A top social media company wanted to bring new, creative content creators to their platform ahead of their competitors. They joined forces with NewtonX to ask the creators themselves which emerging features they find the most compelling.
A Social Media Leader Wanted to Attract Cutting-Edge Content Creators Over Competitors
The demand for social media content creators is blowing up. The total size of the creator economy is estimated to be more than $100 billion. Content creators, wanting their fair share, increasingly move to platforms that offer the most profitable monetization options. Our client — a leading social media company — wanted to know how content creators perceive their platform and monetization process when compared to their competitors. The also needed data on what features they could include to attract and retain content creators on their platform.
However, most content creators are not on professional platforms, like LinkedIn, that market researchers generally target. Influencers are also not usually familiar with market research. Compounding these issues is the fact that no market research company has expertise in this challenging emerging space. Our client faced difficulties finding a sufficiently diverse group of content creators to run a large-scale quantitative survey covering all aspects of content creation, while staying within research parameters.
NewtonX Surveyed 1,000 Content Creators Across 14 Markets
The client contacted NewtonX, as our custom recruiting methodology can access even the most difficult-to-reach influencers on all major platforms, from Instagram and Facebook to Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok. NewtonX designed an entirely novel outside-the-box approach to building detailed influencer searches, accounting for location, hashtags, keywords, and platforms.
We reached out to content creators with 10K+ followers. These influencers were active on multiple major platforms but did not use the client’s service as their primary platform. Among them were — for example — Sara, a food influencer with 650K Instagram followers and 170K Youtube subscribers, and Carlos, a video game streamer with 1.4M followers on Twitch, 450K on Twitter, and 395K subscribers on YouTube.
For 1,000 participating influencers, NewtonX coded and hosted the 25-minute survey, delivering final results in only three weeks per market. We achieved high reply rates, with 1,000 content creators across 14 markets contributing their insights, including the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. Our proprietary two-step verification process guaranteed fraud-free and reliable data.
The survey provided detailed feedback on content creators’ preferences. They told us how often and on which platforms they post content, covering both major competitor apps and sites (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, and Twitter) alongside smaller or more regional ones (Triller, Line, Kakao Talk, MX Takatak, VK Clips, Kwai, etc.). We charted the incentives that attracted influencers to other platforms in order to discover what our client needed to stay competitive in this high-pressure segment.
1,000content creators surveyed
NewtonX is the gold standard for content creator research.
The Client Built Market Share with Accurate Competitive Intelligence
Our data allowed the client to successfully pivot their own product roadmap to design stickier monetization features. Armed with these direct insights, our client could confidently develop and launch a new live shopping royalty program for creators.
Thanks to their new systems, the number of new influencers enrolling in the client’s monetization program has more than doubled. The program now has more than 2M participating influencers. Additionally, the number of creators earning six-figure revenues from monetizing their content has grown by 35%.
The survey also delivered insights to further develop the client’s plans for Web3 and blockchain integration, based on creator attitudes toward emerging monetization opportunities. They now understand which features content creators need and want. As a result, our client has been able to retain and grow their market share of creators.
