 So if we're trying to answer the question of where wordpress is place in the creator economy is I don't think we need to Work out what wordpress is, but I wanted to dive in to what the creator economy actually means The terms been around for a long time and doesn't really represent anything new It's that very broad encompassing term of people who create digital content and make a living from that So that's used to be called an influencer But now it can be anything from a blogger to a TikTok to a Twitch streamer and more Because it's such a broad and encompassing term It's really hard to evaluate the size of the market of the creator economy But people who have tried to calculate this have placed it at a 100 to 200 billion dollar a year industry at the moment And with all these people coming in there's no shortage of platforms and tech companies Investors that are trying to build products to get a part of that But also to innovate and to optimize the systems that these creators are using to do their day-to-day But what's more relevant to I guess wordpress in the work that we do is What I would call like the editorial creator and that's the phenomenon We've seen more recently in the last couple of years Where people that traditional media companies are getting up and leaving and going out alone to set up a newsletter or a subscription site or something like that The reality is with the weight these platforms are becoming increasingly easy to use The barrier to starting a media company or any kind of online publishing platform like this is becoming increasingly easy And that's why I guess it's interesting because this could potentially be that just the new standard of how media businesses get started Starting out as a creator and then growing out from that point. So it's really the next generation And I guess the reason I'm interested in this space compared to the day-to-day which is working with much more larger complex media and publishing work is During the last couple of years like everyone found ourselves with a bit of extra time being grounded and not been a travel So unlike some who learned how to make sourdough I thought I would get involved in this sort of creator space and figure out what are these people doing? What are they motivated by? Whereas the technology platforms, you know, what are they using how they're using it? And then obviously where does WordPress fit into that whole equation and hopefully learn something out of that process So for the purpose of the talk I think it's useful like anyone who works in projects to have a couple of personas to frame the conversation In the first persona, which is the most common one we see is this popular journalist who has a Prestigious job. They're the food writer for the New York Times or whatever it is and then one day they just decide that they're gonna go out and out on their own set up a sub-stack and Quit their nine to five and go it alone they've usually got some sort of social following and They can take that audience with them and sort of start off on day one with an existing brand and reputation and credibility and The second persona is kind of similar, but I guess it's almost the evolution of the first one And that's the small collective. So it's still a group of people who have come out of a well-known institution set up their own thing They're typically Still coming from a big background with a big audience But unlike an enterprise or a sort of corporate media company, they're still acting and behaving a lot like a startup They're still figuring out. How do you make money in today's age with media and publishing? and sort of are moving a lot faster and a lot more sort of agile than Where they may have come from? So the simple requirements for a content creator I serve for a creator or an editorial creator is the obviously need to publish content Whatever format that is whether it's written audio video, whatever they need to make money And that comes in a few different forms whether that is Selling and then managing subscriptions of some sort Maybe they'll go down the path of advertising. So that's corporate Commercial options and things like that or they'll sell digital products things like ebooks courses gated content so on And then the final part that a lot of these creators Really embracing is the building and supporting a community that holds this all together The idea of a creator is it's a much more one-to-one relationship with the audience rather than sort of a name at a Big traditional masthead that doesn't have that kind of intimacy So building and supporting the the community is a really important part of their attention strategies And that may be the take may take form of like the comment section Forums prop like private messaging things like discord and so on Unofficially these are like trendy platforms. I see a lot of people going down if they were going to go down and create a new media startup Specialty sass so these are kind of like the platforms you see that are designed exactly for this This sort of edge case So sub-stack has sort of really made its name in the last couple of years and gets an awful lot of coverage On sort of it being one of the big catalysts of this newsletter revolution. That's happening Or at least being reporter on happening Beehive is another that was founded by a few of the people who used to work at Morning Brew Who have there been sort of one of the big winners out of the last couple of years? Delivering newsletters and making them cool again or sort of reinventing that process and then you have things like memberful Patreon where they have sort of like CMS light tooling Ghost has not been around for a long time. They're an open-source platform I've always known of ghosts and I've never really dug into it too much but in the last couple years they've really doubled down on Building their product around this sort