think we're gonna see more creators. I think we're gonna see even greater accessibility. We see companies like Elgato put in products in target that are for kind of, like, the next generation of content creators, they don't feel like content creator products. They feel more seamlessly integrated into your desk setup. So that if you work from home, you have a nicer microphone, you have a little stream deck type thing you can switch between, you got the nice lighting, All of these products that are aimed at people that don't consider themselves content creators, they're just on Zoom calls. But that gap from I just do Zoom calls to maybe I could do content creation is, I think, gonna become shortened. You don't have to spend as much on a great camera, you know, all of these things are getting cheaper to do and just more accessible. And like I said, we're gonna see, I think, more creators, which is going to just increase the competition if you see it that way. We'll also just see a demand on better ideas. Just a couple years ago, you could throw up some inspirational quotes and that was good enough to go on Instagram. These days, if that's your only plan, it's gonna be a lot harder to grow. In fact, you probably it's not enough to cut through the noise. There has to be a different approach, a different idea, something unique about it. So it will just naturally force creators to be smarter in how they work, not necessarily just work harder. It's not about publishing more content. It's about publishing the right content. And I think we're gonna really start to see creators excel when they can save more people time using someone like Joe Rogan, for example. He has the largest podcast by far and he has really long podcasts. I think more people would listen to different podcasts if Joe Rogan didn't have a podcast, but they listen to his podcast because he features such a diverse range of guests. People feel like they can get their fix in for who he's talking to and it saves people time in one way because they don't feel like they have to go everywhere. They can just go to one source and I think we're gonna see creators who are good at synthesizing information across different places, like, hopefully, I'm doing for you here. You don't feel like you have to go to 800 creator resources. You could just hopefully just tune into a couple. I'm not saying it's the only one, but if it is, but, you know, hopefully, it feels like this podcast saves you time. And there's a reason why it's not 3 hours long like a Joe Rogan podcast is because it doesn't need to be. Right? My goal is to, like, give you the information you need in no longer than it needs to be so that you can just move about your day. Now this isn't a strictly, like, entertainment podcast comparing it to someone like Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan, 3 hours, it's a whole show. That's like the opener, middle, and closer of, like, a concert. Right? And he's having these conversations that are super interesting to people. And that makes it simpler for people to just go to and digest that information from one source. So here I am giving you another challenge for your own content. But I would challenge you when we think about the future of content creation, what does the future look like for your content creation? Does it look like having the right content being published? And if it is the right content being published, what does that mean? What does that look like? Is it publishing on one platform? Is it growing just 1 or 2 platforms? Is it really focused or is it going wider? Different needs for different creators out there. If you're open to sharing it, I'd be curious to hear about it. If you're in the Creator Club, share there. If you're not in the Creator Club, either join or just send me an email or message on, social media. Let me know. Lastly, I wanna talk about what's going on with podcasting. I mentioned I was on a interview last week for a man named Erik who did a fantastic interview. It was for his newsletter. So it was just, it was a recorded call, but it was repurposed or formatted for an email newsletter, which was super cool. I hadn't done one of those before and it was fun. And he asked a great question which was, like, what's going on with podcasting? Like, what's the current state? And I shared with him some numbers that I also shared in social media land recently, and that's the number of active podcast hosts. So there are 95,000 active podcast hosts an estimate. Right? There's an estimation of, like, 90 to a 100000. Let's just say 95,000 active podcast hosts. That means not shows because there might be multiple hosts and got the number from podcastindex.org. Used chat gpt to help me figure out how many estimation wise there might be. I kinda go into that more so in the social media post because I don't wanna spend too much time there. But let's say 95,000 active podcast host. The other three numbers I shared to put that into perspective is number 1, there have been over 300,000 TEDx speakers and I didn't know the number was that high, at least 300,000 TEDx speakers. 2nd is there are over 500,000 active Instagram accounts that have a 100,000 or more followers, which, yeah, let's be real. Feels like, well, then why don't I have a 100,000 followers? But, regardless, that's not the purpose of me showing that stat. Number 3 is there are 7,230,000 active monthly Twitch live streamers. That stat blew me away. I didn't know there were so many people streaming on Twitch. What the heck? When we look at that in comparison to a number like 95,000 active podcast hosts, it pales in comparison. Right? There's not that many active podcast hosts out there in the world. Been doing this for 3 years now, like, publicly. From my own findings, there are way more people that talk about starting a podcast than actually start a podcast. And there are way more people that stop or pod fade, meaning they just fade out their podcast, then there are active podcast hosts. And the numbers when I came across this, they support that too. There's way more people that aren't act active podcast host. That's not good or bad. It just is facts. It's a data that we can work with. So when we look at maybe competition of other podcasts out there, there's this huge misconception that there's too many podcasts out there. There is not nearly enough because if we say 95,000 active podcast host, I mean, across what categories. Right? You start looking at it by certain categories, and then you start breaking it down further and further, and you start realizing it's actually not that big of a number. And then I included those other numbers for perspective so we could really kind of get an idea of, like, compared to twitch, how many 7.23 1,000,000 active monthly Twitch streamers, like, come on. So for podcast hosts, I think the takeaway is this. You don't have competition like you probably think you do. The competition is with yourself. It's to either get started or stay in it and keep it interesting for both you and your listeners and get in front of people who wanna hear a podcast about what you talk about. For this podcast in particular, Digital Creator, I'll be real. Like, the audience size is not that huge. And this podcast started out primarily talking about just podcasting. And I work with a lot of podcasters, But, like, the fact of the matter is if you work in podcasting, you can know it can fluctuate so much from people wanting editing services to people wanting help launching a podcast. No one really gets help at the end that I've heard of of, like, actually, I'm winding down my podcast. I need help. I don't think that really helps, like, it happens much. Obviously, maybe, like, how do I switch hosts to a free host or something? But the numbers alone, if you look at the TAM, the total addressable market, the numbers alone show that compared to other industries, there might not be, as much activity as we perceive there to be. Because if you go online, you'll see a lot of people talking about podcasts. That doesn't mean that there's a lot of people doing podcasts. It just feels that way. The perception versus reality is not aligned and I'm also curious to hear your thoughts about this too. This doesn't have to be like a one way conversation, so send me a message. Start a post in the Creator Club if you want to continue that convo. And I just want to highlight real quick before we leave. If you're a creator, it may feel like there's a bunch of other people. It's just you. It's just you versus you. The more you can focus on that, the more you'll set yourself up for success long term. Thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you in the next one.