The new kings and queens of content

There is nothing the creator cannot sell. Her streams, which usually take place in her billion-baht warehouse, feature every product conceivable from electronic goods, food, cosmetics, and even pimrypie’s very own fermented fish sauce brand “Mae E Pim”. It is purportedly the second-most popular fish sauce by sales volume in Thailand.

Popular celebrity and live streamer, pimrypie, infamously raked in more than 250,000 orders in a three-hour-plus Facebook live-selling session. Photo: pimrypie via Instagram 

Once, in a three-hour-plus Facebook live-sell­ing session, the internet personality, with both her arms heavily covered in tattoos, raked in more than 250,000 orders. On another occasion, more than 20,000 members of her live audience sacrificed their bedtime to tune in to her midnight live stream.

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Like other global celebrities such as the Kardashians, pimrypie has multiple income streams as a host for food shows and a music artist. But her booming live-streaming business is unique to this part of the world, where more celebrities and influencers are turning to the avenue as another source of revenue. And it is lucrative.

An October report by Cube Asia, a market intelligence company focused on Southeast Asia’s online retail environment, posits that influencer marketing is a significant sales driver for e-commerce in Southeast Asia. It directly contributes to about US$11 billion ($14.71 billion) in net merchandise value (NMV), or profit after deducting all costs and expenses from gross merchandise value (GMV), this year.

Including the indirect impact of influencers, Cube Asia estimates that total online sales stand higher at between US$19 billion and US$24 billion. The firm predicts that by 2028, the contribution of influencer marketing sales and share of trackable sales impact will increase by 13%–17% and 18%–22% respectively.

See also: Universal Music Group pulls music from TikTok after talks fail

Cube Asia’s report is a sign that a new type of creator economy has emerged. The term, which refers to a software-facilitated economy that allows content creators and influencers to earn a keep, was coined in 2011.

What started as entertainment has morphed into a business — and a massive one to boot. In 2019, The Edge Singapore reported that the global influencer industry is poised to reach US$10 billion by 2022. Today, with about 50 million people globally who consider themselves creators, that figure has ballooned. The creator economy is worth 25 times that size at US$250 billion this year, according to Goldman Sachs research. This figure is expected to grow at a 10%–20% CAGR to reach US$480 billion by 2027.

The colossal growth is no doubt linked to the evolution of platforms, content formats and available monetisation strategies.

It started with long-form video blogs on YouTube in the early 2010s, which transitioned into image-centric Instagram in the mid-2010s. Now short-form vertical video content popularised by video-streaming application TikTok dominates.

According to Goldman Sachs, the global creators of today earn income primarily through direct branding deals to pitch products as an influencer; via a share of advertising revenues with the host platform; and through subscriptions, donations and other forms of direct payment from followers. Brand deals are the main source of revenue at about 70%, according to survey data.

But the other 30% revenue source is burgeoning and celebrities and budding creators in Southeast Asia are eager to capture a slice of the action. Thirty-three-year-old Jotham Lim from Singapore is one of them.

The ex-SingHealth employee felt like a part of him died working in an environment he described as “stifling”. So, when a former schoolmate reached out to him more than a year ago with an opportunity to front an advertising campaign for the consumer technology company Prism+, he quickly agreed.

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The timing of the collaboration coincided with the entry of TikTok Shop, the e-commerce arm of TikTok, into Singapore. Lim began hosting 13-hour-long live streams for Prism+ on TikTok Shop until the brand topped the electronics category of the e-commerce site. His success scored him deals with other electronic goods brands such as Sterra and Omnidesk before he ventured into streaming on competitor platform Shopee.

In eight months, Lim was able to garner a small pool of loyal followers who would tune in to his streams and purchase items from him. At his live-streaming peak, he made $15,000 monthly, with a basic hosting fee of $500–$800 where Lim moved high-value products such as air-conditioning units and luxury watches at high volume.