of digital creator space their marketing and product really fits that space nicely And is a really low friction entry way to using an open-source product to do this sort of thing and Then obviously the last category is like no code low code sort of page builders your web flows square spaces and so on So these platforms obviously are really easy to set up and get going which is one of their biggest advantages The entire UX so the whole back end everything that the actual user like as in the Editorial person is working on has been designed just for that workflow Wordsoft and gets compared is like the Swiss army knife. So it's kind of the You know it has to support everyone's workflows in different ways So these products are designed just for what they need to do and make it really easy to do that And often they have this low or no cost upfront model So you can sign up for an account. Maybe there's a subscription for you Maybe it's like a rev-shared model where when you start to make money. They start to take some money as well But I think a lot of these platforms inevitably hit a point for these sort of creative businesses that want to grow and and Scale that the nature of the restrictions on a platform are going to cause them to growth at some point The way I kind of try and visualize that is thinking you if you start on day zero You're going to get a tremendous amount of value from any one of these sort of products that you use And you're essentially paying nothing for it. So it's this really great trade-off for you But at some point and whatever that time is The cost is going to start coming up and it may not be a direct cost that you're paying But it may be a rev-shared that they're keeping from you and the value is going to subjectively be going down because if your business is growing and they're trying to do more things these platforms the restrictions are going to start to be more present and Start to be a bit more frustrating So you're going to proceed the value of what you're getting for the cost that you're sending out to be lower The challenge is always to figure out when that cross is going to be that might be 30 days If you're you know three journalists with five million followers on Twitter That's that cross could be in the first 30 days But if you're looking at maybe a part-time side hustle kind of thing that cross might be three years time So it's figuring out when those sort of things are going to converge Setting up one of these products Is pretty simple. It's it's going to be buying a domain if you need one Registering an account and then most of these products have done really well in onboarding because again, they're designed for one sort of edge case So your onboarding will take you through and you'll set up all the things you need to set up to be able to start publishing content Maybe you need a connect stripe if you're going to take payments things like that So what does WordPress look like? There's a lot more steps involved Especially if we think back to those personas in the beginning. They're not product people. They're not people. They're not devs They're no engineering background So this is a very common thing and anyone who's worked in WordPress for any period of time kind of knows the friction of Working with WordPress will will bring in So you try and imagine explaining these sort of steps to a non-technical person and the sort of rat race They can go on trying to figure all of this out and hopefully not getting any step wrong along the way because it could potentially You know create further problems as they're setting other things up So with all other why would you bother with WordPress? I think for us obviously the WordPress agency we believe in in the promise of WordPress and the benefit for for businesses So I think selling this sort of WordPress stuff to these creators is really understanding what they're trying to do Is it a we're talking about a creator that is doing like the side hustle thing and They've got very low objectives and they're just going to be happy with that and then maybe that's where a SaaS product works Really well, but the other hand if they're going to be spending $100,000 a month on Audience acquisition they've got growth growth objectives that the product that they're going to land on needs to be sort of comparable for I Think people who work in tech also overthink or skip the basics We've been working with someone recently and you sort of gloss over the really basic things that you take for granted in a day-to-day They're doing you know quite a large Product in this space But they can't do things like simple email sequencing and stuff like that So these are things that we would typically not even think about to do or be able to track conversions because the restrictive nature of the SaaS products don't allow you to Tie in the analytics the way you want or to do the Audience acquisition and analytics the way you want and Then obviously trying to be objective as possible But at the end of the day if we're talking to somebody who is considering using a platform like this There's some pretty big risks And trade-offs that they're going to have to make inevitably using something like that So a lot of these are Reasons you could use of a WordPress in any context. I think in the case of media creators and things like that flexibility allows you to build workflows and Customize your application or your product to suit your audience a Lot of these creators are obviously got the entrepreneurial kind of spirit If they're going to leave in nine to five and go out and build their own thing and what's really great about watching this space happen Is that they are Figuring out new ways to monetize your audience how to capture first-party data build products and things like that So flexibility I think is really important if you've talked to someone who's got ambitions of