Online Creators are finally being celebrated — and it’s about time. Whether it’s clever comics, great graphics, powerful podcasts, or wonderful writing, Creators are what make the Internet a great place to be.
But who is The First Creator? The Creator who captured imaginations of early online users? And was not some flash in the pan or one-hit wonder, but a Creator who is still creating great content today to prove them worthy of the title?
The Internet Dark Ages
Long before ‘Creator’ became an Internet buzzword, one person was already doing it, publishing original content online, building an audience, and sustaining it for decades. In 1994, Randy Cassingham launched This is True, a weekly newsletter of bizarre-but-true news with commentary — a tagline which is humorous, ironic, or opinionated (or with luck, some combination of the three). Basic subscriptions have been free ever since.
It was among the very first email publications to reach a mass audience, growing to tens of thousands of subscribers around the world within months — years before “blogger”, “influencer”, or “creator economy” entered the language. It still runs weekly today.
Writers covering the online world have called Cassingham “one of the first inbox success stories” (Tedium, 2020). His early interviews, dating back to The Brutarian in the late 1990s, document that Randy had been online since the early 1980s — long before most people had ever heard of the Internet — studying the online culture before making his move.
“Talk about unreasonable. At the time, the Internet was considered to be a pristine, unexploited commons. There were all sorts of cultural rules and norms in place forbidding commerce: nobody was going to sell anything, and certainly no one would be making any money. But Cassingham, seeing the future, charged ahead and ignored those rules. (If you think this is common now, it is. But not in 1994!)”
— Be Unreasonable by Paul Lemberg, 2007 [Amazon]
Conventional Media Notices Too
The New York Times asked and answered, “How did he get so popular so fast? Well, for one thing, he writes funny stuff.” (1995) The Los Angeles Times said “Cassingham is a humorist for the Information Age, an Internet-savvy satirist and social commentator. The Jay Leno of Cyberspace.” (1996) There were many, many more.
From those beginnings, Randy built a sustainable independent publishing model that prefigured the Creator-driven economy that dominates online media today. Not just one site, but many successful sites, all creative in their own way. In many ways, he is The First Creator.
While major media outlets have cited and profiled This is True for decades, some of the Internet era’s most respected voices are readers too. For example, this pioneer offered the following endorsement:
I’ve almost never received This is True without laughing out loud at something within it. … I think so highly of This is True that I even purchased many subscriptions for good friends. —Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (2019)
The Internet Today
Today the Internet is a stanky sewer of anti-“social” garbage, except for the beautiful Content created by independent Creators. That is why these voices are now being so celebrated.
Beyond True, Cassingham went on to create multiple enduring projects: the Honorary Unsubscribe (which celebrates the awesome people who have left us), The True Stella Awards (which turned into a Penguin-published book with a six-figure advance), Get Out of Hell Free cards (an online/offline viral sensation), and others, each distinct in subject yet unified by a singular independent voice.
His career as a Creator demonstrates that online creation can be self-sustaining, ethical, and human-centered long before “monetization” became a strategy.
By every reasonable measure — timing, innovation, audience, and longevity — Randy Cassingham embodies what the Internet now calls a Creator. The difference is, he was successfully doing it long before the rest of the world had a word for it.
He truly is The First Creator.