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In today’s blog post, I want to get a little meta with things.
No, I don’t mean that I’ll be writing about the Company Formerly Known as Facebook. I mean that I want to not only examine a company that’s surging up our metrics, as I do every week, but also investigate one of the key features of the creator economy itself: an aspect of creator activity that’s become so pervasive, so universal, that we hardly notice it anymore. Like water for fishes—or air for humans, I guess, if you want a less fanciful simile—this aspect is all around us, and shapes our way of life, all while being taken for granted.
But it wasn’t always there. And it’s getting bigger than ever.
To make things less cryptic, I’m referring to linksharing. More specifically, I’m referring to the ability to share links to multiple pages within a single, landing-page type of link—something eminently useful to creators. This feature is everywhere on social media, and we have one company in particular to thank for revolutionizing the game
The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Linktree
While I love and respect all the brands I highlight in HBBIP, Linktree’s origin story is particularly interesting to me. Like Patreon before it, Linktree broke onto the scene to fill a specific gap within an emerging industry, and its growth ever since reveals a lot about not only the brand, but the industry that it’s helped to shape.
In 2016—the same year I joined Tribe Dynamics—Linktree’s cofounders were running a digital agency that advised brands on social media strategy. (Shoutout to all of our agency friends! You know the struggle.) Updating individual Instagram profiles with new links made for tedious work, so the trio commissioned a developer, who built the prototype for what would become Linktree over the course of six hours. From there, it was only another few hours before the service gained 3k users, causing the server to crash.
So the next time you’re frustrated with a recurring problem in your industry, just take six hours to build a solution, and within six years you’ll have a billion-dollar company. Easy peasy.
Surging from one to three to eight million users from 2018 to 2020, Linktree’s growth essentially mirrors the growth of the creator economy itself. More than mirrors, really: Linktree’s growth is the creator economy’s growth.
What does that growth look like through the lens of our key metrics?
Linktree EMV: 2018 - 2024
Well what do you know—it looks a lot like growth!
Yes, that billion-dollar threshold I mentioned earlier isn’t just a matter of USD. 2024 marked the sweet spot where Linktree officially entered the three-commas EMV club, surging up from $679.5M EMV in 2023 to pass the much-coveted Billion Threshold.
We see a similar, though slightly less pronounced, expansion for the brand’s creator count over the same years:
Linktree creator count: 2018 - 2024
While 12.5k creators in 2024 is hardly negligible—especially considering that Linktree claimed just 623 creators to its name in 2018—it’s a lot less than you would expect given Linktree’s surging EMV. What this indicates to me is that Linktree runs on power users: the same few creators post an astounding amount of content utilizing the platform.
This is born out when we look at historical trends for Linktree’s content volume:
Linktree content volume: 2018 - 2024
This is a very high post-to-creator ratio—more than 10 posts per creator—demonstrating Linktree’s importance for its power users.
And who are those power users, exactly? Before we name names, it’s important to establish where these users are coming from. If creators’ posts about Linktree in 2024 are any indication, then we have a pretty clear answer:
Brand Name, EMV and % of total
That’s right: this is YouTube’s game, folks. Much like the aforementioned Patreon, as well as fellow creator economy forerunner iHeartMedia, Linktree has found a natural home amongst YouTube creators, who use Linktree to conveniently share links to their other content streams.
And when it comes to who exactly these YouTube creators are, well, that’s the beauty part: they’re pretty much everyone.
Looking over Linktree’s most impactful pieces of content in 2024 is basically the same thing as looking at a cross-section of the internet itself in 2024. I’m talking a lot of inspirational content. A lot of pranks and gags and goofs. A lot of politics. A lot of cute animals. And, of course, a lot of Sabrina Carpenter.
Linktree’s top names in 2024 included powerhouse YouTubers like Nikko Ortiz (3.3M subscribers), but smaller creators also got in on the action: Big Guys Littles World Sanctuary, the chronicle of one man and his chihuahuas, boasted just 21.2k subscribers, but that didn’t stop the account from driving serious EMV for Linktree. Granted, BGLWS mentioned Linktree in 2.3k posts, or roughly six posts per day. (Like I said, it’s a high post to creator ratio.)
To be clear, Linktree’s ubiquity didn’t necessarily result in a lot of posts or creators shouting out Linktree specifically. As you would expect from a Link In Bio company (really, the Link In Bio company), Linktree primarily featured as, well, a link in bio. Rather than a creator strategy that manifests in product launches, campaigns, and splashy events, Linktree’s strategy to win over creators is a lot more direct: just build a tool that’s become indispensable to the way that these creators do business.
Sounds like six hours well spent. After all, that’s about five hours and fifty-eight more minutes than I put into thinking of the name for this newsletter series.
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