FlightStory: Forget the creator economy, this is the era of the creator founder

IBC

When individuals can build multi-million pound business empires from chatting to people online it is high time to call it what it is or get left in the dust, says Georgie Holt, CEO, FlightStory Studio

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YouTube stars aren’t just lapping around the edges of the television business they are the media industry, according to Georgie Holt, CEO, FlightStory Studio. In fact, if you are still thinking in terms of ‘YouTuber’ or even ‘Creator Economy’ then you’re showing just how out of touch you are.

“We are way beyond the Creator Economy,” Holt says. “We are in the era of the Creator Founder who are building audiences, ideas, principals and persona on their own terms outside the realms of traditional media.”

One such Creator Founder is Steven Bartlett whose podcast ‘Diary of a CEO’ featuring interviews with experts and personalities like Richard Branson, Boris Johnson and neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart and is produced by FlightStory. Bartlett is a co-founder and investor in the company which was only launched 18 months ago by Holt and Christiana Brenton, former executives of Swedish podcast platform Acast.

Earlier this year Diary of a CEO reached the milestone of one billion streams globally making it Europe’s most popular podcast and the second biggest in the world behind Joe Rogan’s.  It is the fastest growing podcast on YouTube.

Holt says, “Steven will probably do around $30 million in revenue this year on the podcast alone. He just turned down a $100 million deal in order to keep rolling on his own. It’s been an extraordinary success that was built out of naivety and an absolute obsession with data, experimentation and failure and with commitment to the one percent.”

FlightStory uses Bartlett’s success as a template for its own business model. Holt describes the company mission as the search for influential IP around which they can energise global fandom.

“When we say ‘IP’ many people think of big media formats but what we think is the next frontier of IP is human influence. We are now in the era of human creative IP.”

She elaborates, “Creator IP is when the influence, the ideas, persona and principals are born out of an individual versus out of a committee.”

The opportunities for creators to speak to audiences and build followers on their own terms has become almost infinite, she says. “You no longer have to go to a big corporation to get an idea commissioned. You don’t have to endlessly pitch your formats and concepts in the hope that someone might sign you and might invest in you.”

The greatest example of this she says is MrBeast who has amassed 500 million followers across social media. “He's one of the most influential people in the world right now because he's been so exceptional at scaling his audience. He's now building out products and ventures way beyond the media environment.”

MrBeast’s chocolate candy brand Feastables was recently valued at $5 billion alone.

It’s one thing being a good presenter or a good broadcaster but you also need to think like a business person as you're doing it. “This is not a salaried role that you turn up to present. You have to be willing to build. You have to be thinking about every single aspect of the business.”

This is what she means by Founder.

“What we’ve been calling the Creator Economy has changed. The name ‘influencers’ has a negative connotation now. That’s one reason why we're really in the era of the Creator Founder.

“There are influencers doing a great job making content and making good money out of it but a Creator Founder is building out products, e-commerce, events and ventures because they know who they're talking to and they're using the power of decentralized media to build incredible businesses.”

She likens FlightStory to a record label which will foster the growth of Creator Founders. “We sign artists who we think can change the world and do so with a very decentralized media approach. We are not building on someone else's land. We're building our own audiences on every possible platform we can find.”

Continuing to categorise Creators as YouTubers or TikTok stars shows the extent to which the media establishment either doesn’t understand what is happening or is complacent about it.

“If you categorise creators by their platform you ignore the fact that what they have done is scaled global audiences,” she says.

The ability to scale the reach of an IP is vastly superior to anything conventional media has offered to producers before. The tools to analyse performance data and tweak the content to maximise engagement are now in the hands of creators.

“You can understand which viewers are watching and when, how long they watch for, where in the show they disappeared, at what point they returned, where you had the biggest engagement, were they paying attention to what was being said. No broadcaster or streamer is giving that information out. Now you get all of it.”

Obsession with data

FlightStory adopts a rigorously data driven approach to sourcing Creators it partners with and guests for their shows as well as road testing every podcast before it is published.

“Our obsession is with killing the guesswork,” she says. “Creator entrepreneurs either build audience because they’re just really good at something or they’re very passionate about something and want to share that passion or they build out of pain. They feel that there has to be a different way because the prevailing approach is painful. That's how we are building. The better way is experimentation and an obsession with data.

