My Nuanced Company Creator (crypto skewed) Predictions + Thoughts for 2025🧵
This first appeared as a thread on X with truncated thoughts.
2024 has been a ground breaking year for crypto and its nascent creators, with 2025 primed for a compounding run on the horizon. Sharing a brief set of observations and guesses for the upcoming year.
1. Generative AI will greatly enhance a creator's arsenal to affect distro / content creation / admin (in the vein of legal, finance advice) / branding with an increase in use by H2. Creators prioritize tools that amplify their workflow & minimize friction to focus on what they do best - creating.
2. Additionally we may start seeing more legit AI born creators having a place across multiple verticals as features & LLM's scale exponentially (hopefully) that may compete for things like viewership, spend, influence. Cantina has been quietly building this for the last few years but the traction has yet to take off and with the prevalence of builders like Zerebro/Dolos (are they really AI? 😏) we may soon see larger scale collabs across music and art. May be ambitious for '25 but the tech is improving fast.
3. H2 2024 saw more copycats of category leaders' content metas & optimizations. Expect an uptick & see more people diving in streaming, leaning into lifestyle formats, content houses, & blending verticals that have natural cross over (gambling, gaming, interviews, etc). There will be a ton of fresh content and creators but once that settles, the Power Law will remain in effect, thereby creating a natural pecking order.
3a. Pay attention to content meta drivers like Threadguy, FrankDeGods, Probably Nothing. This reminds me of the early streamer +YT days where brands didn't know how to price them let alone understand how they fit into their marketing stack, the creative varied with no set standard on what was "right," and the rails for digital influence management was nonexistent. Formats can be copied but everything lies in the execution & the real winners are the ones that have the edge to consistently break things.
4. As critical mass develops, fans will clearly delineate the spectrum creators fall under:
A. 👀 themselves as a biz/brand ------------- Z. here to chase the 💰
A = quality/captures ❤️+ 🧠 , Z = quantity/captures more attention. A will always outlive Z.
The name of the game is sustainability.
5. Q4 trading meta's briefly experienced "retail is here" via TT/IG dipping their toes in. $QUANT $CHILLGUY were lead bridges signaling:
there's HUGE appetite
the walled garden is (slowly) eroding
barrier of entry to crypto can chip & flow thru content
more to come
5a. We expect more trad creators/celebs to venture (back) in. A more lax Fed, new president, bull market, additional discoverability/coverage in MSM, the surface area of crypto bubble will 📉 meaning more non-endemics filtering in. This is prime opportunity and a lateral move for creators w/ built out brands & for them to easily tap in w/ endemics who gravitate towards marquee and established creators.
6. With that influx, content outputs + creative improves, brand purchasing power will diminish - this becomes more prevalent at the higher rungs of influence. Cheap spenders & performance centric companies will suffer the most. There is nothing more off putting than brands posting million dollar profits and refusing to support a creator's vision in the context of partnership. The stark reality is brands are funding pet projects and not because there is true brand alignment.
Many creators will soon realize what managers drill into them - "they need you more than you need them."
Exclusivity wanes.
7. Not all creators are created equal.
Crypto creators' edge against non-endemic ones are having solid fundamental native experience mixed w/ the ability to create captivating content. Those that can bridge the 2 spaces reflexively will be the definitive leaders now & moving fwd.
Only a handful exist currently but expect that to change.
8. Salience of crypto creator brands / products / supergroups. Creators that achieve "brand status mentality" know the endgame that this is a "when" not "if."
Being a market maker, investing/trading groups like TheHaven or eGirl capital, predictive market platforms like Myriad, onchain/AI builders feel there is an "I can do this better to suit my needs."
As more creators develop audience buy-in, amass loyal fan bases across their digital footprint, and take greater interest in applying their technical crypto skills with that audience, they are empowered to monetize and what better way to do so from something you own end to end?
9. Creators providing an educational, high quality, and entertaining (3a) platform will succeed the most in onboarding the masses. People crave a source of truth & more so if it's relatable. No one cares if you have the best tech, it has to pass the "Don't Make Me Think" book test.
9a. The above is driven by the intense lack of trust from bad actors & distilling technobabble that still exists that majority of normies dgaf about - great content helps filter that. But personality trumps all. Creators at the intersection b/n tech & compelling storytelling have an unfair advantage.
10. We fully expect the valuation of a creator's audience to shift over time as more crypto creators solidify their vertical based on how skewed the economics are in crypto creators' audiences - they transact in crypto, not fiat, often times having larger spending power due to successful trading P&L's. Creators like ThreadGuy consistently can pull 100 subs on Twitch daily, 100 subs DAILY, something that takes years (if not ever) for a normal streamer to pull off. Inevitably as this becomes the standard meta, creator audiences will become more valuable.
10a. This reinforces 6. where brands will have to rethink concepts like ROI or awareness internally when they spend, it ultimately dilutes their value prop and position because the prevailing notion is that the majority of the top ones don't need brand deals to be viable. If the top creators can create a closed ecosystem where platform payments or businesses they create and own offset brand spend, the nature of the deal becomes more of a brand status type play than a financial one.
Crypto naturally positions itself to be a system that changes dynamics and hierarchy. Independent of market conditions, crypto creators that are able to insulate themselves from the volatility of PA and create sustainable rails to consolidate on their influence will front run an industry that is continually evolving. 2025 will officially kick start a new era of digital influence.