This week on Next in Media, I sat down with Shane Atchison, CEO of Zaaz Collective, and Seth Gordon, a film director and co-founder of Zaaz. We dove into their mission to help micro and mid-level creators (those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers) think and act like media companies. With 96% of creators making minimum wage or less, Shane and Seth saw an opportunity to build a collective where creators could access the data, tools, and intelligence typically reserved for top-tier talent. They shared how Zaaz is using AI-powered analytics, audience insights, and comments-to-commerce strategies to help creators maximize their impact and earnings.

I was fascinated by their approach to solving the creator-brand disconnect. Shane explained how most creators have no idea what to charge for brand deals and often feel they get screwed on their first partnerships. Zaaz addresses this with transparent pricing data, engagement rate benchmarks, and personalized AI language models trained on each creator's unique content and audience. Seth brought a compelling perspective from the traditional entertainment world, noting how the $50 million ad model is dying and the future is much more atomized and creator-led. We also explored their plans for Q1 2025, including creator-to-creator events in Brazil and launching new tools for content transcription and multi-platform analytics.

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Key Highlights

💡 The Creator Economy Gap: 96% of creators are making minimum wage or less despite the industry growing to $500 million by 2030 with 35% year-over-year growth in media spend.

🤝 The Collective Model: Zaaz operates as a membership-based collective where creators share anonymized data on brand deals, pricing, and engagement rates so everyone can learn what's a fair deal.

📊 Audience Intelligence: The platform unifies analytics across all social platforms in one dashboard and uses AI to analyze comments for purchase intent, brand opportunities, and genuine engagement.

💬 Comments to Commerce: Zaaz filters through thousands of comments to surface the ones that matter, like when someone asks "what shirt are you wearing?" turning those into affiliate link opportunities.

🤖 Personalized AI Language Models: Each creator gets their own AI agent trained on their content, comments, and audience data, plus access to collective intelligence from other creators' successful strategies.

🎯 Brand Discovery Done Right: Zaaz pushes dynamic media kits to discovery platforms so creators are represented with real-time data on momentum, engagement rates, and audience quality.

🎬 The Future is Atomized: Seth Gordon explained how the traditional $50 million ad campaign model is dying, and the future belongs to niche, specialized creator-led content reaching targeted audiences.

🚀 Launching in 2025: Zaaz is hosting creator-to-creator events in Brazil and the U.S., launching AI-powered content transcription tools, and helping creators who "don't realize they're creators" move into the space.

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Resources & Next Steps

🌐 Explore Zaaz Collective

🔗 Connect with Shane Atchison on LinkedIn

🎧 Subscribe to Next in Media on Apple Podcasts

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YouTube Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Cold open - Building Zaaz for creators

00:36 Introducing Shane Atchison and Seth Gordon

02:02 What is Zaaz Collective?

03:00 How the collective model works

04:32 The "I got screwed" problem for creators

06:07 Seth on protecting creators in the wild west

07:07 Who are the target creators? (5K-100K followers)

08:32 Audience analytics across platforms

10:52 Comments to commerce strategy

13:04 Brand discovery and connecting the two sides

15:19 Seth on knowing your audience

18:32 The value of micro influencers

20:23 Seth on Warner Bros and the dying $50M ad model

22:10 Streamlining media spend in the creator economy

24:51 Personalized AI language models for creators

27:00 Q1 plans: Launching in Brazil and creator events

28:29 Wrap-up and thanks

Shane Atchison and Seth Gordon on Building Zaaz Collective for the Creator Economy

Next in Media