 Whenever I look back, somebody asked me in an interview sometime back saying that, what do you believe about the creator economy? And I said, you know, the unique thing about the creator economy is that 25 years ago when I used to be asked, what are you going to do? And I was a mass communication student, used to do some theater, used to do a little bit of amateur radio in the early days. One really didn't know, one didn't have an answer. I would just turn and say, we will discover as we go along. But over the last 25 years, I've seen this Mahabharat kind of happen all over. And it is Mahabharat, not just in the battle of the mediums, but it's also a Mahabharat in terms of just its size and scale and volume that it has become. And it's really, really interesting. Today, I sometimes often look at myself sitting on the sidelines, seeing a lot of what's happening. It's wonderful to see so many young creators here as well, Anushka, it's lovely to see you. I last saw her at the NAS Summit, but it was really fantastic to bump into her this morning. I'm going to basically try and do two things here. One is that I'm going to try and tell you a little bit of what's happening with the entire on-demand economy, what are the trends, what are the changes. But on the other side, how are creators going to adapt to it and what are some of the trends that could be great for you all to look at as innovations or places where technology could be leveraged. But I'm going to start with something. How many of you had breakfast this morning? How many of you had breakfast? Raise your hand. Raise your hand. You're the ones who look happy or whatever, right? Yeah. The ones who haven't are still waiting for that little shot in the morning. But I was on the flight this morning. I will serve breakfast. Vistara's a great airline, absolutely premium. They came with their breakfast. There were three choices. And the minute I looked at those choices, it had an omelette, but not the kind of omelette I like. And suddenly my mind went saying, you know, I just wish I was on a different airline. And I wasn't, for a moment, making up this decision for the fact that this was a lack of service. There was great service. The options were fantastic. But the thing that was really exciting me was the memory of saying, yeah, I wish I could just have a Maggie right now. Sometimes it's a need. It's something you want to do. And what I love about some of the other airlines is just the amount of choice you have. You can go and get seven kinds of juices, four kinds of sandwiches, three kinds of poha, idli, upma, anything you want. You've got zesty noodles, chicken noodles, anything that's required. And this is something that is directly relevant to what's happening with the on-demand content space. We live in an era where choice is fundamental. It's a fundamental principle. It wasn't. 15, 20 years ago, we used to sit on a Thursday to watch a Chitrahaar on a Sunday to watch a movie. It was predetermined. We would listen to Amin Sianee on a Sunday on a Sibhaka Geet mala, because that was the only day we had the option. There would be people across my entire colony who would be nice to my mother because she was the gatekeeper to letting them come in and see television. And I promise you, watching a Chitrahaar had 40 people in a drawing room. That's what used to happen. There really was no choice. Everybody was a gatekeeper. From the people who owned the medium, all the way down to the person who owned the device, it was exactly that. But where do you exist? You live in an era of unlimited choice. This is something unique. How many of you saw the Oscars yesterday? How many of you saw it live? Some of you saw it live early morning? No, not early morning. But even if you saw it on the repeat broadcast on Hotstar, how many of you were irritated with the ads in between? Because you are no longer keen to see commercials in between. You want uninterrupted viewing. It's a choice that you have made because you pay for a subscription. And you know what happens is we pay for our comforts. And in case we don't pay, that's when we have to handle the discomfort of watching ads, of having 30 kinds of infomercials and graphics popping up on your screen, this is the price you need to pay. In places where you are not paying, remember, you are the product. You are the product being sold on Instagram. You, as an audience, are the product being sold on a Facebook, on a YouTube, everywhere else. The minute you start paying, the product suddenly comes to you and says, now let me build a walled garden around you and give you exactly what you want. So choice is almost now a fundamental right. How many of you saw Pathan? Did you? I'm doing this. My god, I have to report this back to Red Chilies or SRK. It will be like that. But OK. Couple of you saw Pathan. Strange, because it seems that a lot of people went and saw Pathan as a film. In the same movie, there were two trailers that came. One of a movie called Shahzada and the other of a movie called Selfie. Neither were able to even do 100s. And I think even lesser is the amount of business. I think, yeah, I mean, from numbers that I was told, one of them might have a lifetime value of 11 crores. 11 crores versus 1,000 crores for a Pathan. What makes people have this choice? This generation has divided the two screens they see things on. And I don't think television is a screen for you anymore. There are only two screens. There is the screen of spectacle, which is the cinema screen. And there is the screen of intimacy, which is the device that is almost an extension of your hand, which is your mobile. These are the two screens. And now you make choices. One of them requires friction, the friction of getting to a movie theater, the friction of parking, the friction of going there with your family, the friction of spending over 2,000 rupees on bad snacks. All of that. The other is available to you when you want, where you want, how you want. It's entirely up to you. And so when you make the decision of spectacle, which is the big screen, you are actually turning and saying, is this worth my while? George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had a conversation during the pandemic where they turned and said, this will be the screen