growing Customization in terms of visual appearance Most of these platforms will give you half a dozen options to configure But at the end of the day, it's going to look like every other sub-stack or every other beehive or every other whatever else that you're using Ownership for everyone who works in WordPress already I think is pretty strongly about having access and ownership of your own data Ownership of content first-party data that you're tracking on your audience comments analytic, whatever that is Is a really compelling thing for people who get worried about that Access to your own data again is really important if you want to move and migrate to another CMS It can't be understated if you're building your this product The content is your product to have it locked in a vault that you can't access or partially access Is a huge deal and in any other situation wouldn't fly Censorship also is something that comes up once in a while with Platforms, it's obviously a very touchy area of where censorship and where platforms and VCs and investors need to draw lines on things But definitely has been a concern people have raised About why they've wanted to leave platforms like this and then obviously on interoperability between plugins and systems Plugging in WordPress to some other system that may be really valuable to the To the product that you're trying to build So how do you overcome these challenges in WordPress? I think the first thing is this concept that's been bounced around for a while of like the WordPress light distribution There's not really an answer to it But I'm post that I say had a podcast about a look a couple of months ago And it's a similar thought I've had for quite a while of how do you build a sort of really tight distribution of WordPress? That lets these kinds of users that want to be able to spin something up really quickly and push them through a journey to Ultimately be able to do it in as few steps as some of the platforms can do But it's just good to think about I guess conceptually with these other ideas that I have So when we're doing these kinds of projects and this was sort of some of the stuff we did over COVID was did about 12 Sort of platform migrations away from Different CMSs substacks and stuff like that for these sort of newsletter subscription editorial creators And that's firstly to make WordPress feel more like a platform. And so we do that by Leaning into that no and low code mindset So, you know using things like page builders full-site editing whatever that looks like You know as a developer originally my preference is always custom development custom engineering Custom functionality everything writing in in in a text editor But I think in this audience and these personas again That's not something they're looking for and having the maintenance requirement of an engineer to be out of adjust Functionality features whatever it is and that's sort of a trend WordPress is leaning to already So it's not the best outcome But I think it is that trade-off of being able to do more in the browser and less with custom code WordPress admin is a constant. I think in anyone who does client services work with WordPress It's pretty overwhelming at the best of times and the visual hierarchy is just all over the place The what you're looking for when you're setting a site up and when you're using a site when it's live and running Are two different things, but you know a site that's gone live six months ago Is still to see the appearance menu or the comments menu or the tools menu like these things are irrelevant once you're in a day-to-day Movement so how do we get the menu to feel more contextually aware of stuff that is frequent? And that's like stripping it right back to what an editorial team needs to see they need posts They need pages Comments like this is the stuff they're living in day-to-day Everything else and when we've done this Some of it's gonna be pretty ugly to make it work because it's not a real nice way in core to do this But to just push everything else out of screen because for most people Once they're in there. This is all they need to see not that ginormous list of 700 menu items Making plugins feel more native. I think it's a challenge and I don't think there's really a simple answer to any of that but WordPress obviously has a pretty consistent design pattern when you're an admin through the block editor It's all fairly consistent Until you start adding plugins and when you're using the most common kind of ones I will use Yoast and newsletter glue and things like that for for these sort of projects They're now using their own design schemes They're using you know different forms of tabs and icons and things like that So all of a sudden you're sort of scrolling through a page and you've now got almost three or four different things It feels like in the same place so One of the ways we've sort of been out of make that a little bit better without trying to manually rewrite all the styling is Thinking about how do you avoid duplication of steps? So if you're using again the newsletter glue example and a payroll at the front end You would have to go through here and say all right. This is a you know paid article I don't want people on the website to be able to read it unless it is unless they've paid Conversely though, you're running a newsletter system that has paying subscribers and free subscribers in this situation by default You would have to go and then manually say I'd also send this to only the premium list So they're just these little steps that happen over and over again because they're kind of two plugins all under the one umbrella for the editors experience and What we did is we work with newsletter glue and they let us add a bunch of hooks and filters in so when we're doing these kinds of things We know that if it's a paid article It's going to go to a paid list