- Peggy K's Creator Weekly
- Posts
- Creator Weekly: 2024 Trends & Thanks for Reading!
Creator Weekly: 2024 Trends & Thanks for Reading!
As 2024 comes to a close, I’ve been ruminating on the the ongoing trends we’re likely to see into 2025.
Thank you for reading, watching, commenting and chatting!
I want to start with a special thank you to my regular readers and viewers. It means a lot to me, and I appreciate every comment and tip.
Newsletter Readers
A special shout-out to my top 25 subscribers who opened up more than 92% of my emails. I assume you are reading this, so thank you! Having regular readers makes writing worthwhile.
Some of you reached out by email and I appreciate that too!
Blog Commenters
Constructive comments, observations and questions are always welcome. Thank you to my top blog commenters this year!
Adam
Craig Long
Diana Studer
İsmail Şevik
Sam Nordberg
Livestream Chatters
It’s great to go live knowing that I’m not alone! Those of you who show up every week are the best.
Thank you all for participating in the live chat!
Andrew Hatchett
Braylen Avy
Brigitte Uras
Craig Long
Jolyn Bowler
Ileane Smith
İsmail Şevik
Mark Barrus
Nina Trankova
2024 Trends That Will Continue into 2025
2024 is finally coming to a close, and 2025 promises to be an interesting year.
The tech companies are (mostly) quiet this week, and so I wanted to use this opportunity to share my 2024 highlights and then take a look at trends from 2024 that I think will continue through 2025.
You can find my personal 2024 recap here.
Here are the things I’ve been noodling on:
What will we remember in 20 years?
AI in everything, but at whose expense?
Fan support: Paid subscriptions and communities
The open social web versus walled gardens
Videos for the little screen (phones) and big screen (TVs)
I plan a more traditional “here’s what happened” recap for next week.
What will we remember in 20 years?
2004 was an exciting year in tech. We didn’t know it at the time, but huge chunks of the internet we use today were launched 20 years ago.
Facebook, Gmail, and Firefox all launched that year. You could upload your photos to Flickr. And Skype video calling was just 6 months old.
The audioblogging community became “podcasters”.
Blogger turned 5 and WordPress had been around less than a year. Blogging was coming into its prime years. (I created my own Blogger account in May 2004.)
YouTube would be founded in 2005.
As The Verge put it (in an excellent collection of posts), 2004 was the “first year of the future.”
And here we are a generation later, and I’m wondering what we’ll be remembering 20 years from now. Will it be OpenAI? Bluesky? Something currently flying under the radar?
It feels like it’s the beginning of the AI age, but maybe we’ll look back at the AI slop being generated and laugh at our own naivety.
(Will I still be writing this in 20 years? If so, I’ll post an update 😆.)
AI is in everything, but at whose expense?
In 2023 tech companies started inserting generative AI features into everything. That trend continued in 2024. And there’s no doubt that the current AI models are an improvement over those available a year ago.
This year saw the launch of much-anticipated advanced text-to-video models, OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Veo 2 and the Adobe Firefly Video model.
There are AI features that can save time and effort. There’s AI to help editing videos, dub your audio into other languages, help you organize your data, research from your original sources, brainstorm and write, and more.
But there is a cost, for everyone.
AI is expensive
AI requires massive amounts of electricity (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are building their own nuclear power plants for this) and computer processing power.
And that means the latest and best AI tools aren’t free. Some offer limited use for free especially while a feature is in beta. But, for example, Google’s latest Gemini models are only available with a paid account (Google One Premium or Google Workspace) with an additional AI subscription fee on top of that.
And companies like Canva have raised their prices to cover new AI-powered features.
This isn’t likely to change any time soon, so creators will have to decide whether the usefulness of the features is worth the cost.
Creators have to compete with AI-generated content
The ease of generating text and images means there is a huge volume of low quality AI-generated content on social media, Amazon books, and the web in general.
Social media companies require labeling of at least realistic-looking AI-generated content, but they aren’t good at labeling it automatically. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, says it’s up to users to make sure the source of content is trustworthy.
Some AI image generators do automatically add a metadata label, such as Adobe’s Content Credentials or Google’s Photos editor labels. But those are easy to bypass by doing things like sharing a screenshot of the image.
Meanwhile, frugal CEOs and media companies seem to want to replace writers, actors, and videographers with AI tools, based in part on AI company claims that their tools can do the work.
To add insult to injury, generative AI models are trained on artworks, videos, books, and articles, almost all without the creator’s permission.
There is a growing backlash against artists and writers who do use generative AI, sometimes resulting in false accusations.
As generative AI gets better, it’s going to be more and more difficult to tell human-created from AI-generated, especially while scrolling through social media.
The public will lose access to art and writing
Artists, photographers, and writers may be less likely to put their work out on the internet, knowing that it will be scraped by companies making tools that are marketed as a way to put them out of business.
AI-generated content, which is often false, misleading or low quality, is likely to continue to flood social media and the Google search results.
The public then has to pay to access quality reporting, writing and art.
It feels like everyone will lose eventually unless something changes, and I think it will be difficult to make changes when the money is flowing.
I’m not sure where this will go in 2025. Maybe there will be a shift towards clearly human-created content and communities, but I’m willing to bet these are all still issues a year from now.
Fan Support and Communities
How do creators earn money?
Creative work takes time and money. It’s not unreasonable for creators to want to earn from their work, at the least to recoup costs, and at best to earn a living.