of spectacle only. This is like the circus. This is like where the gladiators come and fight. Only if it is big enough in pomp and ceremony and excitement will you go for it. Everything else, I'll see Akshay Kumar and Imran Hashmi on my mobile phone. It'll come in a month on my device. Why should I make that choice? So why choice is something that is the power in your hand? Choice is also the reason why you reject things out right nowadays. You reject things a lot more than you did. We were far more forgiving as a generation. We would sit through three hours of a bad film. You can't sit through 30 seconds of bad content. This is what choice has done to you. The two years of the pandemic actually accentuated this further. Any content you were viewing, you were now viewing with just three thoughts in your mind. Does it entertain me? Does it empower me? Does it make me visible? As a content creator today, the people who were smart, the content creators of today took these three points and said, I'll do one of these, which is why the viral dress-up challenges, the dances, et cetera, that's the entertain me economy. The economy of which Anushka is a part and so many other people are a part is the empower economy. I will teach you. I will show you. I will empower you with knowledge and learning. And that is the kind of stuff that you will look out for. The make me visible is the part which says, can I be a hero? Can you make me the star? Can I be the next person who will feature up there? These are the three fundamental choices that you all are making. And new creators know how to do this exactly. They know how to interest you, not how to interrupt you. Interruption is the biggest problem that we have faced in our media for the longest time. If you try and read an article today, there are at least 40 places where your screen is trying to divert your attention. The article itself wants to give you a subscription. Someone on the side is trying to see your likeness and give you something. It's this interruption that you avoid. It's an anathema to you guys. Look at the creators who have come out and become even stronger, whether it was musicians, because they developed a sense of intimacy with you. The small screen has a genuine intimacy it establishes with you, which is why highly produced videos do not work on a small screen. It is a natural video, a video where the light may be bad, a video where the person converses. I run a big spoken word community and we handle a lot of storytellers and artists and we've been advising them that change this performance style to a conversational style. Become shareable. Do not try to become a spectacle because you cannot. Today, good creators have taken this economy and are slowly becoming brands, production houses, agencies by themselves. Prajakta was at the UN and at Davos. Why is a young creator invited to these places? Because while these are walled gardens, there is a need by the very owners of these walled gardens to have young creators present so that the Gen Z audiences or the Gen whatever is able to come in and see what they are up to. Relevance becomes absolutely critical. Tanmay is today no longer just a commentator. He's making the ads for Lenscard for cred. I met him just last week and in that conversation, he said, you know what? I need to do nothing. I need to write one ad a month and it'll earn me the salary of an agency. That is the power of young creators today who understand their audiences. Bhuvan Bam, who started with BBK Vines, is today running his own production house, the number one rated show on Amazon for six weeks. The longest running show was Taza Khabar. Why? Because Bhuvan appeals to an audience which he unashamedly acknowledges. There are two lines in that show. There is a line in which they turn and say, what is the difference between magic on one side and a miracle? And he says, faith. Faith is the difference. This audience chooses the jadu of a young creator because it thinks most miracles are frauds and therefore it is faith that establishes a link between the creator and their audiences. On the other side, there is a line in this show which I think is the best line and any brand should take it up. He takes his girlfriend, who by the way is not a girl simpering and sitting somewhere. She is a woman of the streets. She is a prostitute. He manages an entry into a public toilet. This is an audience that you and I don't even know. This is a part of Bharat that you and I have never even seen. But when both of them go on a taxi ride when he makes money and she turns to him and says, where are you taking him? He says, the biggest thing about what is happening today is we all want to go beyond our limits. And young creators in this on-demand equation are trying to take you beyond those limits. When a channel like a mirror now is not able to handle the views of their opinion maker, Fedesuza, she goes on to Instagram and creates her own channel. Today, she doesn't need a channel anymore. She has created her own on-demand economy. And these on-demand economies in the future are going to be by themselves, industries, because today she's now going to launch her own television channel. There's a sub-stack subscription. Subscription is going to become standard. How many of you subscribe to something or the other? Show me, raise your hands, right? You do. It could be, and I'm telling you, if you went across the room and asked what they subscribe to, it'll be so diverse. Somebody will be subscribing to Help Mantra. Somebody will be looking at stock tips. Somebody will be having a yoga class. Somebody will be doing just a standard OTT subscription. On-demand content platforms have democratized as well. And they have removed all barriers for entry. Short-form content should not be looked away from. Many people turn and say, short-form content is something which is coming and it's just going, I don't think so. I think it actually fuels democratization. These videos are easier to make. The tools to make them exist on the device itself, gone are the days when you needed an edit studio, heavy graphics, et cetera. All of this is now the computational power of your mobile phone is equivalent to a big computer. And everybody realizes that. And so if you're able to utilize