A journey from being an academician to a champion of the new creator economy
An interview by Cheryl Fuerte
When we were brainstorming for profiles to feature in the second issue of dotSpotlight, Raffi Kamalian was one that immediately came to mind. To say that Raffi had a very interesting journey is an understatement. He was an academician (with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley) who transitioned to entertainment, online video, and the digital creator space. He’s also an avid Wushu practitioner and speaks Mandarin, Japanese, and of course English.
Raffi is currently VP of Content and Head of Greater China at Pinball, formerly known as Collab Asia, a creator-centric digital talent network and content studio operating globally. I met Raffi more than a decade ago. We worked together on a couple of sponsorship projects with alivenotdead.com when I was still working for an e-commerce company based in Hong Kong. Back then, creator collaborations were still sort of experimental, and brands were only beginning to understand the value of digital-native voices.
Raffi’s career has sat at the intersection of technology, culture, and digital media in Asia. Prior to Pinball (Collab Asia), Raffi served as Director of Artists and Entertainment of mig33, and Chief Operating Officer (and later CEO) of ALIVE (alivenotdead.com, or AnD), the Hong Kong-based artist community, including international film stars Daniel Wu and Jet Li. During that period, AnD became one of the highest-profile startups in Hong Kong, the most visible artist-oriented social media platform in the Greater China region and an early bridge between influencers and brands.
From Academician to Online Video & Digital Creatorship Expert
Through this journey, Raffi became one of the region’s earliest authorities on online video and digital distribution, including founding Hong Kong’s first YouTube Multi-Channel Network (MCN) in 2013. His work and perspectives have been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal (Asia), Hong Kong Economic Times, and Marketing Interactive. Multilingual and internationally trained, Raffi holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to work in academia across Asia as a post-doctoral researcher at Kyushu University in Japan and later as an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Q & A WITH RAFFI KAMALIAN
I’ve always been curious about this. You came from a deeply technical and academic background in mechanical engineering, then moved into entertainment, online video, and the creator economy. On paper, it feels unrelated. How did that transition come about? What drew you into the online video and creator space?
Raffi: The short answer is — dot com startups, what we now call Web 1.0. The leap from engineering to web development and entrepreneurship is not that far, and in my case the entertainment aspect was because of my background and interest area.
When I was at Berkeley in the ’90s and early 2000s, many of my friends and classmates were dropping out of engineering school to do web startups. The founder of rottentomatoes.com lived in my dorm during freshman year and ended up partnering with my roommate to start it. While pursuing an engineering degree, I had a front-row seat to this early startup culture, including making my own websites as far back as 1995, and helping my friends with their projects on the side.
My circle of friends included a lot of Asian Americans who were very into martial arts, action films and Asian cinema in general. Through my roommate I ended up joining the Wushu club at Berkeley and we would watch the latest Jet Li and Jackie Chan films in San Francisco Chinatown when they had a midnight premiere. One of my Wushu classmates was Daniel Wu, who later moved to Hong Kong and became an actor. I think you can start connecting the dots about how I ended up coming to Hong Kong and joining an entertainment-related startup with two rottentomatoes.com co-founders in 2007.
While we were doing alivenotdead.com, a lot of artists we knew would ask me questions about YouTube, about digital rights, and monetization. I had been making my own videos for many years by then (I started a business selling my own Wushu competition VCDs online in 2001), so I ended up finding someone from YouTube’s Greater China team who introduced me to their MCN program, which basically allows a company to manage YouTubers’ content, rights, and monetization. At this point I started my own company, which was later acquired in 2018 by Collab Asia (now known as Pinball).
How has the creator economy changed since your early days with alivenotdead.com and similar platforms?
Raffi: In the early days, our business model was very typical of a Web 1.0 blog site— you earn money from the banner ads on your website, so the more pageviews you get, the more you earn.
But we quickly realized that the database of influencers we had collected was the most valuable part of our business. We essentially had everyone from A-list actors and singers to aspiring DJs and graphic artists in our Rolodex. Brands were willing to pay us to organize events or invite our guests to attend their events, and then we took it to what is now common, but at the time was groundbreaking — sponsored social media, including asking a celebrity to retweet an event video, or giving them a new pair of sneakers and paying them to write a blog about it. The influencer wins, the middleman (us) wins, the brand wins.
