Ben Woods

Ben is a Creator Economy Analyst at MIDiA. He holds a BA in American literature with creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Before joining MIDiA, Ben spent 13 years as a journalist, where he won several industry awards. He previously worked as the tech and media correspondent for the Sunday Times and The Telegraph. His focus spans the creator tools industry, social video platforms, and streaming TV services. He is also a big video games and anime fan.

Mining fandom: Music’s Drive to Survive moment

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Ben Woods

28 Feb 2025

Marketing Strategy

Netflix’s Drive to Survive did more than introduce a new entertainment layer for sports fans. The F1 docuseries provided a framework for re-igniting and nurturing fandom. Before then, sports documentaries would have been considered ‘spin-off’ content.

min read

Streaming TV’s fight on social’s stage
Tactics for a short-form video future

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Ben Woods

February 2025

Streaming

live

YouTube

Streaming TV and social platforms have long competed for audience attention but from separate lanes. Now, these roads are merging in the social platforms’ favour as the likes of YouTube and TikTok evolve into kaleidoscopes of entertainment content, from vlogs and music videos to live sport and TV series.

Can the smart TV become a canvas for content creation?

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Ben Woods

21 Feb 2025

Audience Insight

YouTube’s growing strength on smart TVs is a head scratching moment for the video industry. The social video platform recently revealed that US consumers watched 1 billion hours of YouTube content daily on their smart TVs in December 2024.

min read

Creators and the creator economy
Defining the undefinable

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Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert and Ben Woods

January 2025

Creators

Cultural trends

Creator economy

20 years since the launch of YouTube, the creator economy is not new – but it lacks a single clear definition. Different interest groups who interact with it all have their perspectives, but this lack of consistency can result in misunderstandings at best and strategic missteps at worst.

Instagram Edits: the CapCut clone targeting TikTok’s turmoil

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Ben Woods

22 Jan 2025

Product Strategy

As TikTok grappled with its blackout on Sunday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri took the opportunity to up the ante with one of his biggest rivals. Targeting TikTok’s 170 million US users, Mosseri revealed Edits: a new creator tools app is designed to support not only Instagram creators but those cre...

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Are creators wise to sell their offcuts to AI companies?

Cover image for Are creators wise to sell their offcuts to AI companies?

Ben Woods

17 Jan 2025

Business Strategy

Most will be familiar with the adage: ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. Despite being a cliché, the saying lives on as it cuts to the heart of how individuals and companies perceive value.

min read

The creator economy is booming, so why are we spending less time creating?

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Ben Woods

8 Jan 2025

Creator economy

Product Strategy

YouTube’s grip on TV viewership in the West is tightening, reflecting the growing power of the creator economy. Nielsen data from July 2024 shows that YouTube now has the highest TV audience share on US smart TVs,10% versus Netflix’s 8.

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Creators versus creation
Tackling headwinds and bifurcation

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Ben Woods

December 2024

Creators

Music creators

Business Strategy

Headwinds are threatening the creator economy’s potential. Audience growth, social platform monetisation, and content saturation are creating friction that is leaving creators frustrated. Now, the red lights are flashing on the dashboard: the average weekly time consumers spend creating and producing content has fallen for the first time since 20...

Can AI creator tools live up to their hype in 2025?

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Ben Woods

19 Dec 2024

Product Strategy

Generative AI dominated discussions about the entertainment industry’s future in 2024. Whether it is music, video, games, audio, or social, both the immediate and long-term impacts of this technological revolution have been hard to ignore.

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Netflix, Duolingo, and the art of engagement in a fiercely competitive attention economy

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Ben Woods

13 Dec 2024

Netflix is making sure everyone knows that Squid Game 2 is just around corner.The South Korean dystopian survival thriller has been subjected to a major global advertising splash ahead of the shows’ second season release on December 26, 2024.

min read

MIDiA's 2025 predictions webinar slides
It's social's stage now

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Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Ben Woods, Rutger Rosenborg, Rhys Elliott and Olivia Jones

December 2024

Spotify

YouTube

Twitch

MIDiA's expert analysts dive into our 2025 predictions for the music, social, video, audio, and games industries – and explain why we believe "it's social's stage now".

Saving creators’ time is the beginning – not the end – of the AI revolution

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Ben Woods

5 Dec 2024

Creator economy

Product Strategy

Ask content creators about their pain points and they will tell you that time is their greatest challenge. Despite their passion for producing the best possible content, creators often find themselves bogged down by tasks that hinder their creativity.

min read

MIDiA’s 2025 predictions
It’s social’s stage now

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Mark Mulligan, Karol Severin, Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Ben Woods, Rutger Rosenborg, Rhys Elliott and Olivia Jones

December 2024

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

The creator economy reshaped entertainment in the first half of the 2020s and social wasthe big winner, now positioned at the centre of the entertainment economy. In 2025 wewill see the second-order effects begin to play out, set against the backdrop of attentionsaturation, content commodification, and increased focus on profit.

The future of creator software
Maximising AI’s engagement opportunity

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Ben Woods

November 2024

Product Strategy

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising creator software to make it easier for those with little or no skill to produce high-quality content. These innovations are proving highly disruptive to existing workflows meaning traditional creator tools will struggle unless they adapt and evolve.

A message to the entertainment industry: nurture fandom or risk losing control of your IP

Cover image for A message to the entertainment industry: nurture fandom or risk losing control of your IP

Ben Woods

29 Nov 2024

Creator economy

What makes a fan in 2024? Is it how much they spend? How often they watch, listen or play? Is it how much they broadcast their fandom across social apps? Of course, the answer is all the above – and more.

min read

Are consumers ready for TikTok’s AI acceleration?

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Ben Woods

21 Nov 2024

The AI revolution sweeping the entertainment industry will rage on in 2025. In recent weeks, TikTok owner ByteDance has provided a deeper look into how AI will impact social platforms . Through a series of quick-fire announcements, it revealed TikTok’s AI tools for advertisers as well as separate ...

min read

Are social platforms losing the next generation to Roblox and Fortnite?

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Ben Woods

15 Nov 2024

Unpacking social media strategy is now part and parcel of any election postmortem. From Elon Musk’s ownership of X to Donald Trump’s use of creators to target Gen Z men, understanding social’s role in the US election is to understand how influence is wielded in the digital age.

min read

How creator hardware companies can adapt to AI’s new creative lane

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Ben Woods

7 Nov 2024

Product Strategy

creator hardware

Companies building creator hardware are used to disruption. The last seismic shift came in the shape of the smartphone. Mass market point-and-shoot cameras were met with an existential crisis when lenses and microphones capable of capturing high-quality video footage began making their way into mobi...

min read

When Bernie Sanders met Sykkuno: how VTubers are taking over social platforms

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Ben Woods

31 Oct 2024

Creator economy

It made for a curious sight: the US senator Bernie Sanders discussing the upcoming election with Sykkuno , a creator whose digital identity is an anime inspired demi human with cat ears. These two worlds collided last week (October 23, 2024) when Sanders joined a Twitch live stream hosted by superst...

min read

The future of creator hardware
AI’s new creative lane

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Ben Woods

October 2024

Twitch

Sony

Microsoft

AI tools pose a risk to the hardware funnel by becoming the go-to toolkit for beginners and a substitute for recorded footage. With AI providing solutions at every stage of the video creator workflow, hardware must fight to justify its need. Especially because AI makes it easier for all creators to produce professional-grade content.

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