Am I…A Content Creator?

LBC (the acronym for what I refer to as my child) has been in business now for about 3 months. And it’s been going great. I’ve already gotten to meet and work with some amazing people, and my favorite part is that I’ve really been able to let my creativity flourish.

My very first client is a home baker based in Sheboygan, WI. She explained her vision to me and gave me the freedom to design a logo, website, social media accounts, and business cards for her business. All this work made me realize how much I love creating content.

In building up any business, it’s inevitable that the to-do lists will include creating social media content. But when I refer to content (at least in the context of this post), I more so mean the media people see outside of TikTok, Instagram, etc.

I think a lot of people in my generation think of a content creator as someone who gets paid to make videos. In reality, I believe that’s a really narrow perspective of what it means to be a “content creator.”

I was curious what the actual definition of content is, so I Googled it (go figure). Some people say content is anything that people pay for, not just with their money, but also with their attention. Others define it in (legal) terms of essentially anything that can be created—data, text, sounds, graphics, photographs, etc.

The profession of a content creator is something that, in my observation, is considered relatively new, and I think it’s because that title is used interchangeably with the term “influencer.” But really, I believe that content creators have existed for generations.

If words are content, Shakespeare was a creator.

If sounds are content, ancient story tellers were creators.

And if advertisements are content, well, content creators worked for corporations dating back to the early 1800s.

And if this is all true, aren’t we all content creators? We might not all get paid for the content we create, but take a second to think about it. Do you take photos with your phone? Journal? Draw? Paint? Play music?

You’re a content creator. And you have been for longer than you’ve known.

This distinction—and acknowledgement—is important to me. Every day, the unattainable is presented to us by people who have branded themselves as content creators. And no hate to them, truly. I respect the hustle. But it’s not fair to only recognize content creators as people with 100,000+ followers.

We all create. It doesn’t matter if we share it with other people or not.

I think it’s refreshing to think this way. My encouragement to anyone reading this is don’t stop creating, because your content matters.