This is Miko. She's a virtual streamer who is controlled by a real-life woman known only as The Technician.
The Technician uses the Unreal Engine and a $30,000 motion-capture suit to create Miko.
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The Technician's story starts like that of many other creators:
At the beginning of the pandemic, The Technician was laid off from the animation studio she worked at, just weeks after moving to Los Angeles.
She found herself unemployed and stuck with a $2,000-a-month lease.
In her words: “I thought, you know what would be the good thing to do right now isn’t to try to look for work. Let me put down $20K and try to make it on Twitch.”
The early days were slow-going. She made $300 a month and was thousands of dollars in debt from expensive equipment.
But The Technician was a highly-skilled developer *and* she had hustle and grit.
In a typical day, The Technician would wake up at 2:00am to dev, dev until 12:00pm, and then stream from 12:00pm to 6:00pm.
Her stream really began to take off when she let her viewers *interact* with Miko. Viewers could use Bits, Twitch's native currency, to directly influence Miko's appearance and behavior.
It turned out that viewers especially liked to (temporarily) kill Miko. Here's a GIF of it:
Says The Technician:
"My income tripled the day I put in this interaction where the audience could kill me. When I added the nuke and the mute—where the audience could mute me for 30 seconds—I was able to afford my rent and pay off my debt slowly.”
Viewers can also spend money to make Miko dance or to change the size of Miko's body parts.
Here, someone decided to make her head really big:
Since November, Miko has grown from 2,000 followers to 700,000. She's one of the most popular streamers on Twitch 🚀
Once a solo operation, she now employs an engineer, an environmental model artist, a character artist, an animator, & a rigger to help her with development.
VTubers (Virtual YouTubers) have been on the rise. Unlike The Technician, most don't ever show their real faces.
Until now, being a creator was highly public, making it inaccessible to some. Being a virtual creator lets you preserve your privacy, while allowing self-expression.
Twitch's "Just Chatting" category for non-gaming is its fastest growing, +300% in the last year.
Just Chatting is now bigger than the next 3 biggest categories—League of Legends, Among Us, & Fortnite—combined.
This speaks to people's desire to connect casually with creators.
Miko is showing that the future of the creator economy is interactive, raw, engaging. It blends cutting-edge tech with old-fashioned creativity.
Taylor Swift's Eras tour is set to make her the highest-grossing female artist of all time.
I've been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift as a businesswoman.
Let me geek out for a minute about Swift and what we can learn from her:
First, it's no secret I'm a massive Taylor Swift fan. Billy Joel said it best when he called her "The Beatles of her generation."
This is partly an excuse for me to write about my favorite artist. But you also don't have to be a fan to appreciate Swift as a savvy businesswoman:
Taylor Swift is only 33, but she's already the only woman to win three Grammys for Album of the Year.
She holds the record for most songs to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100 (188 songs), and last fall became the first artist to own the entire Top 10 simultaneously.
A question I think about often is: is brand a moat?
My answer has always been yes, but the recent deterioration of digital advertising makes the answer even clearer.
Brand is a stronger moat than ever, and that's not a good thing:
1/ To step back, marketing, in its modern form, essentially didn’t exist before the Industrial Revolution.
There was such little product differentiation that it wasn’t necessary. Then manufacturing exploded, and production became cheaper & faster than ever before.
2/ New entrants crowded the market & marketing became essential.
Today, marketing is often *all* that distinguishes a product.
In America, kids as young as 2 can recognize brands on shelves, and by age 10 kids have recognition of 300 to 400 brands.
1/ One interesting shift: the globalization of culture.
From 2017 to 2022, 47 of the 50 most-streamed songs in the world were in English. But that dominance is slipping.
In India, Indonesia, & Korea, the share of English-language tracks has fallen from 52% to 31%.
2/ In Spain and LatAm, the share of English-language songs has slipped from 25% to 14%.
It's the same story on TV: in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, only about half of the most-watched shows are North American. In Japan and South Korea, it’s only 35%.
3/ We see the globalization of pop culture in what audiences are consuming:
• Squid Game (Korean) became the most-watched show on Netflix
• Khaby Lame (Senegalese-Italian) is the most-followed person on TikTok
• Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican) is the most-streamed artist on Spotify
The most powerful trend in tech right now: "The TikTokization of Everything"
How it's reshaping literally every industry:
To back up, there have been two major forces powering tech for the past decade: mobile and cloud.
Mobile facilitated the rise of massive consumer internet companies: Uber & Lyft, Instagram & Snap, Robinhood and Coinbase. Each was founded between 2009 and 2013.
Digital advertising rapidly shifted to mobile in the 2010s, and desktop-era companies like Facebook had to scramble to reinvent their businesses.