People are paying thousands to learn how to be creators

For nearly every major career, there is an industry built around the industry: one that offers professional development for both newbies and veterans, promising them tips on getting started, building their portfolios of business skills, and keeping up with changing trends. Content creation has come a long way as an industry, with a period of supercharged growth since the dawn of COVID, and now more than ever, there are people offering creators advice on how to level up their careers—if they’re willing to pay for it.

Professional development for creators can take the form of annual marquee events with dozens of presenters and workshops, like at VidSummit (one ticket: $995). Or, like Whalar‘s Lighthouse initiative, it can be a brick-and-mortar collaborative workspace with production studios, continuing learning programs, and coffee shops (annual membership: $5,750). It can even be Ninja‘s much-memed-upon “Become a Streamer” masterclass (the price of an annual MasterClass subscription, which is required to access the class: $180).

Or it can be Creator Method, the $3,000-a-year creator “academy” launched by fashion/lifestyle influencer and podcaster Valeria Lipovetsky (pictured above).

The New York Times recently followed Creator Method to its first in-person event, which brought around 50 people from its inaugural class of students to Miami for a five-hour conference where they listened to Lipovetsky–who has 2.3 million followers on TikTok, 1.8 million on Instagram, and hosts self-improvement podcast Not Alone–talk about her success. The event also included a panel, a Q&A, some breakout session, and finally a content creation hour, where attendees were encouraged to put Lipovetsky’s advice to use and film videos and photos with one another.

Creator Method students were able to access this event–and other future IRL gatherings–as part of their annual tuition. The tuition also includes 80+ prerecorded video lessons on things like the importance of posting consistently, access to private group chats, and weekly Zoom calls with Lipovetsky, her husband/business partner Gary Lipovetsky, and Rachel Ostro, CEO of the Lipovetskys’ umbrella company Valeria Inc.

Students aren’t expected to do any coursework or exams to follow up on Valeria’s prerecorded lessons, and won’t walk away with any official certification. There’s also a pretty low barrier to entry: the Times reports Creator Method doesn’t require potential students to have a certain minimum audience size. (One student, a 28-year-old career nurse, was admitted and paid $3,000 when she had just 76 followers.) As of July, it reports, Creator Method had an acceptance rate of 93%.

Valeria, who’s been making content for eight years and says she’s earned $13.5 million from brand partnerships so far, says she believes Creator Method “is part of what we think future education will look like.”

Gary, meanwhile, describes Valeria as “the Oprah of her generation,” and tells Creator Method students that if they want to become successful career influencers just like her, “You need to believe you have talent. You don’t actually have to have talent.”

As we mentioned above, Ninja’s MasterClass–priced, obviously, much lower than Creator Method–received pushback because a significant amount of the information it contained could be found out there for free. There are thousands of videos on YouTube from career creators talking about their experiences and sharing their advice, for free. Things get especially thorny when portions of paid-for courses spend time (as Ninja’s did) on explaining what a computer mouse is–or, like Creator Method, explaining best practices for making content on an iPhone and telling creators they need to post consistently.

These are common-sense pieces of advice—but even if they weren’t, there is so much information available from trustworthy sources for free (Colin and Samir, for example, regularly host in-depth interviews with career creators making millions of dollars from billions of views) that it can be difficult to see what kind of educational program could contain enough unique information to be worth paying thousands.

But the Times did speak to some Creator Method students who have seen results. One, an etiquette coach, was posting once daily before joining Creator Method, but increased frequency on Valeria’s advice, and since enrolling has grown from 185,000 Instagram followers to over 300,000.

Another said she didn’t feel like Creator Method had helped her grow “from a creative standpoint, but I feel like I’m growing so much from a business standpoint.” One week after following Gary’s suggestion to put the word “partnerships” in her Instagram bio, that student had two brands reach out for potential collaboration, she said.

The Times also spoke to a skeptic: Stanford Social Media Lab founding director Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication.

“It’s buyer beware,” he said, adding that the situation would be different if people like the Lipovetskys described themselves as consultants. “But to argue that it’s an educational thing, that’s when I think you can run into trouble.”