that device, you will be able to create more digestible entertainment. This short attention span that people keep talking about, do not people realize that the shorter attention span also means that shorter bits of content can be created, which break traditional boundaries. How many of you now, when you do, I see so many old creators do a YouTube show which will have the formal introduction, because that's what they learned. But if you see a new creator, they jump straight into the content. The first thing they will put out will be the bite that's going to hook their audience. They will take the best part of the interview and put it up front. We were taught, never reveal your magic. Let it come in the middle. These are entirely changing the norms of what used to happen. Shorter attention spans create now a more fun, a more participative, and a more creative environment. YouTube is the TV of Gen Z. While Instagram and Reels are almost the trailers of the shows that you get to see. YouTube becomes the place where people go to legitimize their influence, because YouTube is creating appointment viewing. Prajakta's manager, who's a good friend of mine, Sudeep, I was talking to him one day and I asked him, I said, so you know what she just creates, what she wants, is are you mad? She has a schedule for Monday, a schedule for Tuesday, a schedule for Wednesday, a schedule for Thursday. And if she misses it, even by a minute, go and look at the content comments below. And there are people turning and saying, what do you think you are? Instead of this, appointment viewing on YouTube is replacing appointment viewing on television. And this is something that most people don't seem to realize. These are important things to look at. And this short form content as a gateway to the long form content on YouTube with a subscription option is the new monetization that people are building. But what this requires is that you have to be really good at what you do. The best YouTube creators know that they must have the best answer on the web. Because the best answer is just a search away. Or today, maybe a chat GPT comment away. So how will your answer be the best answer? Access has led to access. Today, there is just too much to see. Passive viewing trends binge watching is now leading to a counter trend. The counter trend that is happening in most channels now is people are dropping things on a weekly basis. Gone are the days where you'll see a show. Last of us did not launch with all episodes at one go. Because they say we are good enough for you to make appointment time every Monday. Otherwise, wait for eight weeks and then see me together. This is a big, complete change, right? The entire thing of binge doing and dropping things in totality has completely gone. Behind every great video is an exhausted creator. I can see the smiles from the ones who are there. There are just too many options. Fame is really, really short lived. The truth is only 2% make money. So when you hear this 10,000 crores number, I'm sorry to say, but a lot of it is bullshit. Because that number is also from the music videos that is played. They are putting up every number. A friend of mine was a journalist actually went and asked them saying segregate the independent creator from the upload of the music videos and you will come across the true number. So while everybody says this is a great economy, it is a great economy for 2% of the people who are there. You have to conquer ageism. And when I say ageism, here content creators age 10 times faster than we used to. I remember in the early days when I got on television, I was told if you're a good creator, you'll have five years. If you're a great creator, you'll have 10. If you're God, you'll have 20. Mr. Bachchan has more than 20, right? Because he is, for any of us of our era, he was that. But that number has shrunk for online creators. You're constantly fighting for relevance. And ageism can only be broken if you reinvent yourself. Tanmay is a great example of this from creating gaming reactions, videos, live streams. He has moved entirely from comedy because he is constantly seeing what is popping and becoming relevant to that generation. I must tell you, I try to do this all the time and I fail miserably because I just do not have it in me to create content on a daily basis anymore. But I'm okay with it, I'm fine with it. So I built a little niche for myself within which I will exist. This access leading to access on the reverse has now created the era of the micro niche. The micro niche era is happening. People, there's this lovely article called A Thousand Fans. I think that thousand fans can actually come down to even a hundred fans. Because if a hundred people are willing to pay you 10,000 rupees, that's 10 lakhs. Can they pay you that kind of money? Is that enough to keep you going? And imagine if you had 500, that could be 50 lakhs. Sub-segments of creators will happen. You will find if you go on to your Instagram feed now, people are giving you solutions for 299, 399 for everything, motivation, weight loss, finance, yoga, then follows a whole set of templates. If you're a creator, there are people giving you free templates for the same. Stage, I don't know how many of you have heard of stage. Any of you have heard of stage? Right? Stage is a regional OTT platform created by a bunch of young boys who used to run Viti Feed. When Viti Feed failed for a while, they really didn't know. They actually came to do spoken word. But then they realized that spoken word was a space that wasn't trending at that level. And their next realization was that there were a bunch of people who came to them in Haryanawee, in Rajasthani, in Punjabi, and said they're in our own place. They created their own app. They created their own shows. Today they have 11 lakh paying subscribers for a regional OTT. Today they proudly say that people who left Haryana or Rajasthan, et cetera, to go and try their luck at Bollywood are coming back to work with them. So this is the kind of micro niche that is being created. Vernacular creators will be wooed by brands. If you can speak in more than one language, it is an advantage. If you can speak in more than two, it is a triple advantage. If you do your videos in Hindi instead of