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Welcome to 1% Better. A weekly newsletter where I provide simple playbooks to grow your following, earn more revenue, and live a happy life.

Today at a Glance:

• Here is how to succeed with content in 2024

• Every trend from 2023 that is officially dead

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What the Creator Economy Looks Like in 2024

2023 was a major wakeup call to a lot of people.

This year the internet discovered you can make a full time living off your content.

You can go on X, build a personal brand, and start a business.

What was the result of this discovery? The Linkedin-ification of X, Hundreds of thousands of new newsletters, courses, and cohorts. Threads on how to get 30 followers in 2 months.

The creator economy was born then became unbelievably diluted real quick.

Going into 2024 we are in a critical transformational period.

The start an X → create a growth newsletter → sell a growth cohort playbook is dead.

The new playbook hasn’t been written yet. Those who write it will build empires.

Here’s what I believe the 2024 creator economy will look like:

Value will no longer be defined by growth hacks. It’ll be defined by personality.

One of the most interesting/cringe part about the 2023 creator economy was 99% of new participants just happened to be growth experts.

The mindset almost everyone had was “Oooo I want to make money with my content. I’m going to put up a Linkedin profile picture and start telling people how to gain followers.”

Now you have people will 500 followers telling people with 400 followers how to gain a following.

Growth hacking has officially jumped the shark.

The amount of interest in growth tips has waned. People want real substance now. They want to connect with the creator. The want personality.

In 2024, people are not going to be buying from you because they love your advice. They’re going to be buying from you because they love YOU.

Newsletter open rates plummet

In 2023 everyone and their mother started a newsletter. Every other post on X became “Join 15 others by subscribing to my newsletter!”

Not only did hundreds of thousands of people start a newsletter, but then it became trendy to send them DAILY!

Now people’s inboxes are flooded with daily, boring, cringe newsletters with irrelevant and uninteresting musings.

The pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction.

People fucking HATE spam emails. Now somehow thousands of creators have decided to weaponize spam email.

It’s insanity and it’s going to cause people to go on unsubscribe marathons.

In 2024 open rates will plummet. People sending daily emails with stories about shit nobody cares about will end.

When these spammy creators spend hours on emails nobody reads, they’ll stop sending emails, and the whole cycle will reset.

Here’s the key though: this won’t be the death of the newsletter as a medium. It just means only the people that truly LOVE writing high quality, high value, low spammy newsletters will keep writing them.

Everyone who thought they could send daily emails about some made up framework they’re using to shoehorn a cohort down your throat will disappear.

People stop selling on X

You go on X right now and it’s 50% newsletter advertisements and 50% people talking about their upcoming product launch.

Then people wonder why growth rates and engagement on X is at all time lows.

People fucking HATE being sold to on X.

Seriously. Go on one of these Linkedin headshot profiles and check out their posts. The posts with personality have some engagement, the posts advertising their upcoming $50,000 growth cohort gets 0 engagement.

Every time you put out a post people don’t read, it kills your algo standings.

People will realize this and stop selling. They’ll get fed up of having 0 growth for months on end and realize it’s not the algo’s fault, it’s their fault.

All of these salesy X posts will quickly disappear.

The Linkedinification of X ends

In 2023 people switched from cartoon zoo animal pictures to professional Linkedin headshot pictures and started their “personal brand”.

X isn’t Linkedin. X is a town square for conversation.

People will quickly realize the playbook of Linkedinifying their X and building their “personal brand” became unbelievably diluted.

People don’t want to follow perfectly crafted brands on X. They want to follow interesting, real, authentic, funny, vulnerable people.

Humor and memes > advice threads

There’s no advice you can give on X that hasn’t been given before. Especially in the age of ChatGPT, people can get answers a lot faster elsewhere.

One thing AI can’t create (yet) is personality. Is humor. Is irony.

Humor and meme posts will have a lot more virality than advice threads.

This doesn’t mean you can’t share value. It just means you need to do it in a way that makes people smile.

Multimedia over threads

In the same spirit as the last section, multimedia will become 10x more powerful than threads.

Elon has been open about wanting to eliminate threadooors.

He’s also been open about wanting to push multimedia way harder.

Threadooors will be replaced by videos, photos, and audio.

The standard monetization playbook dies

Right now the way creators monetize is by starting an X, starting a newsletter, then selling a cohort and course.

Just like newsletters, all of these monetization plays have become incredibly diluted.

People are going to stop signing up for cohorts. When people with 1,000 followers start selling growth cohorts, the game has ended.

In 2024 only the top .0001% of courses and cohorts will survive, meaning you’ll have to find new, interesting ways to monetize.

Watch out for software, premium content subscriptions, and other new trends to emerge.

Conclusion

We are at a really interesting time in the creator economy. The standard playbook of X → newsletter → Cohort has been diluted to hell.

You have people who have never written in their lives telling you how to write your way to freedom.

Once the money dries up with this playbook (it’s already started), new playbooks will have to be written.

The authors of this new playbook will own this year.

Happy holidays y’all.

Find this content helpful? Here are 3 ways we can work together:

My X Growth Masterclass: Just relaunched, my X Growth Master Class is 40+ videos

My 1% Club Community: Weekly group Zoom calls and a Discord to hang out. The best creator community on the internet.

Coaching: Let’s hop on a call and discuss your content/business strategy!

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Alex