How creator-tech company Animeta will help creators overcome burnout and monetise well

In 2018, for the first time, a Youtuber Elle Mills posted a video about how creator burnout has impacted her content quality and quantity. Since then, so many content creators globally have spoken about ‘creator burnout’. In fact, according to a 2022 report on the creator economy, around 61% of content creators are facing burnout. 

While the creator economy is fairly new in India, according to a Zefmo report, there would be over 100 million content creators by the end of this year. Therefore, before ‘creator burnout’ takes a mammoth shape in India, the ecosystem should address this challenge at an early stage. On top of it, among the current 80 million content creators that already exist, only 0.2% of creators are able to monetise their content, as per the Kalaari Capital report. 

To help grow and organise the creator ecosystem in India and help solve the burnout challenge, Cosmos Maya’s former CEO Anish Mehta launched the creator tech SaaS-based company Animeta. 

Based in Singapore, in no time, he formed the core India leadership team of the company by onboarding Cosmos Maya’s Devdatta Potnis as CEO, Jellysmack’s Vipasha Joshi as COO, Warner Media’s Krishna Desai as CPO and Meta’s Biswamitra “Vishu” Ray - who will look after branded content and creator projects at Animeta.

In an interview with BuzzInContent.com, Potnis said, “Imagine, when the product will be fully ready, the creator will come on the platform, log in to the product and just question what content to make. In no time, he/she will be provided with indicative content ideas, solving for creator burnout.”

The platform will help content creators grow their communities and monetise content across platforms through its proprietary Animeta AI-based self-service creator tech platform that helps creators with data analytics, business and content strategy.

Shedding more light on how the tech platform will help content creators suggest good ideas, he said, “We are investing in machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language programming, social listening and also bringing in our media experience and expertise.”

In total, the company offers financial investment, data analytics and business intelligence, content strategy and creative supervision, brand, PR and social media expertise in addition to data-driven, result-oriented brand campaigns to content creators.

But to avail the platter of attractive content monetisation and creation services offered by Animeta, the content creator will have to exclusively collaborate with them and Animeta will secure 50% of IP rights within creators’ existing and future content.

In a usual scenario, an influencer marketing agency, platform and talent management agency would charge 10-15% of the commission and not have an IP right on creators’ content. 

Therefore, Potnis said that Animeta is not an agency, but a tech platform based on a studio model. “An agency will never have an IP right over content creators’ content and won’t get 50% share in the revenue earned by the creator from any content piece.”

Commenting on why a content creator would let go of such a huge part of its income, content rights and forge an exclusive partnership even after them being fairly new in the ecosystem, Potnis said, “It’s a total symbiotic association between a creator and us. If a creator is listed on 10 different agencies, the brand will associate with the creator via the platform where his/her rates are the lowest. Eventually, it’s a loss for the creator. This challenge will vanish in an exclusive partnership. Our core team has a strong M&E corporate background and will bring their expertise and experience to the creator ecosystem. We help creators with a full 360-degree strategy and invest in building their content. In times of content overdose and so many trending genres to create content around, we help content creators to maintain the utmost authenticity and create good quality content while scaling their revenue. When the creator sees the value they get, they don’t mind associating with us exclusively. ” 

“A company can put this level of effort and investment in the growth of content creators only if he/she is its exclusive partner. In terms of opportunities that we bring: from original content creation plans to integrated marketing campaigns we are building out; we are bringing a huge value to content creators in exclusive partnerships with us,” added Potnis. 

Getting into the nitty-gritty of how the platform will help creators create content, Potnis said, “Creating content is not enough to garner more subscribers. There are several logistical issues going multi-platform from the creators’ perspective. We help creators with better editing and packaging of their content. It’s all the more important when it comes to brand partnerships. There is a proper science behind what should be the length of a video, both short and long.

Animeta will also help creators produce highlight videos in series format. “For example, if a creator had 15 million followers and reached 20 million subscriber base in some time. Then the additional 5 million subscribers are not going to go back and watch his/her 700 content pieces. This will help creators in their current viewership, increase viewership and be of library value.”

Not just creating highlight videos, Animeta will also dub creators’ content in various languages so that it reaches the masses.    

In the future, Animeta, which has over 25 people in its team, will also help creators create large-scale original content, OTT content partnerships in the form of web series, etc., launch merchandise and much more.  

Even when it comes to the name and logo of the company, Animeta stands for ‘anybody has the power to reach their own Meta stage’. 

“We just replaced Y with an I in ‘Any’ spelling to form Animeta,” commented Potnis.

The Animeta logo has a record button because the platform wants its creators to only focus on recording videos and the rest will be taken care of by them. 

The company is focused on key 16 content categories which make up over 80% of social media viewership. The first set of creators Animeta has exclusively partnered with includes categories like automobile, travel, people and vlogs, science and facts, and food and drink. 

Potnis shares that Animeta will avoid creators creating content in music, politics, news, kids and other "edgy" genres. 

By edgy, we mean content which is controversial, has abusive language and is political, said Potnis.

Launched in February, by April-end, Potnis told BuzzInContent.com, that Animeta will be closing deals with almost 50 creators. The content-tech company further aims to onboard about 200 exclusive creators by the end of 2023 across India, Southeast Asia, and the US. 

Currently, in the beta stage, the first list of Animeta exclusive creators includes - Lakhan Rawat and Neetu Bisht Rawat of the Lakhneet Vlogs fame, Faisal Khan - Founder of Motorbeam and FK-R, Gaurav Thakur, Indian YouTube Educators, the founder of GetSetFly Media, Manoj Malhotra an avid traveller and vlogger and one of India’s biggest food channels FoodieWe, created by the trio Onkar, Mukti and Gautam.

To onboard content creators, Animeta first does thorough qualitative analysis, trend mapping, and filtering of a content creator. After that, the outreach teams engage with the content creators who are filtered out through the earlier process. 

Animeta’s founding investors include Rajesh Kamat, the Managing Director of KKR’s Asian media and entertainment platform, Emerald Media, and Sameer Manchanda, a serial media entrepreneur.

Potnis concluded, “Our long-term goal is to shape the future of the creator economy. We are heavily tech-focused because the scale at which we want to grow is not possible humanly without a good product. In the short-term, we are creating a product, which will solve all the problems of this industry. While we are using technology, many human efforts are involved in understanding the pain points. While everyone talks about AI, at the heart, it is HI (Human intelligence), which is building the product like Animeta.”