and things like that So we can kind of cut half his UI out of the screen altogether So from an editor's perspective, they can just say yep This is a premium article or this is a free article and not have to kind of manually do it in multiple steps because other than it just being clunky introduces risk of You know human error and things like that So the subscription engine part so they'll have to see whether that's in a e-commerce or subscriptions recurring revenue There's a few ways to architect this the two schools of thought are obviously running it inside WordPress using your new Commerses your paid membership pros and things like that Well, there's using like SAS integrations something on the cloud that runs all the billing engines and things like that And I think if you think back to what is important to the personas of who's using this editorial Not products not tech The second you add payment payment systems to a WordPress site it goes from being something that's really important to now being mission-critical Something like a content site is really just lead capture at this point until you add a billing system And that's sort of trade-offs. You have to make If it's content, I have no issues in saying let's use what WP engines auto-updata It's gonna do some screenshots. It's gonna make a pretty calculated estimate of doing updates and keep the site up to date But there's no way in the world You would want to recommend that if you've got a custom billing engine or a payment engine in there as well Because that thing's not going to understand the nuance of failed subscriptions. There's also bottlenecks We did some work last year Where they were sort of almost at a theoretical limit of single parallel Processing they could do on their site and anytime there was a release They had to figure out a way to pause it only short enough because if it was paused for too long It would never be able to catch back up again because it could only process one subscription at a time And as it was growing it wouldn't do that So our preference is usually to use SAS products things like at the low end like memberful or Pico Up to your recurlies and charge bees and charge of fires and all these other tools So you build your API connections between and let it do all the heavy lifting It's going to deal with all the security PCI compliance All your reporting and number crunching of analytics and data and things like that especially at scale if you've got 50,000 active paying subscribers Trying to run that off a back end of a shared hosting platform isn't going to result in any fun for anyone And they're also going to manage all the plumbing between all the different tools that you don't have to worry about So that's how we sort of think about that and then if you are going to go down that part back to that chart of when the lines Converge and use something up, you know building your own to start with It's the premise that there's never going to be a perfect time to do a migration They're always going to suck and that's because these platforms While they tick a box and say we give you access to everything They don't have to make it incredibly easy for you to leave To use sub-stack as an example, you know, they will give you a full export of the data set But you're going to get a zip file with one CSV file with all your emails in it And then a directory full of HTML files, which is not an easy way to migrate that into a CMS Especially if it's being iterated on over a period of time When we've done some of these large ones that just couldn't be done manually We've had to build WPC live functions that will basically scrub and scrub and scrub the data because there's inline CSS There's inline JavaScript and called actions. It's pretty messy and trying to reverse engineer static HTML files against the production site So you can grab the schema data to then build it in WordPress It's technically a data migration, but it's not a very pleasant one to do at that point So it's being realistic that it's going to be painful whenever it happens And it's just gonna have to happen and then that's the other so the summary I think is that this creator world and these new versions of media companies are definitely here to stay and they're growing The industry is continuing to add, you know different versions of this. We're seeing new incarnations of how people are starting the platforms that are A different thing and there's definitely learning of what they're doing. Well, what they're not doing well But how does WordPress? Remain competitive in that space either as a something out of the box or three people who implement WordPress You know so that it can continue to sort of serve that purpose for businesses that are trying to do more than just sort of the status quo and And the sort of heavy amount of lifting and thinking that sort of has to be done at the moment to get to that point so that was my sort of Talk, yeah, thank you We do have some time for questions if anyone has a question for Ben So you you've been working on migrating the creators that are starting on these other platforms and bringing them into WordPress What types of people have you seen the most that are making those migrations like from what industries? Have you worked with the most? So, I mean most of these are in some sort of specialty niche and I think that works really well for Anyone who builds an audience really organically so Some of them are moving like in politics some of them have been just like local news So like the hyper local news thing is like this other trend that sort of really been bubbling up over the last couple years as well There's been a few politics I think And others have just been like sports so that the industries themselves are the verticals have been a bit all over the place I Think the the catalysts behind a lot of them have been we've just we can't grow any