Do creators tend to use only one platform or have a presence on multiple creator economy platforms?

Guest: It's much more common for people to use multiple providers when they're not on an integrated platform. And the reason for that is a lot of providers only offer one or two different types of content that you can sell.

For example, you can sell digital downloads on Gumroad. And then as of recently, they're offering a membership product, so you can sell digital downloads and a membership product on Gumroad now, but you can't really sell online courses.

You can sell online courses on Gumroad like an email course maybe, but they don't actually have a powerful course viewing experience for the end user. People who want to sell digital downloads as well as memberships, as well as online courses, then they'll use Gumroad plus Teachable or maybe Gumroad plus Podia for their courses.

Before Gumroad launched memberships, it would have been Gumroad for your digital downloads, Podia or Teachable for your courses, and then they would use something like Patreon, maybe for their membership. And that creates a lot of challenges. Obviously, it creates all these data gaps, and a lot of complexity for the business.

I think where the creator economy is moving is that people are going to want everything in one place. So more and more platforms will become a comprehensive all-in-one suite for creators to support all of these different content types. Just because it's far easier to keep track of everything in one place for creators.

You're seeing the same thing with Gumroad there. They were supporting digital downloads. They're going to support memberships. And I think I saw that in 2021, they plan to support courses.