Digital Creators Are a Growth Industry. BU Alums Are Some of the Most Successful
Julian Shapiro-Barnum (CFA’21) [from left], Joel Bervell (CAMED’19), Priyanka Naik (CAS’10), and Elias Friedman (CAS’10) are all BU alums with large online followings. Photos courtesy of Shapiro-Barnum, Bervell, and Naik; Friedman photo by Matthew Williams
Digital Creators Are a Growth Industry. BU Alums Are Some of the Most Successful
They’ve earned followers by showcasing cooking, canines, kids, and healthcare
In today’s digital economy, the largest and fastest-growing segment is made up of the people who produce and publish content online to build a community and potentially earn income—the digital creators. The number of full-time equivalent positions has mushroomed by a multiple of 7-plus since the start of the pandemic, to 1.5 million last year.
Boston University has educated a host of successful entrepreneurs in the business. Alumni who post on various platforms about a vast array of topics include Lynae Vanee Bogues (GRS’18)—who has 904,000 Instagram followers—and Evan Puschak (COM’10), your guide to art and culture on The Nerdwriter. Several have gathered large, adoring audiences and the mainstream media coverage that goes with them.
Bostonia caught up with four Terriers and asked how creators select the topics for their sites, how they monetize them, and what impediments they had to overcome to turn personal avocation into full-time vocation.
Elias Friedman (CAS’10), The Dogist
Main platform: Instagram, 8 million followers
Eleven years ago, Elias Friedman decided to detoxify online’s often coarse, angry discourse with a topic guaranteed to spark smiles: dogs and their people. He has approached strangers on streets around the world—mostly in his home of New York City, but also across the US and in Croatia, Italy, China, France, and the UK—and persuaded them to appear in videos and photos with their pooches for his online platform The Dogist.
“The internet was filled with things that are divisive, and even more so today,” Friedman says. “And I always thought dogs were an antidote to all that, something that makes you feel better when you put your phone down instead of worse. They’re light in the world. And I wanted to be a light in the world.”
His light burns brightly enough to attract attention from the likes of CBS Saturday Morning. He’s also added New York Times best-selling author to his résumé, thanks to his books, The Dogist (Artisan, 2015), The Dogist Puppies (Artisan, 2017), and his just-published This Dog Will Change Your Life (Ballantine Books, 2025).
“My cadence is essentially one post a day,” he says. “So I’ll end up going out once or twice a week, shooting either by myself or with a behind-the-scenes shooter” to capture his conversations with dog walkers. That target is somewhat self-protective. “If I photograph too many dogs, then the stack of pictures starts piling up, and people start getting antsy, emailing me—‘Hey, you met my dog today. Where’s the picture?’”
His income fluctuates year to year. “Part of the rodeo of being an entrepreneur is that, some years, I’ll make 100 to 200k; some years, I’ll make significantly more. It depends how much new business I win, how well I’m striking the pulse of the internet.”
That’s the biggest challenge of this work: mustering the resilience to change with the market and the roller coaster of less work, more work. “I started as a photographer and was forced to become a videographer,” he says. “Now, I’m forced to become an influencer, a personality. I end up enjoying each of those things. But you have to like a new challenge to tackle. Being a creator is the fun part. It’s not the easy part, but it’s the fun part. But then as it starts to evolve and you get some success, then you realize that you’re on this rodeo—entrepreneurship—and most people fall off the horse.”
Julian Shapiro-Barnum (CFA’21), Recess Therapy
Main platform: Instagram, 3.2 million followers
“Life’s biggest questions, from climate change to boogers.” That, says Julian Shapiro-Barnum, is the focus of Recess Therapy, featuring short videos of his interviews with children.
Just don’t call what Shapiro-Barnum creates “content.”
“I can’t stand the word,” he says. “It’s a dirty word that denotes filler, fluff, junk food. I put a lot of love and thought into my work, and I know a lot of other creatives do as well. I think a lot of artists, filmmakers, creatives see mainstream media as a step above work put out on the internet. I think that isn’t true, and the gap is shrinking incredibly fast.”
Shapiro-Barnum has filmed Recess Therapy almost every week for more than four years, usually in New York, but occasionally around the country, logging thousands of interviews. His young subjects have been magnets for celebrity guest appearances on the series, including Rihanna, Michelle Obama, and Sean Evans, and have earned media coverage from the likes of Today.
