As relatively easy as it may be for many creators to write a hit song or create a viral video, making money from their work may not be as intuitive. Enter the suits! The best executives—whether as a platform or an agent or manager—step in and step up to help creators maximize profits from their work and grow their audience. This can be specific to a particular cohort of creators: Keely Cat-Wells, founder and president of C Talent at Whalar, for example, works to give disabled creators more opportunities in front of and behind the camera. Others, such as Night Media founder Reed Duchscher, come along later in the process to help creators with an existing following partner and take a stake in brands that they can promote. These five executives, working at SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotter, and more are paving the way for creators, brands, and investors to make money in the creator economy.
Keely Cat-Wells, founder and president, C Talent at Whalar
Keely Cat-Wells was inspired to form her talent management and consulting company that represents high-profile Deaf and Disabled talent during a stay in a hospital while in treatment for a chronic illness. C Talent works to place disabled performers into roles that go beyond being disability-specific. She is also working to get more disabled people behind the camera, and Cat-Wells uses her platform on Instagram and her 15,000 followers to advocate for disability rights. “Oftentimes, disabled talent will come to us, and they’ll have kind of small goals. They won’t be huge because they’re so used to, unfortunately, living in a society where things aren’t achievable just because of the barriers that we face and the attitudinal barriers that exist,” Cat-Wells said earlier this year on an episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Control. Her group’s roster of artists have worked with such brands as Savage X Fenty, Hulu, Disney, Google, Subaru, and Nike. In May, Cat-Wells’ agency was acquired by creator commerce company Whalar; she currently runs it as a subsidiary.
Beyond working with individual creators, Cat-Wells and C Talent help create a hospitable environment for all of them, consulting with companies to become accessible. In that role, she works with them to provide amenities that go above and beyond meeting basic compliance standards. To date, the organization has been contracted by companies, including Netflix, Twitter, and Sony. As a continuation of her work, Cat-Wells has also founded Zetta Studios, which is set to be the world’s first studio to be designed with disabled people in mind.
Tracy Chan, SVP, creator, SoundCloud
Tracy Chan has made a career helping independent creators get off the ground, based on a simple insight he gained during his time as head of music at Twitch. “We looked at how many artists on Twitch make $50,000,” says Chan, who decamped from Twitch to SoundCloud in June. “For a typical signed music artist, they needed about 80 million streams to get 50K.” This is because Spotify, for example, looks at how much an artist’s work has been streamed against all the other artists on the platform, and pays them accordingly. “On Twitch,” adds Chan, who worked at the livestreaming platform for two-plus years, “they only needed 183 fans willing to pay them.”
To overcome the challenges in how artists get paid in streaming and give creators more money on SoundCloud, Chan oversees a program called Fan-Powered Royalties, which debuted last year, where fans can choose to direct money straight to the artists they have been streaming. SoundCloud’s private link ecosystem is also under Chan’s purview. This feature lets creators share early drafts or works in progress with other musicians or their most dedicated fans. When an artist wants to get their music on other platforms, Chan’s team can help there, too. “We actually help artists distribute their music to other services—like Apple Music and Spotify,” he says, “so they don’t have to pay for another distributor.”
Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO, Night Media
In January 2019, Reed Duchscher and his talent agency, Night Media, started managing an emerging 20-year-old talent from North Carolina with 14 million YouTube followers. The partnership has certainly turbocharged that young man’s career: Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) is believed to be the highest-earning YouTube creator, making $54 million last year. (See our take on why, on our Big Shots list.) But Duchscher has the makings of his own empire, representing a litany of digital stars such as Safiya Nygaard, ZHC, Hasan Piker, and Matthew Beem (and many more) and linking them up with the right business opportunities to boost their earnings well beyond the industry-standard revenue streams. “Your creator business is not just predicated on brand deals and AdSense,” Duchscher advised both his clients and the wider creator community over the summer amid fears of a recession. “The opportunity for creators is so much bigger than that. You really need to look at other ways to diversify your revenue.”
