Creators revealed an interesting theme in this round of tech earnings reports

Which social media platform cares the most about creators?

There are countless ways one could try to measure that, but one of the simplest is to listen to how often the companies talk about creators during their quarterly earnings calls. And based on the recent spate of calls, one might get the impression that social giants Snap and Meta are deprioritizing creators, while Alphabet (via YouTube) can’t get enough of socials’ main characters.

It’s fascinating because creators drive users and advertisers to social platforms, but as the creator economy matures and tech giants prioritize “efficiency” (layoffs), it seems courting and compensating creators is no longer trendy.

In the latest Meta earnings call CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg only mentioned creators once. As he talked broadly about artificial intelligence opportunities across Meta’s family of apps, he notes, “I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses.”

That’s it. 

At this time last year, Zuckerberg made creators a hallmark of his earnings call. “I believe our investments in A.I., all the different types of content we support, and our work to build the best platforms for creators to make a living will increasingly set our services apart from the rest of the industry and drive our success,” he said, going on to highlight revenue opportunities for creators in the metaverse.

While there are a million other factors at play—notably metaverse de-emphasis—the company beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, earnings, and users in the first quarter with year-over-year revenue growth after three quarters of revenue declines, per CNBC.

Down the California coast, Snap—whose executives mentioned “creators” a whopping 33 times in keynotes at last week’s annual dog-and-pony-show Partner Summit—only mentioned creators when prompted by investors in this quarter’s earnings call. It is, however, worth noting that Snap’s call was more devoted to question-and-answer than those of Meta and Alphabet.  

In response to an investor characterizing “confidence in [Evan Spiegel] and the team” as “the big challenge” (yikes), Snap chief financial officer Derek Andersen says, “The investments we’re making in the creator stories program, which you noted, were much smaller in scale are deepening monetizable engagement. And we’ve been pleased to see this drive really significant growth in impression inventory over the last two quarters.” (UPDATE: A Snap representative notes that the company’s investor letter, which is published ahead of the earnings call, mentions creators more than ten times).

Downplaying the investment into creators and highlighting the income squeezed from their content is a far cry from this time last year, where Snap executives called out “creators” a hearty 16 times during the first quarter earnings call. “There are many different ways for creators to grow an audience and build a business on Snapchat,” said CEO and cofounder Evan Spiegel on last year’s call, as he and his team discussed creator opportunities in augmented reality, lenses, Spotlight, Creator Marketplace, Stories and so on. 

Again, plenty of other things are at play, but Snap clocked revenue at $989 million this quarter, down 7% from the same period of last year when the company generated $1.06 billion. After posting results from Q1 2023, the stock plunged. 

Meanwhile, Alphabet, which quite obviously encompasses the non-social business of Google, devoted significant portions of this year’s earnings call to courting creators on YouTube, with executives invoking creators 14 times during the one-hour call, and emphasizing Shorts as the “number one” priority for the company’s video arm. 

This remains fairly consistent from last year, when Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said, “We are continuing to invest in making Shorts a fantastic experience for creators and viewers alike,” on the first quarter earnings call.

Still, YouTube operated at a loss this year. The $6.7 billion it generated in first quarter 2023 advertising revenue dropped 2.6% from this period last year. It’s a less brutal decline than the 7.8% drop it suffered in the last quarter, but red is red.

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Alexandra Sternlicht

Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman. 

NEWSWORTHY

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Top Apple engineers moved to Google. A group of Apple engineers working on A.I. tech left late last year, a move that comes as Apple has reportedly been trying to make A.I. improvements like updates to its voice assistant Siri. The Information spoke to dozens of former employees, who said that Apple lacks the ambition to become a serious A.I. player.

This Day in Tech History

The iTunes Music Store launched 20 years ago today. On its online music store, Apple offered more than 200,000 songs that users could download for 99 cents each (the price was later increased to $1.29). On the day of the iTunes Music Store launch, Apple boasted that the store was “revolutionary,” with Steve Jobs saying it was a “groundbreaking solution” for people to listen to unlimited music and not steal from artists through the pirate services that were popular at the time. The iTunes Store paved the way for today's paid streaming services, including Apple Music, which launched in 2015 and has become Apple's primary music business. iTunes shut down in 2019.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

This Week in the Metaverse: Meta’s Zuckerberg tries to reconcile A.I. with the billions he’s already sunk into the metaverse, by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Robinhood to let customers buy crypto using outside wallets and apps: ‘Our conviction in the future of Web3 remains strong’, by Ben Weiss

Last week’s SpaceX Starship explosion might have sparked a fire that burned 3.5 acres, by Chris Morris

‘It makes no sense’: Activision CEO Bobby Kotick slams U.K. blocking of $69 billion Microsoft deal as ‘clearly irrational’, by Chloe Taylor

How an unusually diverse team of VCs is putting $100M to work in Oklahoma, by Jessica Mathews

BEFORE YOU GO

Reddit is testing chat channels. Social network Reddit announced that it’s trying out chat channels in 25 volunteer subreddits this month. Reddit described them as spaces within a subreddit to connect and hang out, saying it will slowly expand to other subreddits by request. The chats will include features like threading, pinned messages, user mentions, and the ability to edit messages. But Redditers aren’t happy about the update, comparing it to Discord and asking how they could opt out.