Lim, who earned $200,000 in revenue with two fellow live streamers during the 11.11 sales week, says that live streaming “gives him a lot of joy and freedom”. Photo: Jotham Lim 

A part of Lim’s success as a live streamer can be attributed to TikTok Shop, which, in a bid to quickly win over new users and gain share, had allotted vouchers worth $500 to viewers at the start of its entry into the market.

Venture builder firm Momentum Works revealed that TikTok Shop is on course to reach its US$15 billion GMV target this year, a leap from the US$4.4 billion last year. So successful is the application owned by China’s Byte­Dance that it was banned by Indonesian authorities in early October for fear of its power to spur consumers to buy more than they could afford, especially when the platform allowed for direct payment without leaving the application.

Meanwhile, as Lim gained his footing in live streaming, he decided to leave his nine-to-five job to pursue content creation full-time. To bolster his confidence, he joined a retailer as an in-house live streamer to sell its products which included high-end Bose audio equipment and other lesser-known electronic brands.

The initial word-of-mouth agreement resulted in a $6,000 basic pay and a 20% commission from the products that Lim sold. However, a lack of transparency and communication from the retailer led to a fallout, which caused a drop in Lim’s income in October. He had only managed to take home $2,000 that month, a far cry from the $15,000 he had previously been able to command.

“It’s tough as hell but this is the path I’ve chosen and I know that it’s going to be an uphill battle,” says Lim, reflecting on the failed partnership with the retailer. “I’m still paying for my house mortgage and I’m supporting my parents.”

Since that incident, Lim has been able to recoup his losses from the global shopping season of Black Friday and 11.11 sales. Now as an independent live streamer, he has teamed up with other more well-established live streamers from Wulalandsg, Vadelene Eng and Chester Quek.

Participating in a week-long marathon streaming session as part of TikTok’s TikTok Shop 11.11 Double Digit campaign, Lim and his peers streamed 15-hour sessions from 11am to 2am from Nov 6 to Nov 12. The result was a net revenue of $200,000 from selling skincare products, edible goods and home electronics.

Looking ahead, he has plans to work with former MediaCorp artiste Jade Seah on her platform Kakikaki.live for the year-end sales period. His target is to generate $1.5 million in revenue over the next four months until Lunar New Year.

But beyond the financial gains, Lim exudes a passion for live streaming. “It just gives me a lot of joy and freedom, and I build relationships. It’s playing to my core competencies, which are selling, hosting and building a strong customer journey experience with my customers, and I know I have so much potential.”

Confluence of 3c’s 

Lim is not alone in riding the wave of live streaming. Co-founder of Cube Asia, Simon Torring says that TikTok Shop has changed the game of influencer marketing.

Torring’s market intelligence firm, Cube Asia, predicts 2024 will be the year of the mega live seller in Southeast Asia, with million-dollar live-selling stars emerging in all markets. Photo: Cube Asia 

The industry had previously been shrouded by a lack of attributable data to “influence”, according to Torring. While big technology platforms such as Meta and Google have been able to unlock tracking and attribution, paid advertising kept growing more costly.

“There was always this feeling that we can’t track how this works, so we just have to hope for the best,” he says. “It’s something that maybe excites the marketing team but it’s not something that excites the commercial leadership of brands.”

So when TikTok Shop managed to marry content, commerce and creators all on one platform, the ecosystem changed. Here was a new commercially-focused platform which enabled better attribution and tracking of what generated sales, Torring explains. Brands also became more comfortable coming on board.

Because the monetary benefits of being a live-selling creator have now become so big, Torring says that some creators with huge audiences, who previously “would not touch live selling with a 10-foot pole”, have now become excited about it. Large brands that previously did not feel it was a brand-safe environment have entered the game too.

One of Indonesia’s most famous actors, Raffi Ahmad, started live selling on Shopee and TikTok Shop before the ban. His most recent 12-hour marathon stream crossed US$450,000 in revenue.