While he’s not comfortable sharing his annual income, “I will say there is a lot of money to be made in this field. Postgrad, I never had to work a day job, and I now live alone in a lovely neighborhood. Brands are investing a ton of money into this market.” To survive as a creator, however, “You need to really feel comfortable hustling. You have to constantly advocate for yourself, seek out your own opportunities, network, create, and produce. My advice for anyone just starting out is to make as many different things as possible. You never know what’s going to stick.
“Also make things that come from the heart. The internet is oversaturated, and genuine people shine through.” Along those lines, he’s branched into a new YouTube show, Celebrity Substitute, which captures stars subbing in public elementary schools for a day, and Gems with Miles and Julian, a podcast he cohosts with a seven-year-old on YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and TikTok.
Priyanka Naik (CAS’10), chefpriyanka
Main platform: Instagram, 201,000 followers
Priyanka Naik may be one of the most successful layoffs around. She’d worked at X (formerly Twitter) for almost five years before the company let her go in 2022. But a cooking calling had been germinating since her youth on Staten Island, seeded by her mom’s lessons in making Indian cuisine and by cooking shows that, she realized, didn’t feature chefs who looked like her. After graduating from BU, she’d started a website and blog on the side to spotlight her cooking, found she was good at both recipes and photos, and auditioned for the Food Network. Following several rejections, she went on to win an episode on season five of the network’s Cooks vs Cons competition in 2017.
With her X layoff, she turned avocation into vocation. Today, Naik is a vegan chef, posting about her recipes, travels, and beauty and fashion tips, “all through an eco-friendly lens,” on social media and her website, chefpriyanka.com.
She also hosts recipe-making pop-ups around the country and world and has published a cookbook, The Modern Tiffen: On-the-Go Vegan Dishes with a Global Flair (S&S/Simon Element, 2021).
“As my expertise grew in the culinary space, the need for a larger presence on social media became pertinent,” she says. “I used my social platforms as a tool to grow my brand and share my mission of the importance of eco-living through food, travel, and fashion/beauty.”
Her career provides her with annual income “from low- to mid-six figures,” counting not just online content, but also live events, such as her pop-ups and speeches. Earning that living requires unremitting work; schedule permitting, Naik usually posts something new daily.
Her advice: “Aspiring creators need to be savvy and build multiple revenue streams,” whether it’s monetizing their social platforms, selling digital products, such as e-books, or working a part-time job. “It’s important to create a safety cushion for yourself,” she says. “You’re not going to post one TikTok and—boom—go viral and become a millionaire. It doesn’t work that way.”
Joel Bervell (CAMED’19), Medical Mythbuster
Main platforms: Instagram and TikTok (1.5 million followers total)
Joel Bervell dispels social media healthcare misinformation that stems from racial bias. The Ghanaian American isn’t a full-time creator; he’s an internal medicine resident at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash.—not a job known for banker’s hours. But his digital work represents a substantial portion of his income, he says, and it “has grown into a significant part of my professional life” as a doctor.
How significant? How many doctors have won a Peabody Award and been named TikTok’s 2021 Voice for Change? The prestigious Peabodys cited his “well-researched and clearly communicated insights about the many ways medical scientists and practitioners have used race to make arbitrary adjustments to care. Over the course of hundreds of videos, we see how racial bias affects everything from pain assessment, kidney transplants, X-ray treatments, and lung capacity tests, to cognitive tests for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) experienced by professional football players.”
Bervell typically creates several videos a week, “sometimes at home, sometimes in the hospital during residency, sometimes in hotel rooms in between speaking engagements.”
He says BU “shaped me in ways that show up in my work today.” Boston’s diversity, history, and academic-medical industry showed him that “medicine doesn’t exist in isolation,” he says. “It’s tied to culture, to history, to policy,” an insight essential to his videos, which blend medical facts with historical and social context to “explain why things are the way they are.”
The toughest part of his creator job is consistency. “Platforms change constantly, algorithms shift overnight, and what worked one month might not work the next,” says Bervell, who earned a master’s in medical science at BU and an MD at Washington State University. “I didn’t begin this work to go viral; I began it to educate, to challenge bias, and to build trust.”