What's Poppin Reader Welcome To Content Corner!!!
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This week:
🚏 The six creator types replacing the influencer
🚏 Behind the scenes of Draftloop
🚏 Why MrBeast's behind-the-scenes got 23 million views
and more... lets go!
Sidenote: follow me on Spotify, especially if you're more about listening while driving click here
📰 What's Poppin
December 2024. I sent you an email called “The END of Influencer Marketing: Do This Instead For 2025.”
I wrote about Kim Kardashian showing off her Tesla robot and nobody caring. The eye rolls in the comments telling us everything.
That was almost two years ago and I want to be honest with you about something. I called the shift. I did not call what would replace it.
I thought it was micro-influencers. Smaller accounts, realer connections, better rates. And that was half right.
What actually happened is bigger than that, and I only saw it clearly on Monday’s live.
Here’s what I kept coming back to.
Time Magazine says creators now. Not influencers. Rolling Stone put out their most influential creators of 2026 and every single person on it has their own thing. Their own ecosystem. Forbes list, same story. MrBeast, Dhar Mann, Stephen Bartlett. They are not sitting there focused on AdSense and brand deals. They built whole businesses.
Influencer got a bad rap because influencer meant lifestyle. The cars, the houses, all of that. And we got tired of it.
What’s winning now is storytellers. People who create experiences. People who pull an actual emotion out of you.
Druski, who is making the best skits hands down and evoking real emotion through his own storytelling. Kareem with the Subway Takes. Markiplier. Joe Rogan.
Every one of them, in their own way, has created an experience.
Meanwhile the influencer model is over there going “hey, be me. Hello. Be me. It’s all about me.”
People don’t care anymore. People are not here just to watch you be you.
They’ll watch you grow something.
And here’s the receipt that made it land for me. MrBeast dropped Escape 100 Cops, Win $500,000. That video got 83 million views. Then he dropped the behind-the-scenes vlog version of the same thing.
23 million people watched what it took to make it.
23 million. For the messy human side of a video they already saw.
That’s not an accident. That’s the entire shift in one channel.
So on the live I broke down five creator types that are rising, and then I added a sixth, because the video that named them left out the one I’m looking at right now.
THE SIX
1. The educational creator. Not academic, not formal. Somebody who knows something real and shares it in a way that makes you feel smarter for watching. (This is me. I said it on the live. I’m a one.)
2. The genuine creative. Niche, original, uncompromising. Doing it because they love it, not because it performs.
3. The cultural guide. Taste is a real differentiator now. These are the people telling you what matters and why.
4. The mundane micro-vlogger. Ordinary days, ordinary jobs, nothing spectacular. And somehow it’s compelling because it’s actually real.
5. The gabber. The storyteller. Unscripted, candid, feels more like a friend than a page. In the middle of a loneliness epidemic, that’s telling.
6. The live streamer. This one’s mine and I’m standing on it. You cannot fake a live. It’s hard. Trying to be educational and entertaining and motivational in real time with no edit is hard, which is why only a selective few do it at a high level. That’s exactly why people rock with it. They watch and go, that’s a human.
All six of these have one thing in common and it’s not the format.
AI made content cheap and ALOT. Anybody can generate content. So we’re watching influence move off of attention and onto something much harder to fake.
Credibility.
That’s the actual answer to what replaced the influencer, and it’s the thing I couldn’t see in 2024.
Email me back your number. One through six. I’m genuinely curious where this list lands and I read every one of these.
🌆 AI Alley
The reason there's so much AI slop out is because people are asking AI to be the creator.
So let me walk you through what I actually do, because I've been posting consistently off this one process and I call it the DraftLoop.
🔹 Goals and vision, before anything else.
Everybody skips this and goes straight to creating. AI is not a magic wand. Treat it like a new team member. You wouldn't walk up to a new contractor and say "make me something" and then get mad when it's not what you pictured. Tell it what it should feel like, what you want the audience walking away understanding, and what you absolutely do not want in there.
🔹 Build two skills. Just two.
A skill is an instruction it remembers, so you stop retyping that same long prompt forever. Start with these two.
Brand voice: feed it everything of you talking. Video transcripts, Zoom calls, threads, tweets. Then tell it, if that's not enough, interview me and figure out my tone and my keywords.
Social media style: feed it your scripts, your newsletters, your Substack, your posts. Because you don't write on LinkedIn how you write on Threads and it needs to know that.
🔹 Run the loop.
I journal in Notion using their AI meeting notes, except I don't use it for meetings. I hit record on my walk and just talk out whatever's on my mind. Claude checks that page on a schedule every morning, and by the time I'm back at my computer there's a page waiting with threads, a LinkedIn post, a Substack, a newsletter draft, and a quote carousel. From one walk.
🔹 Milk it.
We spend way too much time making something to post it one time and let it die. Post it everywhere. Then post it again in a few weeks, because you swear everybody saw it and ain't nobody seen it.
🔹 React. This is the one that matters.
The way we stand out in this AI world is by reacting to what AI gives us, not copying what it gives us. Everything it writes sounds fire. Cool. Now say it out loud the way you'd actually say it, and rewrite it that way. I use WisprFlow for this, one button and it types how I actually talk.
This is not a five minute setup. But you build the skills one time and you run this thing forever.
Full walkthrough plus every prompt I use is here: Click here
🗣️ See Me Live
Here are the next spots that I'll be speaking at. Hopefully, I see you at one.
September 10th Washington, DC - BGV Homecoming
September 12th Dallas, TX - InstaClub Hub Live
November 6-8 Puerto Rico - LB Club Lock-In (only for LB Club Members)
So you already know you have to email me back about your biggest takeaway from this week's Content Corner. Take a screenshot and tag me in your stories (or Threads/Substack) so I know you liked this week's content. If not, I'll see you next Friday. Same time, same corner.
I'll Holla,
Nicky S
Creators who last don't rely on motivation. They rely on behaviors. ~ Lions Behavior
P.S. Whenever you are ready, here's how I can help you
- Watch my YouTube channel for full tutorials and walk-throughs on content tips, AI, and brand strategy that go beyond this newsletter.
- Turn your ideas into a content machine with DraftLoop - Click Here
- Finally, join Lions Behavior. It's where creators who build seriously come to actually do it together - Join here