Cube Asia’s October report titled “The Power of Influence” says marketing expenditure on influencers will reach US$4 billion this year, in which influencer fees will eat up the largest portion of spend, almost 60%. While Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social content platforms in Southeast Asia, TikTok comes in at third place. This underscores the growing significance for brands to consider expanding their reach on TikTok, the report notes.

But as expected, the consumer appetite for live streaming in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia is vastly different. The city-state has the lowest penetration among all its five peers — Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines — in being influenced by celebrities and creators to purchase goods.

However, for Singaporean influencer agencies, there is plenty of opportunities in neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. On Dec 1, shareholders of Vertex Technology Acquisition Corp (VTAC), the first spac to be listed on the Singapore Exchange S68

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, will vote to see if the business combination of live-streaming platform 17LIVE will go ahead. As the management of the Taiwan and Japan-centric platform has indicated, listing here in Singapore is a way for them to go big into the rest of Asean. The combined entity, if VTAC shareholders give the nod, is seen to have a market capitalisation of around $1 billion. (see sidebar VTAC readies for EGM as 17LIVE puts the spotlight on creator economy)

Meanwhile, not all incumbents of the wider ecosystem here are having a rosy time. Having enjoyed five profitable years, Hepmil Media Group slipped into the red in 2021 amid the pandemic. The holding company owns content platforms SGAG, MGAG, PGAG, SGEEK and Hepmil creators’ network (HCN). Last year, its operating loss widened by over 14% to US$608,000, according to TechinAsia.

In 2019, Hepmil Media Group began to expand its creator network efforts when it noticed a new breed of creators on TikTok. Hepmil’s regional head of creators, Kylie Sng, says the team began to woo these creators from Malaysia and the Philippines. In turn, Hepmil would provide them with the tools to create better content and to make themselves visible to brands.

Sng: Hepmil creators’ network’s focus on TikTok has been a key growth driver for the holding company, Hepmil Media Group. Photo: Hepmil 

This was four years ago when TikTok was still in its infancy, which meant creators on the platform had little understanding of the basics of influencer marketing.

“There were quite a few training sessions that we had to do at the start just to guide creators along the process of being brand-safe or toeing the line between being hard-sell and authenticity when working with brands,” says Sng.

Slowly, the group’s creator network venture began to pay off. Today, HCN is in six markets, which are the same few surveyed in Cube Asia’s report, with a stable of more than 1,000 creators. Some of them are with HCN on an exclusive basis while others are on non-exclusive terms.

Sng declines to share the percentage of exclusive to non-exclusive contracts but implies that their regional expansion has reaped financial benefits. CEO Karl Mak says HCN has been a key growth driver for its business, which saw a jump from around US$6.1 million in revenue in 2021 to US$11.5 million combined with their joint venture in 2022. The company aims to hit US$19 million in revenue this year, a 60% rise from 2022.

Sng says that while HCN began with a focus on TikTok, it is now working with creators across other competing platforms and formats such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels. The regional head of creators says that the network’s talent pool ranges from artistes and live sellers to content creators but is unable to tier them according to which talent type rakes in the most revenue for the business.

Instead, Sng is confident of HCN’s regional growth. She likens the network’s management skills to an Airbnb superhost. “Everything goes back to the servicing [to the creators], if the experience was not great, they [the creators] would eventually drop off.”

Content creation as a career 

As one of the earliest platforms to avail monetisation to creators, YouTube claims it is “probably the most scaled engine powering the creative economy”. Siddharth Srinivasan, head of YouTube partnerships for Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, says they have paid out about US$50 billion in the last three years in the global creator economy.

YouTube has no doubt been fairly transparent in its creator monetisation models. Over its 15-year journey, it has developed consumer payments, advertising revenue, sponsorships, shopping and merchandise among other emerging spaces.

Its bread and butter, which is its advertising-related revenue, has scaled up over the years to become instream ads and now evolved into six-second non-skippable ads in its short-form product, YouTube shorts.

Srinivasan speaks of the streaming site’s other monetisation methods for creators, such as YouTube Premium, which pays out a share of revenue to creators, and memberships between local audiences and their favourite channels.

