The creator economy produces art, entertainment, ideas – and data

LaCie Rugged is now 20 years old. The latest in the product line is the Rugged SSD4 portable, solid-state drive.

Today’s Rugged series is designed for the $250 billion creator economy. This is a large, expanding market sector without large companies, stock ticker symbols or boards of directors. Instead, it’s much more entrepreneurial, made up of individuals working on their own or in small teams to create and post content online.

“People taking selfies for their social media feeds at events are creators. Gamers streaming on Twitch are creators. Kids unboxing toys or posting reactions to TV shows on TikTok or Instagram are creators. And formats and platforms are expanding, with long form and short form; horizontal and vertical; live streamed and edited.”

Goldman Sachs estimates the current number of content creators at 67 million worldwide, growing around 10% a year (CAGR). IDC puts the number in the “hundreds of millions.”

Torrents of creative data: These artists, thinkers and entertainers produce photos, videos, short films, songs, podcasts and reviews all measurable in bytes. As their ranks grow, so does the aggregate amount of data generated in the world.

This rising population of content creators is one stream. The other is the amount of data each one creates – which is growing as well thanks to generative AI and richer content.

“Generative AI has the potential to accelerate a shift towards individual creators and the rise of the creator economy,” according to Goldman Sachs.

"With the rise of AI video creation and editing tools, it is possible that storage needs will jump again as creators iteratively generate multiple files as they try out different prompts and hone in on what best represents their vision," says Greengart.

Case in point: Adobe Firefly, which “allows content creators at any level to create a generative AI,” says Dave Helmly, Director, Professional Video at Adobe.

• “You just basically type what you'd like to see. ‘I'd like to see a brown Labradoodle puppy playing in the snow.’ 
• “Now, all of a sudden, I prompt that into video and I've got multiple videos that I'm putting together. I've taken this from a very small image of, just say, a megabyte, all the way up to maybe 100 or 500 megabytes. 
• “If you now take it and you multiply it times 12 languages and then multiple frame sizes, you could easily see where you'd get up to over a terabyte in data.”

In June this year, Adobe reported that creatives have generated more than 24 billion assets using Firefly.

Richer content also contributes to the surge:

• “People are creating video in multiple resolutions for various distribution platforms – everything from SD to HD to 4K. If you are targeting spatial computing or VR, you might actually be considering 8K,” says Greengart.
•  Seagate notes “exponential growth” in the number and file size of photos taken on smartphones – a trend the company closely follows.
•  Goldman Sachs anticipates “an increasing opportunity for the adoption/monetization of long-form” episodic content, podcasting and livestreaming.

All this data is invaluable to content creators. Their livelihood depends on protecting files from that long-awaited photo shoot or inspired recording session.

A great option – especially out in the field and out of internet range – is the tough, portable LaCie Rugged SSD4. Among the ways it supports creative workflows:

• Offloading data from maxed-out storage on phones and cameras.
•  Shuttling digital files back to the office or studio.
•  Working directly from the drive when connected to other devices.
•  Archiving intellectual property. 

The SSD4 offers up to 4TB of storage and transfers data at 4,000 megabytes per second, matching the top speed on laptops and PCs. iPhone users can record 4K video directly to it. And it comes with Adobe Firefly (mentioned above) and other Adobe Creative Cloud Pro tools for two months.

“Rugged drives are portable, tough and go wherever data is created and stored,” says Seagate’s Vice President Edge IoT Marketing Lance Ohara. “With its 20-year legacy, the LaCie Rugged line has long been a favorite of creative professionals and hobbyists on the go.”