The digital content creation market will grow tenfold to 180 billion dollars over the next 10 years. The catch is that today, only teams can produce content of the desired quality! This means there is a need for platforms to organize various aspects of collaborative creative work. Here are examples of such platforms that have already attracted millions of dollars in investments.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
Mozaic has developed a payment service, “designed specifically for creators,” that is, players in the burgeoning creative economy.
The core advantage of the service is its ability to simplify and automate the process of dividing profits from the sale of creative goods and services among all those involved in their creation.
For instance, a musician composes a song, but for its recording, he invites another singer, and the recording process is overseen by another individual – a producer. Notably, all these individuals have contributed to the song’s creation not for a fixed salary but for a share in its future earnings, as is the current trend in the creative economy.
If the musician, for example, releases the co-created song on Spotify and later receives royalties for its plays, he would need to manually calculate and transfer a portion of those royalties to other contributors. Meanwhile, the other participants might be anxiously waiting, wondering if he’ll do it, if he’ll do it right, and when he’ll execute the transfer.
Mozaic allows the immediate setting of profit distribution rules for each creative product. Subsequently, all royalties from each product are automatically transferred to all those involved in its creation, according to the rules set for that specific product.
In the same manner, revenue distribution from platforms like Twitch and other interactive platforms can be arranged.
Mozaic facilitates not only the division of platform royalties but also direct payments made by viewers, listeners, readers, and subscribers — such as donations on TikTok or YouTube. A user pays a lump sum through a specific link, and the received funds are automatically distributed among all the creators of the content in a predetermined ratio.
Participants can receive their money through Mozaic in any way convenient for them — be it a bank account, credit card, PayPal, or even cryptocurrency wallets. A single payment can be distributed and directed to various destinations specified by the participants. Furthermore, each participant can independently set and modify their payment reception preferences on the platform.
For some platforms like Youtube, Shopify, and Amazon, Mozaic already has ready-made integration modules.
In essence, Mozaic can be plugged into any payout and royalty system using its available API.
The Mozaic platform supports 3 languages (English, Spanish, and French), 135 currencies, and can transfer funds to participants in 199 countries.
Mozaic earns solely from commissions on payments made through the platform; they do not have any subscriptions or subscription fees. The standard transaction fee is $1 plus 1.99% of the payment amount, but not more than $25.
The startup’s expected revenue for 2023 was projected to be $50 million at the end of the previous year.
Mozaic has now raised $25.55 million in investments, a significant leap compared to the $5 million they managed to attract in all previous rounds.
WHAT’S INTERESTING
According to Linktree’s 2022 report, there are 200 million creators worldwide posting their content online — either already earning from it or aspiring to. In 2020, according to another report, there were “only” 50 million. An impressive growth in 2 years!
Looking at the amount of money, we can cite the following examples:
Spotify has paid musicians a total of $40 billion over time, $3 billion of which was in the last two years.
Youtube paid its creators $15.9 billion in 2021, and in 2022, the payment size is expected to approach $19 billion.
in other words, the number of creators is in the hundreds of millions, while the amount of money coming to them is in the tens of billions of dollars.
The important point is that such creativity is no longer the domain of individuals. To create quality content that people are willing to watch, listen to, and read, whole teams are required, each member of which is responsible for some part of the process.
Some write music, some lyrics, some create scripts, some shoot videos, some write texts, some draw pictures, and some are involved in production and marketing. For instance, popular YouTuber Mr.Beast has a separate team of 6 people just to create thumbnails for videos. So how many people are involved in everything else?
But all team members need to be paid. But not all creators earn as much as Mr.Beast, who can afford to pay a salary to all team members. Creators’ earnings vary greatly depending on the size of their subscriber base. And the number of creators with “millions” or even “hundreds of thousands” of followers is not that large.
According to a Linktree report, the breakdown of creators by the number of subscribers is as follows:
23 million creators have up to 1,000 subscribers,
139 million have from 1 to 10,000,
41 million have from 10 to 100,000,
2 million have from 100,000 to 1 million,
2 million have more than 1 million subscribers.
Thus, creators with more than 100,000 subscribers make up only 2% of the total number of creators. And the other 98% also need teams to create quality content and have the opportunity to earn. But they usually don’t have the money to pay team members in advance for content creation, let alone in the form of regular salaries.
What’s the solution? Interest them in future profits. But this profit, when received, must be carefully accounted for and distributed. Additionally, there are problems such as having team members in another country, which means they need to make cross-border transfers, which becomes a separate hassle.
And that’s where Mozaic comes in, which is capable of setting up an automatic process for distributing payments among creative process participants and arranging the transfer of money to almost all countries in the world in any currency.
The rise of Paypal began when it became a convenient payment tool for sellers and buyers in the emerging e-commerce market, starting with its integration into eBay.
Now, Mozaic aims to be the go-to tool for settling transactions with creators. Therefore, Mozaic (Jammber being its parent company’s name) has enough ambition to replace PayPal in the creative economy market.
Where to run
The digital content creation market is growing. It is expected to grow by 25.7% annually over the next 10 years. In 2022, its size was estimated at $19.5 billion, and by 2032, it’s projected to reach $181.4 billion.
Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, this market is beginning to see more and more teams – whose presence is essential for producing quality content. This means that there will be a growing demand for platforms and tools for organizing the collaborative work of permanent and temporary teams – starting from project planning, through its creation, and ending with the division of profits earned from these projects.
So, the general direction is to create platforms for collaborative work of creative teams. While doing this, one can focus on different aspects of this process. Mozaic, for instance, has chosen the payment distribution phase among participants.
On the other hand, Plot- focuses on idea generation and execution, but specifically within teams. Currently, Plot is still in early access, but they raised a first funding round of $3 million this spring.
Moving in a similar direction is Assemble, which is more focused on video content creation. Meanwhile, Highnote is centered on creating audio content (music and podcasts).
Which theme and part of the process would you choose to focus on if you were to create your platform for collaborative creative work?
About the company:
Mozaic
Website: mozaic.io
Latest funding round: $25.55M, October 11, 2023
Total investments: $31.3M, 6 rounds.