In the heyday of blogging, it was pretty easy to slap AdSense ads on your site and earn pretty well. But those days are mostly gone .
Platforms like Facebook and X base monetization earnings on engagement, which doesn’t work well for all types of content.
YouTube offers ad revenue sharing, but that can fluctuate a lot as it depends on the advertisers deciding to spend on ads.
So the trend is to rely more on fan funding.
This is also appealing to creators who don’t want to make all their content publicly available, whether to prevent AI scraping or to better earn from their creative work.
Building a platform-specific community
The idea is to get fans to pay a small amount as a community member or subscriber, and in return offer perks and exclusive content.
That isn’t a new idea, but this past year feels like more creators are taking this route, and platforms are offering more features for building community.
Patreon, for example, went “all-in” on community features in the fall of 2023 and continued building on that in 2024. You can now have free Patreon community members, with the hope of converting them to paying members when they find value in the community. This also locks people into the Patreon fan network.
Substack, which started out as an email newsletter platform, is also going all-in on community building, with twitter-like Notes, chat and even live streaming. They push newsletter subscribers to install their app, where it’s easy to discover new creators to follow. From the creator’s side, this hopefully converts fans into paying subscribers.
And even YouTube is slowly releasing a new Community experience that can be limited to paying channel members.
This is good for the platforms, because the alternative is for creators to set up their communities on Discord or Reddit or another platform.
This helps creators, at least in theory, because fans are already using the platform, and are at least theoretically open to joining new communities.
What’s the downside?
The big downside for creators is that they are locked into that particular platform.
If you separate the platform people use to pay to access your content and the platform for community, you can keep your community even if you switch content platforms.
For fans and subscribers, I feel like this isn’t great either. Who wants to join yet another platform?
And while spending $5 a month to support your favorite creator or journalist isn’t too expensive, it doesn’t scale well. There’s a limit to what people can afford to pay each month, meaning they will pick and choose who to support.
Fan funding may also be difficult for creators who are successful on algorithm-powered platforms, like TikTok, who may not have a dedicated fan base.
Going into 2025, I expect the trend towards paid newsletters for journalists to continue, as well as the offering of more platforms with community features. Maybe Twitch will be next?
But I’m thinking there may also be some consolidation, with options for creators to band together into multi-author publications, making it easier for supporters to pay.
While some creators are focused on building communities locked into a particular platform, the other trend of 2024 is the shift of many users to the open social web.
The open social web includes the “Fediverse” (like Mastodon or eventually Meta Threads) and Bluesky.
The idea is that you can join any server, and then that federates with other servers using the same protocol. That means that I can post on Threads, and someone with a Mastodon account can follow me and comment on my posts, and I can follow them.
And at least with Mastodon, if you change servers you can take your followers with you.
Services like Bridgy Fed let you do the same between Mastodon and Bluesky.
Just think how nice it would be to have just one social media account, and then be able to follow people and have followers from everywhere else.
I suspect most people don’t actually care that much about federation, at least until they have a reason to change platforms.
And it’s pretty clear many social platforms want to lock people in. LinkedIn profiles, for example, aren’t even public. And Instagram and X hide content from non-logged-in users.
There are questions around how these various servers are supported financially, when ads may not be an option. Paid subscriptions for premium features is an option, but those features would not be available across servers.
It’s also not clear whether this model will be able to support creators who want to monetize their content without having to build a community on a separate platform for fan funding.
I expect to see progress on fediverse integration with Threads in 2025, with maybe more options to connect Bluesky and fediverse accounts. And monetization has to be something these platforms are working on.
Will there be one platform to rule them all by the end of 2025? I suspect not. The new normal will be multiple platforms, with people picking the one that best suits their interests and needs.
Videos for the small screen and big screen
There are two trends in video on 2024: on the one end, there are more video features for small screens, like phones, and on the other end, more features for video (especially YouTube video) on TVs.
Shorts, Reels and more short vertical video
For the small screen TikTok-like short vertical video feeds have been on trend for a few years. There are, of course, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, but also short video on LinkedIn and Twitch lets streamers create vertical clips of their content.
YouTube has been adding features to Shorts and the Shorts feed to help build engagement, including interactive stickers (Polls, Q&A, Add Yours); scheduled live stream notices and vertical live streams; and improved comment and save-to-playlist options.
And there are also improvements to the Shorts video editor, including templates, auto-generated captions, effects and remixes of remixes.
Shorter videos are also getting longer. YouTube Shorts are also now able to be up to 3 minutes long, And the Instagram Reels editor can create videos up to 90 seconds long. (TikTok lets people create videos up to 10 minutes long).
If TikTok is indeed banned in the US in January 2025, many TikTok creators are likely to move to Instagram and YouTube, giving those platforms a boost.
I expect that both YouTube and Instagram will continue to improve their video editors and feeds to attract creators.
YouTube on the big screen.
On the flip side, YouTube reports growing numbers of viewers on big TVs. So if short and vertical isn’t your style, try longer and landscape (and 4K resolution). YouTube has also been improving the interface on TVs to improve the viewing experience.
YouTube seems all-in on TV viewing, especially for sports, so expect to see more improvements in the coming year.
What do you think?
Join me live on Sunday at 10:30 AM Pacific time (6:30 PM UTC) to look back at 2024 and ring in the new year. Open the link on YouTube to set a reminder.
Thanks for reading! I hope you join me in 2025.