Actor Brings Community Model to Content Creation

Actor Brings Community Model to Content Creation

Actor, director, writer, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is anything but a regular Joe. At Content Marketing World 2017, Gordon-Levitt talked about how just such a career dry spell led him to seize control of his creative destiny and to build something few startups and brands ever achieve: a thriving online community that not only pays for itself but also shares the wealth with its contributors. Gordon-Levitt: I’ve been an actor since I was 6 years old. HITRECORD evolved organically as the (online) community grew over the last 10 years. CCO: HITRECORD feels like a community for creative brainstorming and ideation. It’s great that artists are putting their stuff out there for free if that’s what they want. CCO: What’s the role of non-media brands that produce content on HITRECORD? Gordon-Levitt: We make money from two categories: branded content and licensed content. Most creativity online is an individual posting something of their own: “Hey, world, look what I did.” On HITRECORD, we’re more about what we can do together when we collaborate. When we issue creative challenges, it’s about people working together to fulfill the challenge in the best way possible.

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Don’t be fooled by his moniker on HITRECORD, the collaborative production company he founded with his brother in 2004. Actor, director, writer, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is anything but a regular Joe.

His acting career already spans three decades and includes a long list of popular and acclaimed TV shows and movies: 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Dark Knight Rises, Lincoln, Looper, Inception, Snowden, 500 Days of Summer …

Having graduated from child actor to blockbuster star, it’s hard to imagine that Gordon-Levitt ever struggled to find work. Yet an actor’s life is never certain, and dry spells are not uncommon.

At Content Marketing World 2017, Gordon-Levitt talked about how just such a career dry spell led him to seize control of his creative destiny and to build something few startups and brands ever achieve: a thriving online community that not only pays for itself but also shares the wealth with its contributors.

CCO: How did the idea for HITRECORD come about? Were there moments in your life that formed the seeds for this project?

Gordon-Levitt: I’ve been an actor since I was 6 years old. At 19, I quit to go to college. When I wanted back in, I couldn’t get any acting roles. That was painful.

When you’re an actor, you depend on someone else to give you a role. That couldn’t be how it went in my life. I had to be creative and express myself on my own terms. HITRECORD became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet – for being the one to push that record button on the video camera. It’s also a pun. In the past, media was an object you would consume, like a hit record. Now media is more and more something you do, an action you take, something that you’re a part of.

HITRECORD evolved organically as the (online) community grew over the last 10 years. I think that’s a huge strength. You can feel the homegrown origins in the nature of HITRECORD when you go there. It’s not just a startup that was conceived as a business model. I think people feel that. It’s a big part of why creative people – who are notoriously difficult – really do trust HITRECORD. They come. They contribute. They participate. It’s not just a scheme to make money or to collect your data.

CCO: HITRECORD feels like a community for creative brainstorming and ideation. But the platform also generates finished/monetized projects. Do those projects produce enough revenue to support the community or will there be other ways to monetize?

Gordon-Levitt: For a while, it was purely a hobby I worked on with my brother. We didn’t spend money or make money. And then, starting in 2010, we launched as a production company with our co-founders.

We wanted to do ambitious things: create things good enough to become feature films, make records, write books. A TV show was our pie-in-the-sky goal.

To accomplish those…

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