Content Entrepreneurship on Social Media Platforms
Topic
The absence of entry barriers, minimal initial investment, and the abundant income possibilities offered by content-based platforms have transformed this space into a highly competitive and attractive market. While users seek information, entertainment, and social interaction, content creators can profit from vast amounts of monetization opportunities while businesses profit from promoting their products and services to their target market.
The topic under discussion is defined by the process by which content creation, facilitated by platform such as Instagram and TikTok, evolves into a profitable online business.
Relevance
Out of 8 billion people in the world, 4.9 billion are active on content-based platforms as of 2023 (Ruby, 2023), the average time spent on social media per user each day is 2.5h (Global Social Media Statistics, 2022). Hundreds of content creators are pursuing opportunities to monetize their content and profit from the various sources of online income (Roccapriore & Pollock, 2022).
The lack of research available in this field, providing insights on content monetization and content entrepreneurship has kept the community of content creators aspiring to entrepreneurship, with a subjective understanding of this business endeavor.
Results
Three stages within the process of creating a content-based online business have been found throughout this research; building an online audience, content monetization, and business creation. Each stage contains factors that directly influence its development.
Key findings within the first stage define what it takes to build, retain, and grow an audience significant enough to start monetization, among these; strategy, skills, and challenges. During the second stage, monetization sources and main income-generating activities are determined, followed by insights into the nature of business creation, execution, and profitability.
Implications for practitioners
Practical implications
Through this research it was determined that the strategy to build a content-based online business should start by defining the account's main goal, the purpose of the account and the content, the ideal audience, and thus define a value generation plan for all involved stakeholders. Further practical implications to foster audience growth are defined by selecting one to a maximum of two topics per platform account, addressing a specific audience, operating in a selected industry, and, implementing an action plan for consistent media upload throughout time, the absence of this criteria can negatively impact the account's audience growth, audience quality, and engagement rate hindering content monetization.
Theoretical implications
Findings provide a broad theoretical understanding of the various stages content entrepreneurs go through while transitioning from creating content as a hobby to professionalization. Furthermore, the study delves into the profitability aspects identifying primary income streams and quantifying the significance of this income, this contribution to the refinement of theories allows a more focused examination for future research. Additional theoretical implications are the categorization of content entrepreneurs into two distinctive groups, deepening the understanding of the content entrepreneur's landscape, enhancing existing literature, and enabling researchers to improve data homogeneity.
Methods
Primary data for this research was collected through:
- Preliminary account analysis: data from interviewed profiles' social media accounts have been collected and analyzed, among the collected indicators are audience size, account activation date, engagement rate, total media uploads, and visible monetization sources. Data was gathered by visiting the profiles and using the Socialblade tool.
- Qualitative research: an open-ended questions interview was conducted with 13 content entrepreneurs. This approach fostered the collection of a broad spectrum of primary data avoiding the possible delimitations set by closed survey questions, enabling the obtention of data on new untapped subject matters.