It's time to take the creator economy seriously

Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg are filling a void with Scalable.

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Photo Credit: Scalable

It’s not often a new media company pops up these days, and it’s even less often that the new media company feels, well, actually new. Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg spent years working in traditional digital media and marketing, gradually circling internet creators and the industry around them, until the two became the go-to voices on the creator economy. It’s a beat that, despite the industry’s $250-billion valuation, still earns minimal mainstream media coverage—if outlets have even carved out any space for it all.

That’s the main reason Kaya and Jasmine left their respective jobs to launch Scalable, a podcast and newsletter that’s bringing coverage of the creator industry out from behind paywalls. Enberg tells me they want to be “the go-to resource for news and analysis on the creator economy” and a tool to “help business leaders make better business decisions.”

We chatted about building Scalable, the gaps they’re hoping to fill, and why business coverage of the internet is so crucial.

Before Scalable, what were both of your backgrounds?

Jasmine: Professionally I spent the last 13 years at eMarketer, a market research and insights firm. I started there as a researcher, and then most recently I was an analyst covering social media and the creator economy. I set up our creator economy research desk a couple of years ago and really grew that practice to what it is today. All of my work was really focused on data-driven analysis about what was going on within social media and the creator economy, and really trying to help brands and businesses navigate the space. I was also an on-air commentator on different news outlets. You might’ve seen me on BBC or Bloomberg or CNBC talking about the big social media trends, whether that was the TikTok ban or Elon Musk’s takeover of X or Meta’s antitrust trial. Kaya was one of the first journalists I started talking to back when I really began covering creators and social media in 2018. We had coffee at the Hudson Yards and we became friends.

Kaya: Okay. My turn. I have been a journalist for the past ten years at news outlets, including CNN and The Information. I started my career at The Street writing breaking news about stocks, which I frankly had no business doing. But I broke into business journalism and then tech journalism and covered social media and then really was fascinated by the rise of creators and felt like mainstream media was not really covering the industry from a business lens. And then I went to The Information in 2021 because they wanted to launch a newsletter about the creator economy. So I got to launch that and build that, and it had more than a hundred thousand subscribers and turned into an event and databases and other smaller events throughout the year. So I really got to focus on that and make that my niche.

Jasmine: That’s so funny, Kaya. I didn’t realize you were covering stocks at The Street. That’s how I technically started, too. I was doing earnings estimates for publicly traded companies on the Nordic Stock Exchange for like a year when I lived in Argentina.

That’s so funny.

Jasmine: It was like fresh outta J school from NYU, and then I was like, I’m gonna do earnings estimates.

Kaya: I had never taken a business class either. I did a Bloomberg News internship, which was amazing, and that was right after I graduated college. So then I was like, I guess I’m a business journalist now,.

Jasmine: Isn’t it funny how sometimes you have these big plans or aspirations and life just takes you in a different direction?

You got coffee in 2018, but then how did we get from there to launching a company together?

Jasmine: Both of us covering this industry for such a long time, it in some ways felt like a natural step for us to enter it, but I think it all kind of really started back at South By in March. And we did this panel where we basically just threw up a couple of charts and for an hour we sat there and talked about what was going on in the world of the creator economy. And people loved it. I mean, so many people came up to us afterwards being like, “You should take this show on the road. This sounded like a podcast.” And so that kind of planted a seed. But this didn’t really materialize until everything lined up with The Lighthouse as well, which is our business partner.

Right. Can you talk me through that?

Kaya: So we formed a 50/50 joint venture with The Lighthouse because I think Jasmine and I have interviewed so many creators. We know the space so well. So many people were like, ‘Why don’t you just do your newsletter on your own?” And, you know this Kate, it’s really hard to go out on your own

Yes.

Kaya: So that’s why we wanted to do something together because I think having a co-founder and a co-collaborator is just so important in terms of riffing off of ideas and mitigating some of the burnout and isolation, all these things that can come with doing something solo. But that also doesn’t solve everything. So I think having a business partner come in and be able to help us with the business side, they’re providing us with capital, they helped us with our launch, with our branding. Having the support of a company, but then having it be a joint venture, separate company, and something that we have 50% ownership of just felt like a good path forward for us where we get to do something independently, but we have some of the security and support and resources we felt like we wanted.

Jasmine: We have full editorial control, so I think not being so stressed about generating revenue on day one allows the two of us to really focus on the content and the product. From day to day, we are really focused on our newsletter and our podcast and also thinking about other products we might want to bring to Scalable down the line.

You both come from creator economy backgrounds, so what is the gap in this space that you hope Scalable fills?

Jasmine: There’s a lot of news and information out there. A lot of it is good. Some of it isn’t as good. A lot of it is also paywalled. I know Kaya and I both worked for companies that gated a lot of the information and news and the content that we were creating. And so what we wanna do is bring this news information and analysis to everybody who needs it or is interested in it. We wanna make this really accessible, which is another reason why we’re planning on monetizing primarily through sponsorships, at least to start, so that anyone who is interested in learning about the creator economy can.

Kaya: We want to cut through the noise. There’s so many headlines and so many stories, and I do think it’s sort of this interesting time in traditional media where like, it feels like every day the New York Times has some story about a creator, but I don’t think they have a beat reporter that’s just focused on the creator economy or the business side of the creator economy. I think internet culture reporting is super important, but especially in traditional media, there are not really journalists who are covering this as a business beat. You’ve seen people like Taylor Lorenz go off on her own. Now I’m going off on my own. The few reporters who were doing this at legacy media companies are no longer there.