It has a tool called ‘Guest Radar’ which scours thousands of YouTube and social channels to find people to invite on its own shows. “For a show to have consistent 10,000 to 20,000 views you can see that they've overperformed. That not only helps identify guests but to identify creators. These are people who have something important to say and they know how to say it. It’s a subject that the world is interested in and also where we can see how to build an ecosystem around that creator whether that events, products or e-commerce.”

FlightStory even has a print publishing division. Among guests of Bartlett’s podcast to be signed to their own shows by Holt are Davina McCall and dating expert Paul C. Brunson.

Instead of testing pilots of shows with test screenings in front of audiences or from surveys - an approach Holt describes as “inefficient and human biased” - FlightStory filters every second of every episode before release by streaming to closed groups and tracking their every reaction.

“We use eye tracking software to understand if they've looked away or when they stop watching. They can interact with the content. We can see how their attention span moves with the episode. With this data we understand exactly where the audience has fallen away this. What bit they found funny. If the average amount of time spent on the episode is 20 minutes but we need 30 minutes then what can we move around in the edit to make it more compelling? There's no need to guess.”

When a pod is a show

There's still some puzzlement in the media about the podcast phenomenon, perhaps because the term itself is no longer fit for a format that has shifted from audio to video.

“A few years ago a podcast was media personalities like Ricky Gervais mucking around with their mates on radio,” Holt says. “Now it can be absolutely anything. It is whatever the audience thinks it is and wherever you go to meet them.

“We don't even say podcast, we say ‘show’ and it is disrupting television with an impact that is little understood by those not working in this space.”

She says 30% of people who watch FlightStory podcasts do so on their TV. That means around 1.6m people watch Diary of a CEO in their living room.

She says FlightStory doesn’t present its topics as news but does use fact checkers to provide on-screen references for the audience to learn more.

“The debate format is one of the most interesting if it's done in a respectful way. If people shout over each other, it puts people off and makes them scared to contribute to the debate. We have to give people space to share a new idea, even if it's different, or controversial, even if it goes against the earned wisdom that we've had for decades. How many times has that earned wisdom been challenged and a better situation has emerged?”

A conversation between two or more people remain foundational principles of the podcast/show but the quality of production matters too.  “We invest in that as much we invest in the data and streaming systems that we build behind the scenes,” Holt says.

“I'm not saying you need to always do video. There are beautiful ‘audio first’ and sound-scaping formats which immerse a listener but there are also ways that video can amplify the audio experience.”

AI will scale podcasts exponentially

At FlightStory the next big leap is AI generated content. Holt explains, “We used to believe that in order to make a successful or credible show you had to have the key creator present. That is not the case anymore. We are rapid testing and rapid iterating AI podcasts. We are now building entirely AI generated scripts, visuals and voices.”

This includes an AI generated voice version of Bartlett which is “pitch perfect in AI” she claims. “AI is the next frontier and it is happening now.”

Story Flight is running an in-house experiment over 60 days tasked to disrupt every single team and every single division. “We're presenting back all the different ways that we think we can do that with AI. If your senior leadership team is not talking about AI in a very forward-thinking way and is avoiding the topic, then that is showing vulnerability.”

Failure is a huge part of our company

FlightStory has an entire department dedicated to failure. “We have a head of failure and experimentation and a team of six people ranging from data analysts to failure leads. Their entire objective is to get our team to fail more because one of the things I’ve learned is that you learn nothing with success, absolutely nothing. With success, you’re ego thinks you're good at something, and that prevents you from being disruptive. We run between 20 to 30 experiments a week across every single department to try and uptick that rate of failure, because when you fail you get a valuable databank. It is feedback that you can use to adapt and iterate much faster than anybody else.”

Holt hires people into the company who aren’t afraid to fail.

“People have been culturally conditioned that failure is not something to be embraced because it means that your status becomes vulnerable. We need to kill the ego in order to iterate much faster.”

She also talks of “killing the romance” by which she means the nostalgia or sentiment for what has been and what has worked before.

“If there is romance or ego in broadcaster boardrooms or senior exec meetings at TV production companies then you're not going to innovate.

“It’s something that I've had to coach myself to avoid. The first thing is to recognise that failure is good. Now move on, get the data, adjust and pivot again.”