more the way we are When you get into sort of more see like when they become a business and they start thinking about it as a business You know if you're doing audience acquisition You're spending money on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter to like get people to sign up If you can't like build the funnel with analytics You're basically just throwing money at a wall and you know, we've worked with people who are spending 20k a week like in trying to build Subscribers and when someone screws up something in the analytics and it's they've just they've no visibility so It's like these things of when do you realize you have to graduate out of sort of like consumer tools to like business tools And that's where like migrating those sub stacks as an example of they just sort of hit All of them in different ways, but hit theoretical limits Some of them have been like I don't want people I don't I don't want to be in the same place as somebody else Who's also on the platform like you know somewhat more ideological arguments, which aren't business arguments as much I guess But it's really it's been a really mixed bag But they've all had sort of the same pain points and workflow that they're trying to achieve. Yeah one of the issues we've seen is Membership numbers and users on WordPress. How do you deal with really large? Membership sites that start to grow into the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands Do you move those off WordPress to a third-party like I damn solution? How do you handle that challenge? Yeah, obviously and obviously the the reason that becomes so challenging is not necessarily the size of the users But it you start having uncashed traffic and big large chunks of audience on there I mean, there's two ways people like two ways easy being done. So there's either like complete client-side SAS products Which I'm not the biggest fan of but they certainly achieve that sort of objective really quickly where they'll be doing single sign-on through some sort of identity system and then Basically, it's like a leaky paywall. You can just like kill JavaScript and bypass that all together I think if So it's just slightly contradict the point about using like page builders and off-the-shelf stuff If you're getting into a site where you've got a hundred thousand paying subscribers You probably don't need to be doing like a $20 theme You can probably like the economics ever change a little bit And that's where if you can sort of start to working through like proper cash management and stuff like that because ultimately logged in users still Have the same experience other than access to the X only two cash dates It's not like econ of a hundred thousand unlocked in users All doing different dynamic requests. So we've had luck. Yeah being really clever about like state management with cash state management To prevent that There's still like I still like this simplicity like the anti-complexity kind of thing of them being natural users in WordPress Managing that through API through rest API. So, you know, if you're using a system that says someone's, you know They're done in their their failed payment. They're expired, whatever just having a simple webhook ping us We verify that it's happened and they know that another system knows that it's happened Otherwise, yeah, you go down that sort of identity management system Which we've done a couple of times and these are probably not really even creators now But just more general, you know, big membership media sites And sometimes they're ones that are like now bordering into headless stuff So almost next JS is dealing with your identity management and state management to something like author zero or something like that And it's almost completely abstracted from WordPress at that point Other than going like get full native application and trying to be really clever about cash management So you don't have everything get natively blowing up so Based on what you've just said, when is the right time for with your experience with a large media companies? When is the right time to start looking at? headless For a creator company or a media company? Is there a checklist or what's the process behind thinking this might be a good solution? Yeah, I Headless is a funny one. I've got a lot of thoughts on it on headless in general I think part of The general sense of there's a lot of people who are wanting to jump straight into headless for any reason at all the simplest site We can take let's go build it in a totally decoupled architecture we've worked over the last two or three years on some like Probably sevens and higher figure projects where we've gone down outside of our recommendation down this headless approach and The sort of most disheartening thing is when they are so overly engineered They have such big teams to power these things to build them And then you finally get to the launch and they are working worse than a $12 off-the-shelf theme From a performance perspective their buggy there, you know They're creating infinite issues in in AWS and auto scaling and stuff like that So I don't think no one should ever do headless ever. I think there's The sort of pendulum swings of like this is the latest and greatest everything should be headless We talk most people out of headless or come to us and say, oh, we need this and then we'll talk through the reasons Why and they're just doing what a WordPress site like and they think it's faster and it's like well It's nothing to do with how it's rendered It's the fact that there's 800 different ad tech providers or analytics things that are running and that's all going to be on The headless site so appeals motivation sometimes get a bit skewed I Think the main thing when I would say that it makes sense is when you're pulling in multiple data sources and Significant amount amounts of data If it's like 95% WordPress