When Michael Berkowitz of management company Greenlight Group signed TikToker Jordan Howlett in 2021, Howlett had 2 million followers and was working full-time flipping pizzas. He hadn’t yet developed his signature style: Now, he opens almost every video with his famous “Come here” bathroom mirror zoom, and most often goes on to share some kind of life advice or a restaurant-related secret, like a permanent discount code or a sauce recipe.
For Greenlight Group, snagging Howlett was about more than signing a single creator to its roster. Berkowitz, who launched Greenlight with childhood friend Doug Landers in 2020, believed the $250 billion content creation industry was entering a new era–one where blue-collar workers find audiences online by being both relatable and aspirational.
“You have three eras of content creation as a profession, and it’s been informed by the platforms and the mediums that were predominant at that time, and the agencies that sprung up to service them,” Landers tells Tubefilter. “You had the Instagram era, and that’s when traditional agencies like CAA, UTA, and WME entered the market with lifestyle influencers whose medium was visual photos, and the content you saw was hyper-curated. Particular kinds of clothing being endorsed, very manicured.”
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People like Kim Kardashian thrived during this era—and, to be clear, are still thriving. “They’re not gonna go away,” Landers says. But he thinks online audience preferences shifted around the mid-2010s to a new era, one where “you have YouTube as a sort of pseudo production studio,” he says.
“I think that’s encapsulated in MrBeast and all the sort of acolytes around him, like Night Media, where it’s these mega budgets, big studios, more like a game show, and long-form,” he says.
We know that’s not going away, either. MrBeast gets over 2.5 billion views a month and is two days away from debuting his biggest-budget project to date (Beast Games, which Amazon bought for a cool $100 million). Meanwhile, fellow YouTubers like Dude Perfect, EYstreem, and Alan Chikin Chow are all opening their own major production studios.
But, over the last five years, two things have happened: one, the rise of lo-fi short-form thanks to TikTok (and then other platforms’ copycats); and two, COVID lockdowns, which proved a potent cocktail.
With lockdowns, one large subset of people were trapped in their houses and seeking connection through content, and another subset had to keep going to work, and found that the first subset was interested in seeing the ins and outs of their jobs and daily lives. Healthcare workers were some of the first to gather audiences online, but viewers’ interest wasn’t limited to only one industry.
That’s where Howlett and the rest of Greenlight Group’s roster come in. Howlett’s first videos were about his job at a chain pizza joint.
“I was talking to a lot of creators at the time when we signed Jordan, and I had a lot of conversations that felt very surface-level,” Berkowitz tells Tubefilter. “My first conversation with Jordan, he was not afraid to get incredibly real on the phone, and honest. I think that showed his character, and that was incredibly attractive as a potential client. When I was first watching his videos, it didn’t seem like the videos were scripted. It was one of the first things I asked on the phone: ‘Is this scripted?’ He laughed and said no.”
Berkowitz was also drawn to Howlett’s background as an athlete, since “I understood he was someone who has very good work ethic, and knows you need to be process-focused in order to win and succeed.”
Together, he and Howlett worked on content strategy, including establishing a daily posting schedule (though Howlett often went “above and beyond” and posted multiple videos per day, Berkowitz says), intros, hooks, and audience engagement like answering DMs.
As for other folks on Greenlight Group’s roster, there are creators like musician Landen Purifoy, who caught the company’s attention by posting about being a full-time piano player for his local church, and edutainment creator Hafu Go, who started with a $300 camera off Craigslist, making videos about his routine as a college student.
Since Greenlight Group signed Howlett, Purifoy, and Go, all three creators have blown up.
- Howlett has gone from 2 million followers on TikTok to to 35 million across platforms. He was recently named a Forbes Top Creator, made Hollywood Reporter‘s Next Gen 2024 list, and just won Creator of the Year at the Shorty Impact Awards. He’s also collaborated with brands like Domino’s and traditional celebrities like Big Sean.
- Purifoy has grown from 1 million followers on TikTok at time of signing to 8.5 million on TikTok and 10.6 million on YouTube. He just peaked at over 350 million views per month on YouTube, and has appeared several times on our Tubefilter charts as one of the platform’s top-watched channels. He has partnerships with brands like Sony, Supercell, Brandlab, and the mobile game My Singing Monsters, which recently added him as a character.
- Go signed with Greenlight Group when he had just 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. He now has over 10 million subscribers, brings in 150 million views per month, and has a long-term ecommerce partnership with biz management software company Odoo. He uses Odoo to sell various STEM gadgets, and Greenlight Group says one video integration resulted in 300,000 shopper sessions.
Landers says all this growth goes back to the core of Howlett, Purifoy, and Go’s content.
“We’ve found that raw, one-on-one storytelling supported by personal anecdotes has really taken hold in the minds of the public,” he says. “What makes blue-collar creators special is that they are both aspirational and relatable. Regular folks see themselves in the blue-collar creators they follow, but also look to them for inspiration.”
Brands are embracing these creators, too. We mentioned some partnerships above, and though Greenlight Group won’t share exact numbers, it says brands are, in general, willing to pay higher rates for deals with blue-collar creators.
“We’ve found over time, repping a wide variety of content creators over the last four years and seeing many data points on sponsorship feeds, that blue-collar creators command higher rates in general then their counterparts,” Landers says. “They convert customers at higher rates and there are less of them in general, so there is the supply-and-demand factor that plays into their premium rates.”
Here at Tubefilter, we’ve noticed this eagerness from brands. We wrote about how companies like Verizon, Lyft, and Synergy Kombucha scrambled to get deals with “very demure, very mindful” creator Jools Lebron after her catchphrase went viral in August. She too was a blue-collar worker—and thanks to that virality, was able to quit her job as a cashier to go full-time on content.
It’s clear this “new era” of content is giving more visibility to creators who, in a lot of ways, are just like their viewers. They have day jobs, are caring for their families, and trying to make ends meet.
“Fans are straying away from the older kind of content because they don’t find it to be relatable,” Landers says. “People can’t necessarily see themselves in MrBeast’s shoes ever. They can’t necessarily see themselves in Alix Earle’s shoes wearing a $10,000 outfit. What they’re finding to be appealing is someone who works a nine-to-five job, whips out their phone, and starts ranting about it.”
