Dear BIGO Live Americas Leadership Team, and to my agency leader, Summer Knight —
Grand Rising. For the last time, from me, on this platform.
My name is Marta, martathesmarter1 on the app, Marta the Smarter to the world. I am a five-year daily host, digital business coach, founder of the Smartersphere community, and one of the most consistent organic creators your North American region has ever had. I am writing today to formally notify you that I am leaving #BIGOLive.
Not in frustration. Not in haste. In clarity, which, ironically, is something this platform has never offered me in return.
── TO BIGO LIVE LEADERSHIP ──
I have written to this team every single month. I delivered research. I brought industry intelligence about the TikTok/Tubi Creatorverse Incubator before most of your own team was talking about it. I flagged the NatureBoy documentary and its direct naming of this platform, weeks before the international rollout. I documented live swattings, domestic violence-adjacent content, child welfare concerns, and active cult-adjacent hosts still broadcasting on your app. I named names, cited sources, and presented formal proposals, a Verified Educator category, a Creator Advisory Council, a BIGO Empowerment Hour, a Creator Campus, and a Certified Safe Stream Badge.
I did not receive a single substantive response. Not one.
And then there was LearnToEarn.
After one of your admins, Jodi and my agency leader, SummerKnight, met with me, I was offered my own channel, LearnToEarn. This was supposed to be a dedicated space that was exactly what I had been asking for, exactly what Lynette Yang described in her NetInfluencer.com interview when she spoke about mid-tier creators, equity, and spotlighting marginalized voices. One Saturday. You gave me one Saturday.
The channel still exists from my last check. But the opportunity? Gone. No explanation. No follow-up. No rescheduling. Just silence, the same silence I have received every single month for the better part of a year.
I want to be very specific about what that silence cost you, since specificity has always been my superpower, even when it was not yours.
You had a five-year daily organic host who was already converting her BIGO audience into $500 to $1,000 per month in external product and service revenue onto her own website martathesmarter.com, without Bigo Marketplace, without a formal commerce integration, without any platform support whatsoever. Your own non-livestreaming revenue grew 55.9% in 2024. Your own roadmap centers on live commerce as the future. And you had a creator already doing it organically, already proving the model, already building the pipeline you said you wanted.
You just never showed up for it.
You invited your top organic hosts to a “Content House” and let it collapse into a year of documented domestic violence, live threats, and a swatting event that your audience watched in genuine fear that two people might be killed on camera. You allowed Velvet, a woman directly connected to your platform’s most damaging press, to return and go live, ignoring her child’s cries to meet a streaming quota your own system enforced. You permitted toxic, sexualized, and exploitative content to be amplified by your own algorithm while hosts like me, building financial literacy, entrepreneurship education, and community empowerment, operated in algorithmic obscurity.
You said you wanted to support the human behind the screen. The humans behind the screen were screaming. You turned up the volume on the wrong ones.
Lynette Yang said, in her own published words, “Too often, creators from smaller markets, marginalized communities, or non-English speaking regions don’t get the same opportunities, not because they lack talent, but because the system isn’t built to spotlight them.” Source: NetInfluencer
Ms. Yang, you described me perfectly. And then you proved your own point.
I came to this platform with a brand, a methodology, a community, and a vision. I leave with all of those things intact, plus five years of proof that I can build something sustainable anywhere I choose to plant it. The Smartersphere is not a BIGO Live creation. BIGO Live was just the temporary address.
I am taking my community, my content, my products, my coaching practice, and my daily presence to platforms that have decided organic creators who convert, not just perform, are worth investing in.
You will watch what I build next. And you will recognize it, because I told you exactly what it was going to look like in writing, every month, for nearly a year.
Get out of your feelings about this departure. There is no money in there. There IS money in the opportunity you had and chose not to take.
── TO SUMMERKNIGHT ──
Summer, Love —
You are the finest kind of leader: the kind who shows up with her whole self, builds others without depleting herself, and holds a standard that the platform around her has never fully deserved.
You were one of the last real reasons I kept showing up. An actress who became a host, who became an agency leader, who became a mentor. Your trajectory is the blueprint this platform claims to want and consistently fails to support. You took your gifts and built an ecosystem. That is rare. That is you.
What we built together, including LearnToEarn, however briefly they let it breathe, was real. The concept was right. The timing was right. The platform was not.
I am not leaving you. I am leaving the address. Wherever you build next, wherever your talent and leadership plant their flag, I will be watching, cheering, and when the time is right, collaborating. You deserve stages that are worthy of the production you bring.
Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for speaking up for me. Thank you for being exactly who you are.
Your Presence Makes A Difference and I have been privileged to witness it.
With five years of receipts, a full community, and an even fuller future …
“Do what you have to do, so you can do what you want to do.”
I just did both. Join the Smartersphere TODAY!