A social media platform is only as good as the content creators on it. Creator economy insiders like Tiffany Matloob, the global head of creator community at YouTube Shorts, recognize this. Matloob has participated in a defining chapter of social media that saw the rise of short-form videos since the beginning. Having previously worked with creators at TikTok (when it was still Musical.ly) and Instagram (Meta (META)) Reels in their early days, Matloob is tapped into a source much more valuable than any single platform or trend cycle that it gloms onto at the moment, whether it’s live shopping, 50-part storytimes or watching a YouTube playlist on a TV screen instead of a laptop.
“I’ve always been in this building stage of helping build these systems that help creators be seen and discovered,” Matloob told Observer in an interview in January.
Entertainment consumers are increasingly turning away from traditional media to user-generated content, or UGC. A recent study by marketing tech company InMobi shows that 61 percent of Gen Z favor UGC over music, podcasts, gaming and TV. Among platforms that deliver their first-choice content, YouTube is at the top. As YouTube CEO Neal Mohan put it in his annual letter in early February, creators are producing storytelling “that can’t be dismissed as simply ‘user-generated content.'”
“All these companies end up being in competition with one another again and again,” Debra Williamson, an independent social media analyst who previously worked for Insider Intelligence, told Observer. “But the main place where they’re all competing is for creators, because it’s the creators that make the videos that drive the attention of users, that then drive advertising revenue.”
From journalist to creator manager
Matloob started her career in journalism as a freelance entertainment reporter in 2009, when internet creators and influencers were emerging but certainly not famous enough to share Super Bowl commercial space with Beyoncé. Even then, she knew that the future stars would be the ones who could wield control over social media. When she transitioned to the digital media company Spin Media in 2012 as its director of programming, Matloob began building websites and an overall internet presence for reality TV stars who turned into cultural icons: The Kardashians, Nene Leakes and Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, just to name a few.
“I always say they were the OG creators,” Matloob said. “They knew that their 15 seconds on TV wasn’t gonna [last] and they needed to build beyond that. That’s why you see some of those reality stars are so successful now because they’ve built these digital footprints that have stood the test of time.”
YouTube Shorts was launched in fall of 2020 as the Alphabet (GOOGL)-owned video platform’s answer to TikTok. Matloob joined the team in late 2020 from Meta, where she developed creator partnership strategies for Reels from its inception. “YouTube has been my number one because I felt like it was so amazing to see creators be able to build businesses here and have longevity with their careers,” Matloob said.
How YouTube Shorts works with creators
As global head of creator community, Matloob oversees Shorts’ community partner managers, or CPMs, who work directly with creators in the platform’s invite-only creator community. Though she doesn’t work with creators on a day-to-day basis, she said she has years-long relationships with many of them and speaks with them often. She also frequently scrolls through Shorts looking for talent and doing her own recruiting. One of her proudest finds is Clean Girl, who has 2.5 million subscribers to her content about cleaning random public spaces like a Taco Bell bathroom or a gravesite.
Shorts’ creator community program and its CPMs offer weekly newsletters to creators, virtual “office hour” type sessions, educational workshops and access to a peer network who are also building platforms through Shorts, including long-form YouTubers. YouTube did not disclose the number of creators in the program, but Matloob said her CPMs work with thousands of creators.
“I think the magic of this model is that a lot of times creators will come and there’ll be a Shorts creator, but because of YouTube, there will also be long-form creators in the room,” Matloob said. “They link together and they become collaborators, helping each other grow in that format and giving them the best practices there.”
YouTube’s partnership program, which allows creators to earn money from their videos, paid out $70 billion over the last three years to “artists, creators and media companies,” Mohan said in his February letter. He also noted that Shorts is growing at a pace of 70 billion new views daily and the platform has 50 percent more channels than the year before. A study from creator marketing platform CreatorIQ showed that 63 percent of creators found Shorts more effective for content creation than long-form YouTube videos.
Content creators are “the next generation’s studios”
However, in the same study 65 percent of creators said Meta’s Instagram is the most lucrative platform in terms of pay, while only 9 percent said so about YouTube. Brands favor Instagram for marketing, with 60 percent marketers surveyed saying it generates the best return on investment and only 8 percent saying so about YouTube. The video platform is “still very much in the competition not only for user attention, but for the brands and the creators that need to support it,” Williamson said.
Mohan said in his letter that content creators “should be recognized as the next generation’s studios.” Matloob expressed a similar view when describing how creator collectives like content houses and shared social media accounts will be an important part of the creator economy’s future.
The idea, especially of content houses, is certainly not foolproof. In 2021, a startup called Clubhouse Media Group operating influencer mansions in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Europe filed defamation lawsuits against former house members who had accused the company of bullying and manipulative behavior. Probably the most famous influencer mansion, Hype House, is currently on sale. Many of its original star members like Charli and Dixie D’Amelio left years ago.
But in Matloob’s view, creator collectives, in the different forms they come in, give creators agency that the platforms can’t. Whether it’s by lessening the workload on the individual by divvying up roles, or having other people to bounce content ideas off of, this is the value of creators coming together.
“It’s going back to vintage YouTube with O2L and the Try Guys and all those people that we love where it was like five people to one account,” Matloob said. “And you got to know this group of characters and then they also have their own stuff, but it really is a collective.”
From working and living in the digital world, Matloob understands that the internet is cyclical, but she’s learned what creators can do to latch on despite the changes. “I want to go back to that bread and butter of YouTube where we’re collaborating more, we’re connecting,” she said. “And that’s what I’m even more excited to bring together.”