Srinivasan of YouTube says that it is “probably the most scaled [monetisation] engine powering the creative economy”, having paid out about US$50 billion in the last three years. Photo: YouTube 

YouTube structures its creators in the shape of a pyramid, where the creators are tiered according to how many subscribers they have. Those with 10 million and more sit at the top, followed by those with a million, then over 100,000, and 100,000 and below. Srinivasan says that as a creator gets to the top, the opportunity to monetise grows, as sponsorship deals, licensing and project opportunities increase with the reach that one brings in.

Most, however, are at the bottom of the pyramid and the width and depth of the pyramid vary from country to country. In Singapore, there are over 80 channels with over 100,000 subscribers each, while in Indonesia and the Philippines, the figure stands at about 18,000 and 5,000 respectively, according to the head of partnerships.

Without disclosing the spread of revenue across the pyramid structure, Srinivasan says that the growth of material income for creators is growing. In Singapore, the number of YouTube channels making $100,000 or more in annual revenue is up 20% y-o-y as of June 2022, while the number of YouTube channels making $10,000 or more in revenue is up 15% y-o-y as of December 2022.

“The number of people who are earning starting and significant salaries is right now the best it has ever been in the company’s history and that keeps growing,” he says.

YouTube’s success in supporting creators through “shorts” perhaps has links to the downfall of the rival platform it borrowed the idea from. TikTok’s complete ban by India in 2020 due to national security concerns has likely contributed to the success of YouTube shorts.

At least, this is something YouTuber Ng Ming Wei has observed. Following India’s ban, the taekwondo athlete turned media entrepreneur saw an uptick in followers on YouTube from India, alluding that his audience had followed him across platforms from TikTok.

The 28-year-old echoes Srinivasan’s sentiment. Of all the forms of monetisation as a creator, Ng found YouTube’s advertising revenue most reliable.

Having dabbled in content creation some years back as a means to support himself and reduce his reliance on his family for financial help as he embarked on his athletic journey, Ng had some understanding of the different monetisation opportunities available.

Despite having more than two times the follower count on TikTok at 22.6 million, Ng’s primary means of monetisation comes from YouTube’s advertising revenue. Photo: Ng Ming Wei via Instagram 

After the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 and compounded by seeing all his friends starting new jobs, Ng decided to jump full-time into content creation.

He began to create short-form comedy sketches on TikTok and within weeks, the number of followers had ballooned. It quickly went from a hundred thousand, then to a million, and then a few million. In two years, Ng has amassed 22.6 million followers on TikTok and most recently celebrated crossing 10 million subscribers on YouTube.

Despite having more than double the number of TikTok followers, Ng’s primary means of monetisation comes from the Google-owned platform. Short-form vertical content is difficult to monetise, says Ng. Most TikTok creators had earned their keep doing sponsorship content with brands, an avenue Ng found too unpredictable.

“I wanted to be content-first,” he says. “And I needed to find somewhere [a platform] where I can get constant revenue without having to worry whether I have a sponsored deal or not.”

Yet, when asked about his monthly revenue from advertisements through YouTube, Ng skirted around the question. He said his earnings differ from month to month, as advertising revenue is dependent on how many views a video chalks up.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub (IMH), Google pays out 68% of their AdSense revenue. This means for every US$100 an advertiser pays, Google pays US$68 to the publisher. With an average of 18 US cents per view and with about 15% of viewers on average watching the mandatory 30-second video ad content, a YouTube channel is estimated to receive $18 per 1,000 views.

IMH therefore estimates that a YouTube channel with a million subscribers would receive US$36,000 of advertising revenue per week if it were able to get its entire fanbase to watch two new videos per week.

Ng is also the founder of Boom Digital Media, which according to its online description, is a one-stop creative and media agency that helps brands optimise their presence on TikTok. In essence, Boom Digital Media creates videos for brands for a fee.

