Why do creators use social media platforms instead of direct channel economics which can be more profitable in the long term?

Guest: I guess YouTube is unique because they actually share ad revenue with their creators. I guess even if the economics aren't very good for creators because the platforms take a big cut, YouTube lets you monetize while not having to worry about things outside of creating contents.

Whereas direct monetization captures value directly from your audience requires you to pick up other skills outside of content creation.

I think the creator economy is still pretty new. A lot of these platforms have only really started growing really fast in the last couple of years. So I think there's definitely an education process that needs to happen, both at kind of like the micro level for individual creators and the macro level where there's not enough shared knowledge of how to become a professional creator and do it well. On the individual creator level, it's like a lot of these creators have only been creating for, a year, two years. 

The vast majority of that time they've been, just spending all their time, thinking about how to continue building their audience and a much less time thinking about how to monetize it. 

And I think we're still at the stage where creators often know that they want to monetize, but it's such a vague idea to them in terms of like how to optimize for that goal, that they end up optimizing for the number of followers for a long time, because that's a more accessible proxy for them to think about.