The rise of YouTube and their partner program kind of changed the game by the 2010s. Now anyone, whether they’re a celebrity or not, could access monetization on YouTube. Google handles everything — you only need to focus on getting views on your uploads. They serve the ads and wire you money every month. This helped democratize the creator economy, but it also provided a baseline revenue stream, especially for musicians. You could monetize anything, even just filming a fireplace, playing rain sounds, or doing stupid skits.
This model is still pretty dominated by YouTube. Facebook has a view-based monetization model, as does TikTok in certain markets, but Instagram (IG) is still on the older model — you want to become popular enough that brands will pay you to mention their product.
“Live commerce is becoming a bigger and bigger deal, but it is less interesting to us from the creator side because not everyone is well-suited to being a live pitchman, and also, livestreaming can be very tiring.”
Things have evolved with social commerce. For creators who focus on product-related genres (reviewing guitars, unboxing figurines, etc) there is a direct way to monetize your influence, which can be more lucrative than just revenue from Google Ads.
Live commerce is becoming a bigger and bigger deal, but it is less interesting to us from the creator side because not everyone is well-suited to being a live pitchman, and also, livestreaming can be very tiring. For our clients, who are established video creators who have already proven they’re good at making content people want to watch, every hour they’re livestreaming is an hour they’re not making videos that can go viral and keep earning money 24/7 for years.
Pinball Asia operates across multiple Southeast Asian markets. What’s unique about the region?
Raffi: We have teams in Jakarta, Manila, Seoul, and Tokyo in addition to our Greater China team. My team actually is also very active with partners and creators in South Asia as well.
One interesting aspect of Asia and SEA is the diversity of platforms by country. In the Philippines, Facebook is much more popular than YouTube while in Indonesia YouTube and TikTok are in a fierce head-to-head competition and Instagram remains popular. Whereas India has blocked TikTok, and YouTube seems to have beaten Meta.
A lot of the top short-form creators in Japan and Korea are signed with us, and we find by default a large portion of their audiences are actually coming from Indonesia and India. Basically you can’t get to 50 or 70 million subscribers on YouTube without 30% of them coming from those two markets.
The main pain point is that the advertising rates are just much lower in these markets. So a view from Japan or Korea, with Japanese and Korean ads being served, may be worth 5 to 10 times what a view in India or Indonesia would earn.
You now live in Kyoto, Japan, which is awesome, and you manage work across Asia. How is this working out for you?
Raffi: I moved my home base to Japan during COVID (I lived here before moving to Hong Kong and my wife is Japanese). Now that restrictions have loosened up, I can travel to visit Jakarta and Manila again. But we are able to handle a lot virtually nowadays, so it’s much less necessary. Flying to Jakarta from Osaka is much less convenient compared to Hong Kong, but now I can take the train to Tokyo at the drop of a hat.
For most of us, browsing or scrolling videos of content creators is one way to unwind. However for you, this is work. What else do you do to unwind then (aside from cycling — I see your cycling posts on my IG feed sometimes)?
Raffi: It’s not exactly “unwinding”, but I have found one pastime since I’ve moved. I decided to actively embrace the fact that I’m living in Japan to make my own Japan-related content. On a Zoom call a few years ago, one of our European clients mentioned to me how much he enjoyed watching YouTube videos of people walking around famous places in Japan, and I realized “Hey, I do that every day when I’m doing my Apple Watch workout”. So I started a channel walking around the streets of Kyoto. In the meantime I’ve become an expert in all the local festivals and photo spots for sakura and fall leaves. I rationalize it as “eat your own dog food” — I know how to help people grow their YouTube channels because I do it myself.
“I started a channel walking around the streets of Kyoto. I’ve also become an expert in all the local festivals and photo spots for sakura and fall leaves.”
You speak three different languages, Mandarin, Japanese, and English. For many of us who speak one or two only, this is a feat. And you’re able to use them — speaking Japanese in Japan where you live now, and speaking Mandarin for business. Can you tell us a bit about your language journey: what inspired you to learn Japanese and Mandarin? Is there a fourth language on your list that you’re working on?
Raffi: I started taking Mandarin at Berkeley when I was in graduate school. After studying Wushu for a number of years, I thought learning Chinese would be useful. After the first year, I spent a month in Beijing and was hooked. I ended up taking four years of Mandarin. I eventually started attending engineering conferences in China as well. My plan was to spend the summer of 2003 in an internship at Qinghua University, but due to SARS, I ended up going to Japan instead. That led to a two-year post-doc position at Kyushu University. Compared to learning higher-level Chinese, basic Japanese was not intimidating. I ended up moving to Hong Kong after that, which gave me a lot of exposure to Cantonese, though I never studied it formally. Now I’m focused on improving my Japanese again while maintaining my Chinese, so I’m not sure I have time to take on another language.
