Jetpack 12.8 was released this week, introducing Jetpack Creator, a new product under the Growth category that sits alongside the recently launched Newsletter product. Jetpack Creator is aimed at users who want to monetize their content and subscribers. It supports e-books, courses, paid newsletters, advertising, paywalled access, and other content monetization options.
The market size of the creator economy is growing and established social networking apps are updating their offerings to better serve creators who are marketing themselves independently. According to Goldman Sachs Research, the creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027:
As the ecosystem grows, the total addressable market of the creator economy could roughly double in size over the next five years to $480 billion by 2027 from $250 billion today.
Goldman Sachs Research expects the 50 million global creators to grow at a 10-20% compound annual growth rate during the next five years.
Jetpack Creator bundles monetization features aimed at this market. It enables access to 40+ blocks that allow creators to paywall content, add subscriber forms, accept donations, start a newsletter, and receive payment via Stripe or PayPal. Jetpack Creator also extends existing products, like adding the ability to import unlimited subscribers. The free Newsletter product caps subscriber imports at 100.
Users on the Creator plan are also added to Jetpack’s “creator network,” which appears to be similar to ConvertKit’s creator network with a few differences. The network is designed to amplify creator’s content to help them reach a broader audience across WordPress.com and self-hosted sites using Jetpack. Jetpack’s creator network aims to get sites exposure to new readers through distribution to more areas of WordPress.com’s Reader.
It also includes author recommendations, powered by the Blogroll block, which was introduced in Jetpack 12.7. Site admins can recommend other sites their readers might enjoy and have their site included in others’ recommendations as well.
The Suggested follows modal is currently driven by an algorithm and suggests additional publications to follow based on what other people follow and other publications recommend. Jetpack representatives said there are plans to make it more Blogroll driven in the future.
Creators can track their engagement through a number of different ways in Jetpack, including general traffic stats, email open stats, WordAds revenue, and subscriber stats, with a new growth chart using records going forwards since October 24. Jetpack also includes an Earn screen for those selling paid content.
The Jetpack Free plan gives users access to all the monetization tools for free but takes 10% of all revenue, similar to Substack and Gumroad. This allows users to try out the tools to see if they can make money through their web presence. The new Creator plan reduces the fees to 2% (plus Stripe fees), a significant savings for those who are successfully earning money as an online creator.
The fees apply to the following features:
Jetpack product manager Mike Stott said his team is keen on receiving feedback on this initial offering and will continue developing the roadmap based on users’ input.
“There’s a lot happening in Newsletter – last month we launched Paid Newsletter tiers and we’ll be bringing subscriber modal and categories settings into the Jetpack UI in future too,” Stott said.
“We’ll also be making it easier for content creators to gain more subscribers through the creator network (a start to this is the Author recommendations) as well as make it easier to get started.”