It may just be simpler to like bring that data into WordPress and store it there and then push it all out the same way But if you are genuinely pulling in like a fully commerce system a full content system if WordPress isn't the majority anymore That's makes a lot more sense to go like a fully API driven Headless approach. That's my typical sort of thing. That was my other idea of a talk for word camp this year Was to win about headless for half an hour But that's my that's my sort of simplified thoughts on on the headless argument Hey So we talked about Substack creator economy. I'm wondering like how it would look like to migrate a social media creator like somebody from tiktok Somebody who is I have the Instagram realized their core business because like The feature is one part like we can have newsletter glue. We can have who comm mistake care of payment But the the thing that I'm struggling with social media platform is the network effect Hmm, and even if we improve editorial experience say we bring something like web stories that Google leaders some other tool Even better media library or Media management tiktok like that do it creation anything that we do in WordPress the network is something That I cannot get my head around like Any ideas any thoughts on that like? Yeah, I think that's why the newsletter the newsletter revolution thing has been happening Because you're never going to be able to recreate the experience of the tiktok Experience on a website like or even a you know PWA like Google stories or whatever else So I think that's where like Twitter buying review a couple of years ago And now like natively bringing into like the Twitter experience a lot of people have like to subscribe to my newsletter Most people aren't even using review They're just using it like to get the email address and then like API push it into whatever other system. They're using sub stack or something so I think that the The popularity the email argument is that you're still getting something's email address To try and build that relationship because anyone yet who builds on a rented garden could have that taken away at any time That's one of the challenges of any platform if they go in a different direction You're kind of kind of stuck With your whole business model I guess So it's yeah, I think the people who have been doing that well are trying to create something That's useful or meaningful to like you know if they're fashion tiktok or whatever else How do they bring some kind of good content to a website that they can kind of peel away or shave away? Some of that audience builds some direct relationship some of this never gonna happen I don't like I don't think you're gonna ever recreate the virality of a tiktok getting like 100 million views in a week or something and getting them all to go to your website and subscribe to the newsletter and it's gonna happen, but You either do nothing or something and I think that's probably the best way to To try and at least own a bit of that audience and have that first party data I think Because I don't think building a social network on WordPress is gonna be as exciting as Using tiktok or Instagram or whatever else One up front So I've found that WordPress is far superior to say square space or Wix But if I have a client and all they're doing is selling I've had a lot of issues with WooCommerce and sometimes I'll just say you Shopify if that's all you're gonna do is sell. Yeah Yeah, I mean I'm kind of in the same boat like week Years ago. We sort of thought where where do we want to work? We sort of were just a more general no we were generalist specialist at WordPress Like we just did anything at WordPress like anything that was complex We could figure it out and e-commerce and WooCommerce was one of those ones and we ended up working with like a fashion brand in Australia And they used to be like on the homepage of WooCommerce like they were really big WooCommerce site And I think that experience kind of put me off doing e-commerce like in PHP and MySQL ever again Because it is just it's a there's definitely reasons to do it and people who specialize in it But it's not a what I saw value in doing And just like you said not having to worry about Plug-ins or issues or the compatibility between things and then that compatibility with the front-end and then like you add a Twitter widget and somehow the JavaScript breaks the checkout experience like this that kind of world is For someone who's doing something really simple to do that and that's kind of the same comparison with these platforms like Substack is incredibly simple like it looks like something I would have made when I was in high school on a weekend like it's just literally two screens of a UI and like a Textbox like it's really simple, but it does do a really good job But like if you just want to write like a newsletter and send it out I'm not think about anything and you're not sort of having ideas of grandeur of where it needs to go To kind of a fine trade-off. So I'm more than happy to tell people like You are the rule it out because I don't have the budget or even if they think they should spend the money It's like you should probably go simple Spend it on building an audience and then maybe come back when you can actually get a return Because spending all your budget on paying us to build something the spoke is not really Gonna result in any better of an outcome for a business perspective So yeah, I think that's why we always have that's leaning to sass stuff because it's kind of just all abstracted as black box Don't have to worry about it don't have to worry about yet having 500 orders all happen at once and crashing your site It's all just it's somebody else's problem. I think it's a pretty good value exchange. So I don't have to worry about that Questions all right, let's hear it again for Ben. Thank you, Ben