The mini media empires quietly growing in Australia

afr.com:

The worlds of Lucy Jackson and Nikki Westcott from We the Wild Ones and Blue Mountains artist Stephen Travers couldn’t be further apart at first glance.

Jackson and Westcott started a fashion label, Jagger & Stone, after runaway success with an Instagram account documenting the outfits they wore to music festivals. The Gold Coast duo now have a podcast, merchandise, a wine label, a clothing brand, and an influencer business.

Travers started posting his paintings of plants and trees in the Blue Mountains on Instagram after taking a redundancy as a public servant. “If I got 25 likes, I thought it was amazing,” he says.

The women and Travers are both players in an increasingly lucrative and growing sector – the creator economy. It has developed in the shadow of the wider creative economy for more than a decade, and is creating mini media empires in homes around the country.

Nikki Westcott (left) and Lucy Jackson (right) from We the Wild Ones.  

These creators over-index in regional and rural areas, adding tens of thousands of dollars around the country based on unique skills, content and internet access. Westcott and Jackson and Travers are part of the $115.8 billion cultural and creative industry that increasingly includes creators.

“These businesses are increasingly sophisticated content ecosystems with multiple online and offline revenue streams,” says a white paper by AFR Intelligence – sponsored by YouTube. The report, Culture Disrupted: Growth in Australia’s digital creative industries, spoke to academics, a commissioner at the Productivity Commission, and industry groups to find Australia’s growth in the creator economy is at risk of slowing down without dedicated investment and greater understanding.

“Technology has