Hundreds and hundreds of accounts and creators later, I hereby announce the lifecycle of a creator.
Stage I - The birth.
First found hanging around the depths of TikTok, with barely any reach and scratching for views, the next 200M view creator is waiting, makeup on, to be found by you.
There are, really, no rules on who's going to be the next star. Can you, Ari Gold, identify the ONE?
My experience says no. You'll become a better picker, yet it resembles more of a VC fund.
Spray and pray.
So after you find this beginner UGC creator, or whatever you wish to call him, you must train him, let him start a first account, and post.
There, if you split sprints into 15 video chunks, which I highly recommend, you should use the first batch to identify two things:
Can she listen to feedback and improve?
It's important. She's an intern at this point, and she may or may not have any idea about the type of content. She may or may not be impossible to work with.
Is she shadow banned?
The account was just shadow banned. What to do?
Two or three videos doing 10 views is okay. If she posts 15 and nothing changes, then she should be fired.
Or she creates another new account and tries her luck again. I always say, it's either a content problem, a creator problem, or an account problem. The job to be done is to figure out which is which.
Stage II - The growth.
The next 15 video chunks are key. Can she get outliers?
If yes, she's a keeper.
Listen, I've had creators do a viral video at video #3, and others later on. Ultimately, if such a creator does many videos, the when doesn't matter.
It's the %%%%%% that matters.
At scale, it's about the averages and the outlier rates, and those averaged across the entire network of creators.
Perhaps, for a specific period of time, the top 10% will return 10x to 50x, the next 40% will return 2x to 5x, and the bottom 50% can be written off as an investment.
The creator is cracked, what's up next?
Let it scale, and with it, scale down its CPM.
Let's talk real now. If you're at this stage, it's all about CPMs.
I built this little in house thingy I call the "healthcheck."
It tells me the CPM over time, so I can keep it in range.
There are instances of a creator initially doing millions of views, then lagging for hundreds of videos, letting their average CPM go up and up and up until it just doesn't make monetary sense anymore to keep them.
There are two ways to expand a creator:
1/ Cross post on platforms. Add YouTube, Snap, Facebook, and so on.
2/ Create more sets of accounts. Double the creator.
The first one has a diminishing CPM because the pay doesn't linearly go up with cross posting. It goes up logarithmically.
Build the DREAM TEAM like in '92
Build your creator dream team, then never stop drafting new talent. Spray and pray from the bottom of your creator pyramid to the dream team at the top.