You’ve been living in Japan for a while now. Is Japan home for you now or do you plan to go back to the United States later at some point?
Raffi: It’s hard to predict the future, but for right now Japan compares favorably against anywhere else in the world, in terms of pretty much a lot of things: cost of living, safety, infrastructure, and nature. Just a bit too hot in the summer.
ALIVE (Alivenotdead, or AnD) was so cool and hip for many of us following the Asian entertainment scene. The “Dead not Alive” Halloween parties have been one of the most anticipated events in Hong Kong every year. There are many popular celebrities in the AnD network. Can you share an unforgettable moment or two when you were still at Alivenotdead?
Raffi: It’s hard to pin down just one. As a fan of Hong Kong movies long before I ever went there, the fact that my work allowed me to attend many red carpets, movie premieres, and concerts gave me the chance to meet the same people I had seen on Chinatown theater screens a decade or two earlier. My friend Vincent Kok even ended up casting me in small parts in two of his movies. I had a few scenes with Eason Chan in the second one.
And as VP of Content at Pinball now, what are your top challenges? I am assuming that the surge of generative AI content and rights management in relation to hybrid content would be a couple of them. What’s your POV on these issues?
Raffi: AI is not necessarily the biggest challenge, at least not yet. It’s a double-edged sword, it helps us, especially with localization. But if I were a full-time creator or especially an actor, I can see it as a much bigger threat.
The biggest challenge over the last few years has actually been the shift to Shorts / Reels / TikTok videos over widescreen / long-play content. The earnings rate for Shorts versus long videos on YouTube is about 10 to 20%. The more real estate that YouTube devotes to Shorts in their app means less time spent watching long content. This is a challenge for a lot of ‘old school’ creators who didn’t grow up on TikTok.
What advice would you give to creators trying to build longevity today?
Raffi: I think some of the fundamental lessons I shared with creators 10 or 15 years ago still apply — consistency is more important than production quality. It’s much harder to be able to produce content on a daily or weekly basis than it is to learn how to do fancy editing. It takes years of practice to become an ‘overnight success’, so you had better like what you’re making content about, rather than picking something because you think it’s a hot topic. The best cases I’ve seen are people who were already doing something as a hobby and then they just decided to start filming it and sharing that on YouTube.
Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future and evolution of the digital creator space?
Raffi: We are working more and more with content libraries, such as film studios, the owners of old TV shows and record labels. There is still a lot of this classic evergreen content that isn’t being exploited on YouTube (including copyright protection, which we also specialize in).
The other big growth area for us is in professional sports. Sports leagues are putting highlights on their own YouTube channels rather than selling all the rights to TV and streaming platforms. In some cases they’re also livestreaming the games directly onto YouTube themselves instead of paywalled platforms like Disney+ or SonyLiv. For sports like cricket or football, the audiences are huge.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This chat with Raffi took me down memory lane. Like Raffi, I was also in the web industry since the early Web 1.0 dot-com era, expressing myself through my personal website, with a handful of chat/forum members and interacting with frequent visitors (we didn’t call them ‘followers’ during that time). I was building sites, intranets, tools and automated systems for e-commerce platforms, and managing online partnerships. Just like Raffi, I’ve witnessed how the web has massively evolved throughout the years. From simple project collaborations, I’m glad to have stayed in touch even if it’s just being occasionally updated via social media. It’s always inspiring to know people like him.
From engineering labs at the University of California, Berkeley to Hong Kong film premieres, to connecting artists and brands in the early days of social media, and now in the new creator economy, Raffi’s journey is incredibly amazing. His analytical foundation and systems thinking never left him; it simply found a new arena in online video, rights management, and creator monetization. What also stood out is that he focused on sustainable economics rather than merely chasing trends. He understood how platforms worked: how they allocate attention, how ad markets price geography, how rights frameworks protect value, and how culture moves across borders. The countless subscriber award plaques his company got are a testament to that.
Raffi’s story also reinforces a broader truth: the creator economy did not appear overnight. The creator economy was built gradually by people who understood both technology and culture — and who, like Raffi, evolved alongside the platforms they helped and are helping to grow. I’m genuinely excited for Raffi and his team on their next steps, in this golden era for digital creators.
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