With Donaldson’s success as the North Star, Duchscher, who launched Night Media in 2015, has expanded well beyond talent representation. Night Labs is a venture studio to incubate new businesses, such as MrBeast Burger (Donaldson’s virtual—and now real-life—fast-food chain) and the creator-centric bank Creative Juice, where creators can leverage their distribution to grow those businesses and profit more meaningfully than they would from sponsorship opportunities. In that same spirit, the Dallas-based Duchscher has also started a venture fund focused on investing in startups with a similar focus in the consumer, gaming, and passion economy. In September, the Chernin Group invested $100 million in Duchscher’s Night Capital, which is looking to acquire majority stakes in consumer businesses where a creator could transform the business with the benefit of both Night’s branding expertise and their ability to connect with their fans. All the while, Duchscher is not only shepherding his creator-powered empire but also publicly sharing insights along the way. His YouTube show Creator Economics, which is also a podcast, has almost 19,000 subscribers.
Kevin Ferguson, director of operations and partnerships, YouTube Shorts
YouTube Shorts—a short-form video-sharing platform where videos are capped at 60 seconds—started as a response to the Indian government’s 2020 ban on TikTok. The new format was also an experiment: A few TikTok creators migrated their posting over to YouTube, where they had a small or nonexistent fan base, to see if it would grow. It worked. After posting just a few videos, they regained their tens of thousands of followers.
In May 2021, YouTube tapped Kevin Ferguson, who had overseen the lip-synching video platform Musica.ly before and after it was acquired by TikTok’s parent company, to run and grow the division. To compensate creators initially, Ferguson launched a $100 million Shorts fund, which can distribute as much as $100,000 a month to popular creators who use the platform this year. Under Ferguson’s leadership, the product’s improvements, combined with the revenue pool, have driven more Shorts—and, as a result, more viewers. In June, YouTube reported that Shorts now exceeded 1.5 billion monthly viewers.
Ferguson is now developing monetization as well as additional support mechanisms for short-form creators. On the latter front, one example is Remix, a feature that lets creators cut short clips of YouTube videos into their Shorts. While TikTok had a similar feature, Shorts users have access to YouTube’s massive trove of videos. “The amount of content that can be unlocked for that type of storytelling is really unparalleled,” Ferguson told Fast Company earlier this year. “We’re seeing creators get really excited taking that video that they loved five years ago and bringing it to life again in their short-form video.”
Most importantly, Ferguson is taking the creator truism that you build audiences on TikTok and then make money from them on YouTube to its logical conclusion. In September, reports surfaced that YouTube would introduce ads in the feed of Shorts videos, and starting in 2023, it would share revenue, providing Shorts creators with a 45% split, distributed based on their share of total Shorts views. The twist? Because ads run between videos in the Shorts Feed, all Shorts ad revenue would be pooled and then distributed monthly so every creator who participates benefits from the better that Shorts performs.
Monica Khan, EVP, head of creator community, Spotter
Monica Khan served as a partner manager at YouTube for six years, and then another two at Facebook supporting its community. In April, she joined Spotter, a company that pays YouTubers a lump sum to purchase their back catalogs, as its first head of creator community. The company was founded in 2019 and operates a bit like a private-equity firm for creator content. It buys out mature video assets from creators to give them the working capital they need to continue to grow and scale their businesses, whether that’s to create more videos or to expand into real-world businesses.
That’s where Khan comes in. In her role, she runs the “creator success team,” which aims to identify strategic partnerships and business development opportunities for creators. She describes her role as empowering “the creators we fund with access and resources to help them reach their full potential and drive greater impact,” she wrote on Linkedin. She also advises creators on how best to use their investment from Spotter to grow their following and explore brand extensions. Aaron Brown, host of Smokin’ & Grillin’ wit AB, is using his capital from Spotter to open a restaurant in Las Vegas.
This article is part of our list of the 25 Best Creators of 2022 list.
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