Something new is coming soon…

I’m excited to announce that the team and I at Dayflash have been working on a new product for creators. Over the last several years, we’ve spoken with hundreds of content creators from the community on Dayflash, including online entrepreneurs, bloggers, artists, video creators, coaches, and many others about their experiences and gripes with today’s mainstream media platforms. And we strongly believe that creators are underserved.

How The Creator Movement Has Evolved

In the early days, media platforms gave content creators, along with businesses, the ability to organically build a following or subscriber-base, for little to no cost at all. Platforms made it easier for creators to authentically express themselves, build trust, and form more meaningful connections with their audience. Once creators built an established audience, brands recognized the value in paying creators to promote their products or services to their audiences.

The potential to grow a large audience on social media based on one’s talent alone, along with the opportunity to monetize content, propelled a movement of content creators across every category. Today, this movement has grown to over 50 million people worldwide, including both professional and amateur creators alike. In fact, creators have become one of the fastest-growing types of small businesses, with more and more young people aspiring to become an influencer or content creator when they grow up.

Current Challenges That Creators Are Facing

But, over the years, as platforms grew larger and larger, and more and more creators (and businesses emerged), it became increasingly more difficult for creators to grow on these platforms. The number of people worldwide using social media has more than doubled in just six years (4.48 billion people in 2021 versus only 2.07 billion in 2015).

Mainstream media platforms that primarily exist and survive through advertising revenue have become increasingly more saturated with advertisements, in addition to user content, and because of increasing digital saturation, it has become nearly impossible to reach an audience organically.

Fast forward to today, creators who want their content to be seen need to “pay to play” (i.e., pay money to platforms to promote their posts), so that they can reach new followers along with more of their own followers.

Initially, the cost to advertise on platforms was low, but now as more and more businesses compete for ad impressions, it’s becoming more and more expensive for creators to “pay to play”. Due to digital saturation and constraints from ad-based monetization models on platforms, it has become increasingly more difficult for creators to grow on these platforms, let alone even reach their own audiences, which many of them took years to build.

In the last several years, creators have come up with various techniques to try to “hack” the algorithms on these platforms, so that they can organically reach more of their followers on the Home feed. For instance, creators have participated in engagement pods in which they band together with other creators to help increase engagement on each other’s content (in hopes of being favored by the algorithm for having more engagement).

In addition, to rank up higher on the feed, creators have also been posting fresh content more often, sometimes multiple times per day on the same platform. But given that declining engagement is truly a function of digital saturation, and not so much the algorithms, algorithm hacks have been mostly unreliable, oftentimes too time consuming to keep up with, and in many cases, ineffective.

Creators Have Come To Realize That Audience Reach Is Owned By The Media Platforms, And Not By The Creators.

In fact, more and more creators are now asking themselves:

“What happens to my monthly income when my engagement and reach declines even more on platforms, and the cost to promote my content (so that I can reach my own audience) goes up even further?”

Creators Are Ready To Take Back Control

To effectively mitigate risk, many professional content creators are now focusing on strategies that enable them to own their reach outside of the mainstream media platforms, and ultimately have more control over their income. For instance, many creators are now trying to:

1. Diversify on different platforms to minimize risk
2. Move their fans off of platforms and onto their own channels (e.g., website/blog, mobile app, email newsletter, Patreon membership, etc.)
3. Monetize outside of platforms (e.g., NFTs, affiliate commissions, online courses, selling merchandise or creative services, etc.)

Creators Need More Support To Grow

But, for many of the creators who I’ve spoken to, these current solutions for owning — and sustaining — one’s reach (and driving recurring monthly income outside of platforms) have been difficult for most creators to get off the ground, and in some cases, may even require a financial budget and/or team, which many independent content creators do not have access to. This is why the team and I at Dayflash are so excited to work on Surfn, a new product that will empower creators to take back control of their engagement and reach.

Meet Surfn: A New Online Service That Will Empower Creators To Take Back Control

With Surfn, we want to make it easier for you to:

• Directly connect with your audience and own your reach
• Drive up to 10X more engagement
• Have full control over your content distribution and business growth (No ads, no algorithms!)
• Grow your monthly income

Surfn is based on feedback from hundreds of creators from around the world. Our mission is to help create a bigger and brighter future for the world’s creators. We want to help creators grow and inspire the world.

We believe that through technology innovation, content creators can achieve much greater business success online than what they think is possible today. We also believe content creators should have a reliable way to own — and sustain — their reach and income.

We can’t wait to share more details with everyone soon!