Content is king – at least that’s the hope for the musicians, writers, teachers and motivational speakers who provide it.

But creating content and getting people to pay for it is not easy, especially if those content creators don’t have the backing of a label or publishing house behind them.

But Franklin’s Andrew McGarry is banking on the fact he can get people to pay for desirable content through his website and mobile app MyPro.

MyPro, available in app stores, allows users to establish an account and subscription channel at no cost. Users then use their computers or mobile device to upload to their channel for others to access at a rate they determine.

“In most instances you’re giving your content away,” McGarry says. “What we’ve done over the last seven or eight years with Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter is we’ve made about four or five companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

“They’ve built this off the backbone of content, whether it’s 140 characters or whether it’s a story that a mom posts on Facebook with pictures, or a six-second video on Snapchat. For the most part the companies that you’re posting the content to own your content.”

McGarry says with MyPro, channel owners maintain complete ownership of the content they upload, whether it is music, movies or motivational videos. They then split the gross revenue generated from all content sales with MyPro, retaining 45-70 percent themselves. Users are also provided with real time analytics detailing sales, earnings and user activity.

“We’re going to give people a really, really special place to bring their lives and their stories and their intellect and their creativity to one place,” he says.

McGarry

“If you want to share a picture for free you can. If you want to share comments and posts you can. But if you want to create a video channel that you set your own price to, you can do that.

“You can immediately start to monetize your life. Instead of giving your intellect away in hopes of driving them somewhere else, whether it be your website or a physical location, you now have the ability to do it all from one place and monetize that place.”

Eventually, McGarry says MyPro will allow users to earn 50 percent of all ad revenue generated from their channel.

Current users providing content include Olympic gold medalists Scott Hamilton and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, No. 1 ranked LPGA woman’s golfer Lydia Ko, Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond, local guitarist and songwriter Shawn Tubbs, Grammy winner Israel Houghton, and pitching and quarterback coach Tom House.

“It’s been a learning process on so many levels,” McGarry says. “Understanding the human dynamic of how a superstar or how their team operates when it comes to their brand, and what they’re willing to lend their brand to.

“In so many ways they themselves have added so much value to Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. I’ve said for years that if the top 1,000 people removed their content from social media, those companies would plummet.”

McGarry got the idea in 2012.

Born and raised in Michigan, the married father of four had moved near Knoxville in 2011, and then, to Franklin to work with D1 Sports. He began to think about how he could reach a wider audience with his basketball training skills, and drew upon his experiences developing Mid-Michigan Values, a coupon-drive site similar to what Groupon would become.

“I began to really put together the DNA of what it would look like to create this platform for myself,” he says. “After a couple weeks I was mowing my lawn and basically God just said, ‘Don’t make this about you, make it about everybody else in the world.”

What started as a music-and-sports entity now has 20,000K account holders.

And for the people who are pessimistic about people paying for content, McGarry agrees. But it’s all about the numbers.

“A lot of people won’t pay for your content, but there are enough that will that it will make sense for you to do it and not keep giving it away for free,” he says.