Part 2: The $100K/Year Page Playbook: Monetizing Street People of Beverly Hills

Happy Sunday :)

I hope you’re having a wonderful day. I’m Julia, and every week in this newsletter, I break down marketing insights I’ve learned building software and consumer products (bootstrapped + VC-backed) and lean into the organic, creator, and paid strategies that fuel viral growth.

If you're reading this, you're in for some magic on making money with $0 upfront capital. This is part 2 of a 3-part newsletter with the incredibly popular Instagram account, Street People of Beverly Hills (“SPOBH”). If you missed Part 1, I covered how the page started and grew from scratch into one of LA’s most influential accounts without spending a dollar on ads.

Today, I’ll break down exactly how SPOBH has turned their page into a huge, reliable revenue stream that drives 6-figures per year via various monetization streams. In any given month, SPOBH brings in $15,000–$30,000 through five main channels: strategic partnerships, the Citizen App creator program, selling footage, paid memberships, and social media platform monetization. I’ll break down the pros and cons of each and show exactly how the page makes money. Fun fact: SPOBH started as a side job for the owner and has since become a major revenue stream.

Here’s how SPOBH scaled to $100K+ annually in revenue with $0 upfront capital.

This breakdown is where the $100K comes from. I’ll go into how SPOBH looked at each opportunity, how you copy them and set up each, and any challenges along the way (there were many).

Total (Estimate) $16K-$40K+/month

Each of these revenue streams has its own set of opportunities and challenges. Here's how each one works and how SPOBH optimized them to maximize the amount of money each channel makes.

Strategic partnerships can bring your brand and page to a new level. For SPOBH, they have mainly focused on working with businesses that find value in consistently advertising through their content. This has led to long-term, multi-month partnerships that provide a steady income stream. SPOBH also takes on occasional one-off deals, but their primary focus is securing ongoing relationships. This means that there's more work up front to lock in the right partner, and less work in the long run because they don't have to go out and find new deals every month.

Here are some unexpected but high-paying partnerships that SPOBH works with:

Depending on the type of content you produce, no business is off limits for a partnership. Law firms might seem random at first, but personal injury firms are actually right within the wheelhouse of crime content and accidents, which frequently go viral on SPOBH page and make up a substantial chunk of the content submitted to their DMs by followers.  

How can you find a strategic partnership? This is something I'll elaborate on in depth in a future newsletter, but if you have a big enough following, you'll have a mix of the right partners coming to you while you simultaneously target your dream list of partners. Fun fact: SPOBH manages all their own deal flow and negotiates with each partner specifically for pricing. This is actually different than the typical influencer with 100K followers, who has a manager and a pretty rigid pricing list to vet deals. This is one reason I’m a huge fan of working with pages like this vs. traditional influencers – less overall B.S. 

At Citizen, we reached out to SPOBH as one of the first creators we signed to our Creator Program over 2 years ago. We were completely mission aligned in spreading safety content and awareness through reporting on live incidents and amplifying critical footage. Years later, SPOBH has created 1,000+ incidents covering everything from protests to high-profile burglaries. They report content in 2 main ways: first, via their on-the-ground team that uses CitizenCam (our livestreaming feature in the app) to go live on breaking incidents, and second by sharing footage from their followers on Citizen.

BTW, if you didn’t already know, I dreamed up and built Citizen’s first Creator Program from the ground up in 2023. Now, we have creators in nearly every major city in the U.S. who capture essential safety information for people to stay informed (goes a long way with retention / churn reduction). 

Going back to SPOBH, their Citizen app incidents directly make SPOBH money via the creator program and help drive growth for both of us because they are crazy viral. Another way to think about this is that we combined our superpowers (comeplling content) and platforms to totally hack viral news content. Most memorably, SPOBH reported on a diamond heist that occurred in 2022 with a jaw-dropping video [WATCH HERE]. Here are some of the titles of their content that have blown up: 

How can you find a Creator Program to participate in? Citizen’s creator program is a consistent, reliable way for SPOBH to monetize. If you think your page is a fit, reply to this email - I’d love to chat.

If you have brands you love and want to grow your brand’s page, reach out and ask if they have long-term programs; these are often run by marketing teams and aren’t heavily advertised, so message your favorite brands or post that you’re looking to join a creator program to see if you can connect. I love scraping emails and cold reach-outs, so try that too if you’re up for it.

If you have a business you want to grow and amplify: Consider starting your own creator program. It's incredible to be 2+ years into ours at Citizen, and we've seen every benefit from higher quality video content, to cheaper CACs. I’m always happy to riff if you have any ideas and want feedback from someone who has done this end-to-end.

Selling footage is a really interesting way that SPOBH makes money. Traditional media like news organizations and online blogs are always looking for high-quality, breaking news footage to run with their stories. The faster you can provide a visual to a story these days, the more compelling the story is. SPOBH capitalized on this demand by licensing content to major media outlets, including:

Have you ever seen a SPOBH or Citizen video on the news before? If you turn your TV on or follow big news orgs online, I'm sure you have. It's very cool to see the pipeline of a video coming from community members and being shared with the rest of the world on such huge platforms. SPOBH used their unfair advantage of having access to on-the-ground footage that mainstream media doesn't get themselves and built a system to profit on it. 

SPOBH has experimented with monetizing directly through Instagram memberships, offering behind-the-scenes content to their most loyal followers. Because of their content genre, this hasn't been a smooth road. They've had to fight challenges like Instagram flagging the SPOBH account multiple times for content violations, which has made this revenue stream unstable. 

If you want to monetize your content on Instagram: You need to keep in mind that this content is more regulated than your unmonetized content. 

SPOBH is prepping to monetize directly on Instagram and YouTube through ad revenue and creator funds. While this strategy is still in the works, the page engagement suggests it could add another $3,000-$7,000 per month to their earnings, right off the bat.

Typically, each platform has its own follower and engagement thresholds you need to hit before you can start earning from creator funds. Sometimes platforms try out these funds and then shut them down like Pinterest, which notoriously ended a huge creator fund program back in 2022. TikTok, however, is the most reliable for influencers making money through its Creator Rewards Program (I linked a really good Shopify article on the earning potential on there).

To qualify, you need 10K followers and over 100K views in the last 30 days. Once you’re in, you unlock a bunch of ways to make money on the platform-affiliate marketplace, live gifts, follower subscriptions, etc.

Pretty cool, right? It’s super interesting to see a page take a completely unique approach to making money vs. the traditional influencer. SPOBH is essentially a faceless page, so monetization strategies are different and not a one-size-fits-all. City accounts have boomed in the past two years, so it’s been awesome to see friends like this totally build on the momentum and make real money from it. If you shoot us over any questions or ideas on monetization, hit “reply” to this email, and we’ll send over any advice. 

If you’re one of the super cool CEOs and founders reading this, here’s why now is the time to think bigger about social plays: Your audience already follows a variety of pages and brands that shape their interests, so why not meet them where they are? Consumer brands have mastered this playbook, collaborating with creators and other companies to tap into existing communities and create authentic, buzzworthy moments that drive real engagement and sales. But for B2B brands, there’s still a huge, underexplored opportunity to do the same.

The third and final part in this series with SPOBH will be a tactical guide on how the page growth hacked via community, so be sure to keep an eye out. Here’s Part 1, How SPOBH Started and Grew From Scratch (Without Paid Ads), if you didn’t get a chance to read it.

Julia