The idea was born at the inflexion of the explosion of short-form vertical content but because the industry had been slow to adapt to monetising the new format. Ng had to innovate by outsourcing his skills in creating content for brands who wanted to participate in this growing social media trend. “I saw that as an opportunity for me to go into it. Maybe there’s a gap in the industry so I’m trying to fill this gap,” says Ng.

Like any other creator, he spreads his content across a variety of platforms by tweaking a few details such as the music used or the ending of a video.

Diversifying streams of income is not a new concept — the multi-income career is widely popular among celebrities like the Kardashians. Having started out earning money from the streaming of their reality television programme Keeping Up With The Kardashians, each Kardashian family member has since ventured into new revenue streams.

Kim Kardashian herself made millions out of selling her likeness to games, emoji applications and her beauty venture KKW. Most recent are her forays into her clothing line Skims, which is the new underwear partner for the NBA, and lesser-known private equity firm SKKY Partners, which just signed its first deal this week.

Of course, the Kardashians may be an outlying example with their unfathomable wealth but the influencers and creators of today employ a similar mindset.

Singaporean influencer Bernice (not her real name), who started to earn money from sponsorship deals at the height of Meta-owned Instagram’s peak in the influencer economy back in 2018, says she has been afraid of jumping full-time into content creation because of the lack of a steady source of income.

To bolster her financial security, the 26-year-old holds a full-time job at a multinational technology company in cybersecurity.

With a small following of 20,000 followers on Instagram five years ago, she was able to begin charging anywhere between $500 and $1,000 for an Instagram post, accompanied by Instagram stories.

Today, she has multiplied her Instagram follower count by five times to 100,000 and now charges up to $2,500 for one Instagram short-form vertical video known as a reel. In comparison, Bernice’s TikTok account which she only created two years ago, has grown at a more speedy pace, with over 120,000 followers.

But 90% of her jobs still come from Instagram. It might be that Bernice’s audience on TikTok is less homogenous, comprising one-third from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. But she admits that monetising her content through TikTok is “like a Pandora’s Box”, which she has yet to figure out.

The content creator says that her full-time job has taken away time and capacity from understanding how to optimise the new social video platform. While the many years spent on Instagram have allowed her to develop a tried and tested method in delivering results for the brands she works with, TikTok’s nascency means she needs to devote more time to experimenting with which formats work best.

On the other hand, Bernice has been picky about signing on with a talent agency, in fear of losing creative control and having to share a disproportionate cut of her earnings. She has heard that some agencies in Singapore take up to 50% of the earnings of the creators they sign on.

Like Ng, Bernice has ideas of starting her own small agency to manage content for other brands. This will serve to supplement her income as a full-time content creator.

Regardless, the future of the creator economy seems bright. Torring of Cube Asia has three predictions for how things will pan out. The first, and perhaps most relevant to Singaporean creators like Ng and Bernice, is that native advertising such as influencer marketing will become necessary to reach young consumer segments.

Torring says that the use of Adblockers and other factors like the rise of advertising-free subscriptions like YouTube Premium means that Southeast Asia’s young consumers are growing harder to reach through mainstream online advertising. This will require consumer brands to find new ways to reach consumers that they neither can nor want to suppress.

Torring’s next prediction is bolder. He thinks 2024 will be the year of the mega live seller in Southeast Asia, with million-dollar live-selling stars emerging in all markets. As mega live sellers were previously a China-only trend, it has begun to emerge in Indonesia and the Philippines, no less due to the rise of platforms like TikTok Shop. “This boom in live shopping — and more broadly in affiliate marketing — is very good news for e-commerce development,” he adds.

For creators like Bernice, she is making the good news for herself. At the time of this interview, Bernice has earned $36,000 this year alone. A figure already higher than the entirety of 2022, which is a signal to her that her creator journey is still growing. Soon, she intends to take the plunge into full-time content creation, something that she considers a dream job. “I don’t want to be stuck from nine to six at a desk, and still have to hustle beyond that,” she says. “I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m done with corporate life."