Introduction

For little over a decade, we have witnessed the rapid rise of creators, alternatively called content creators, influencers, YouTubers, vloggers, live streamers, gameplayers, KOLS, and Wang Hong (in China). Forbes’ annual list of the most successful creators extends across multiple content verticals to include ‘entertainer’ Lily Singh (aka Superwoman II), game player Markiplier, beauty vlogger Michele Phan, and toy unboxer Evan Tube (O’Connor, 2017). These comprise but a small portion of a vast global wave of online cultural producers fostering and blending old and new forms of media entrepreneurialism, management, creative labour, and user practices.

Operating within the proto-industry of social media entertainment, ‘creator’ has become the industry term to describe social media users harnessing multiple and global-scaling platforms to engage in media entrepreneurialism (Cunningham & Craig, 2019). Creators have emerged natively on and across multiple platforms, fuelled by network effects and diverse technological and commercial affordances, to generate their own media brands. The global social media platform landscape continues to expand and foster new modalities, including text, image, audio, video on demand, and livestreaming. A short list includes first generation platforms, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; mobile apps like Instagram, Musical.ly, and Snapchat; and livestreaming platforms including Twitch and YouNow. China's competing Wang Hong creator industry fosters an even more competitive platform landscape with more advanced and better integrated commercial features, including Youku, WeChat, and Weibo.

Creator entrepreneurialism has contributed to exponential growth in revenue, albeit difficult to measure in scale and influence. A report on the ‘New Creator Economy’ (Shapiro & Aneja, 2018) described 15 million online creators generating revenue off these platforms in the United States alone.