And then also I think now people really trust newsletters and people more, and they also want to know how to think about things. There’s so many headlines and we are writing to a business audience, which is very busy. So I think [they need] a newsletter and podcast that can kind of synthesize information.

Jasmine: And charts too, right? Like, make it really digestible. And I think the other thing we thought a lot about is that people consume information in many different ways. And that’s kind of why we didn’t just want to launch a newsletter. We’re also launching a podcast. I mean, Kaya and I interviewed so many creators and business leaders, and there were so many interviews that would’ve been so great on audio, we just didn’t have the capability to do that. And then there’s people who want to read, there’s people who want to listen. There’s people who want to watch. And again, we want to make sure we’re reaching everybody. But I think the overarching goal of what we’re doing at Scalable is really trying to become the go-to resource for news and analysis on the creator economy and really to help business leaders make better business decisions. Because the other gap in the market that I see is that there really isn’t a playbook for how to operate within the creator economy. And now we can combine both our reporting and our analysis with our real world experience building Scalable that will make what we’re doing so much more valuable and insightful as well.

Kaya: And we’re already seeing it. Everyone told us this would be hard. And of course we believed them, but doing it, we’re like, “Oh, I have such a different appreciation now for founders and creators even just like a month and change into this.” Like, I feel like my perspective actually is much different and evolved now.

Jasmine: It’s not just that we’re looking from the sidelines. We have such a different perspective on it. I mean, even posting on social media is difficult. Every platform is different. They have different tools and there’s different ways that you need to sort of tailor the content for each platform. And it takes a lot of time. And it’s been a learning curve for us.

Kaya: We’re longtime social media users. We know how to use platforms. Using them as a creator is different. And even thinking about things like your YouTube description and your SEO terms and your podcast terms, there’s so much that goes in behind the scenes. People are like, “Oh, you just post the podcast and you’re done.” And it’s like, no, there’s so much goes into it.

Jasmine: I think people still think that you just post one TikTok video, you go viral, and then all of a sudden you are Mr. Beast. That’s not how it works, and it is becoming very clear to us that this is a lot of work. It’s a lot of fun too, but it’s a lot of work.

I honestly feel like if an internet culture reporter doesn’t have an understanding of the business of being a creator, they don’t have the perspective they need to best understand why things are happening the way they are, or even just to lend legitimacy to the people behind the trends. So maybe for anyone who is less familiar with the business side, when we talk about the creator economy, what are we talking about?

Kaya: Even definitions are funny in this space. Like, what is a podcast now? What is a creator now? All these lines have blurred. So I think the creator economy has sort of become this catchall term that actually really doesn’t mean much. We think about it pretty broadly, right? It’s anyone that touches the space, from the social media platforms to the brands to the agents to the talent managers to the creators themselves to, like, Adobe’s part of the creator economy. So we look at it really holistically.

What are the things that you’re looking out for in regards to the charts that you’re making, for instance?

Jasmine: Where the money is coming from, how it’s flowing in and around the creator economy. We’ll look at things like social media ad spending or the revenues that creators are bringing in or how much different platforms are making, what cut of that is going to creators, for example. But then we also look at other parts of it too, like the tools that creators are using in order to build their businesses. We just had a chart in Tuesday’s newsletter about the AI content creation gap and that bigger creators are more likely to use AI tools for content creation than smaller creators. And then we provide a lot of context to that, too. So it’s not just the chart, it’s also, what does this mean?

Kaya: I think people increasingly now want a point of view, right? Obviously these are really smart people, it’s just that they want perspectives. Also to piggyback off of what Jasmine said, like for example, when we cover tech earnings, so many publications will cover Alphabet’s earnings, but very few of them, if any, are focusing on what Alphabet’s saying about YouTube and creators on the call, ‘cause that’s a huge part of their business. So it’s kind of looking at these tech companies through the lens of their creator efforts.

Jasmine: I think the big tech earnings example is such a good one because the other thing that we do is look at what those earnings mean for the creator economy overall. I think there’s sometimes a disconnect between creators and platforms and businesses. I mean, I remember going to a conference a couple of years ago and talking to creators and some of them didn’t quite connect the dots between, you know, if a social media platform’s ad business is doing poorly, they’re probably not going to be able to or want to share ad revenue with creators. And so everything is so intertwined within the creator economy that it’s really important to understand all of these different moving parts.

Kaya: I think one last example just to illustrate that, and Jasmine fact check me on this ‘cause I don’t have anything in front of me, but Meta said that reels has a $50 billion annual run rate. So it’s like, well what does that mean? Jasmine did that really well where she compared it to revenue of YouTube and TikTok where it’s like, okay, if Meta spun out Reels, it would actually be bigger from a revenue standpoint than TikTok and YouTube.

Jasmine: If it continued on the same trajectory. But basically, yes, it could easily be the biggest short video platform based on revenue. And I don’t think people, you know...

No, culturally Reels is kind of the butt of the joke. Is there anything else you are hoping Scalable achieves, or any other projects you’re working towards?

Jasmine: We want to be the go-to resource for business professionals in the creator economy, but I think how we do that may evolve over time. Right now it’s a newsletter and a podcast. We are planning an annual event in the spring at some point. We’re planning a research report. There could be more products down the line. I think a lot of it also depends on how it’s received and the feedback that we get from our audience, from our readers and our listeners, and from the business community at large. So, you know, expect us to experiment and iterate.