Inspired by the growing number of Penn State students successfully launching themselves online as content creators, Bellisario College of Communications assistant teaching professor Bill Zimmerman ’16 MEd Edu designed Comm 255: Digital Content and the Creator Economy. The class gives students the tools to develop novel ideas, deliver value through digital content, build and monetize an audience, and set themselves up for a future career or a profitable side hustle.
“How we entertain ourselves online, how we get informed, how we find community, and how we make decisions about the products we buy have all been changing significantly,” says Zimmerman.
These days, he says, more and more college students are building sizable social media followings, with a few amassing six-figure subscriber counts. Zimmerman thinks it’s important to collate their experiences—both positive and negative—for other students to learn from. “A big part of this is trying to demystify things,” he says, “because on the surface, it looks very glamorous, it seems like you could just fall into a pile of money by pressing record on your phone. The reality is much tougher. It’s a grind and for many, success can be fleeting, so I am really trying to teach this with two feet firmly planted on the ground.”
In Comm 255, Zimmerman emphasizes the importance of strategic thinking and setting objectives, and what it means to be an ethical content creator. His students look at case studies of individuals who have built personal brands through digital content and leveraged those into successful businesses. He has a list of student content creators and alumni working as influencer marketing specialists for brands and invites them to talk to Comm 255 students.
It's important for students to know, he says, that “the social media channels that you choose to engage on are rented space, and you need to acknowledge that they could stop being effective—they could stop even being available, they could go out of business. The most secure route is to try to own your audience as much as possible.”
Through the semester, Zimmerman assigns his students “content challenges” to gauge their idea generation and storytelling skills—and their technological prowess. “I might assign them a 30-second TikTok to do as group, get them to figure out what story they want to tell and how they’re going to tell it, see who has the best headphones, the best microphone for sound—and then come back in 60 minutes,” he says.
For a bigger project, Zimmerman wants his students to figure out a niche, an area that’s important and meaningful to them and in which they feel they can make an impact by offering a unique perspective through digital content creation. “They’ll have a document, a plan to end the semester with that is theirs and that they can apply on their own,” he says.
Offered for the first time this spring semester, Comm 255 will eventually become part of a new, 13-credit content creator certificate that the Bellisario College of Communications is currently developing. Zimmerman says his class—which uses his 2025 textbook, Understanding the Creator Economy: Making Digital Media Work for You—will complement existing courses in podcasting, photojournalism, and video production, among others.