English, this being, I mean, I know this is the South, but up north that increases your visibility by forex, just by changing the language. What is going to happen over a period of time is revenue streams will keep expanding. Today the revenue streams available for on-demand creators are endorsement, merchandise, meet and greets, content, courses, affiliate marketing, consulting, tipping, subscription and product lines. Creators realize that their currency is not just attention. Their currency is engagement. Their currency is authenticity. Their currency is personalization. Their currency is engagement. The next age that will come after the age of the creator is the age of curation. Very soon there will be so much to watch that you will not know just what to watch and then you will turn to curators. Curation is currently something that AI does. When you watch your Netflix channel, there is a, this is for you. The AI is seeing what you saw, how long you saw, what part you stopped at, et cetera, and then deciding. But this is something that human beings can do as well. There are at least eight or nine different apps and ventures working around curation as an economy. I don't know how many of you have got an app called Just Watch. Just Watch is an app where if you enter what you liked, it is aggregating and giving you reviews, et cetera. Fabulous app, by the way. Really, I discovered it early and it helps me a lot. There is an app called OTT Play that is saying why do you need to subscribe to 18 Things? Why don't you come for all 18 to just me? I will be a layer on top of the OTT. So on the top, there's something on top of that as well. That's the curation that is going to happen. AI can be a big assistant to you in this so if you can combine some element of AI into your curation, it is something worthwhile. The new trend after entertainment is infotainment. Ankur Vareku, Kumar Varun with his quizzes. All of these are fastest growing categories because education, financial literacy, infotainment pages are growing at a very rapid pace. There are 1,400 on last count channels that have a million plus subscribers on YouTube. I hope ours will be the next because we are somewhere in between, I don't know. But the reason why these work is because the content is personalized. There's lots of increased use now of AR and VR to enhance your experiences. That's what's going to happen as well. And there's a lot of high level of engagement between the creator. They answer your questions directly. Therefore, they make something impersonal into something very, very personal. Don't be scared of AI. I've seen so many creators who are currently saying, now what will happen? Oh my God, these guys will come. But do you realize that there is going to be an absolutely wonderful layer you can add by just taking some of these artificial intelligence tools? Mr. Beast is an example. Mr. Beast today is dubbed in seven languages. He has more subscribers than the NFL. Putting an ad on Mr. Beast is more powerful than putting an ad on Super Bowl because Mr. Beast is available in languages including Hindi because he disfigured that Hindi is going to be a market he wants to enter. He's just using dubbing at the moment to do that. Why as creators can you not do the same? More money is going to flow into content creation. More opportunities are going to be there for new talent to shine. There are better stages for regional content and much more chances of discovery, which are the pros. The downfalls are that things are becoming less memorable. If I ask you to name five actors in your favorite show, it would be very difficult for you to tell them beyond the leads. If one was to ask you any information about your favorite song beyond the singer, you may not remember much more. But this is not a problem, which is a good problem at the moment to have because this too can be solved for. The problem right now is that youngsters are almost looking like any of the goddesses in our pantheon. They don't seem to have two hands. They have eight or 10. They're on Discord while they're watching a channel. They're listening to Spotify and they're texting on the other side. If they can do all of these together, the brain doesn't know what to process and what to keep. So at some point in time, you will go and back into the era of saying, you know what, I'm going to dedicatedly do just one thing. This is something that will happen over a period of time. As I said before, OTTs are fighting this with binge drops. So they're dropping, they're making something which is now a daily drop. They are learning from the TV serial era. So it's such an interesting time. What you reject is what you're learning from. But these are things that you've got to constantly be aware of. I began by talking of Maggie. And I know many of you must be feeling hungry as well. And I have only about two minutes left. So I'm going to finish the Maggie analogy for you. Last week, when I was really craving this Maggie, I went to a supermarket. And you know what I found? I found five flavors of Maggie, but right next to it was Nissan. Next to it was now a Korean brand that was serving me up bulgogi and kimchi in a different bowl. Next to it was Japanese. Next to it was Thai. And with all of this, I came back with at least 11 different packets of something which was a noodle, but in 11 different flavors. When I came home, I still craved Maggie. Because nostalgia is going to be one of the biggest things that will keep coming back. The more you will have the new, the more you will miss the old. The only difference is that the cycle will change. Today, when music is available at any frequency to you on Spotify, on all your apps, vinyls are becoming art. The time when paintings became, remember there was a time when paintings were the normal format of exchanging pictures, then came photography and paintings became art. Now that when there will be generative AI, real photographs will become nostalgia and art. So keep looking to the past. Don't reject it. There are some great things for you all to see there. A basket full of options allows you choice. The choice to either go for the new or to find some favor with the old, that is a choice that you need to make. But that's all I wanted to leave you with. Thank you.