#creator-economy

#creator-economy

Don't get me wrong; the people who launched those 53 channels are surely talented creators who deliver clever or entertaining content-I subscribed for some reason, after all. But at this point, I couldn't tell you what most of them are truly about because there's nothing there to draw me back. I don't know who the creators are, and I don't return to their channels, because they're not building worlds I want to be part of. They're just...posting.

It's an efficient way to get information, and it lives in a space that combines many information sources. Social feeds are places where audiences can get updates about the many facets of their life - community events, road closures, upcoming local issues, updates from friends and family, advice for working more efficiently - in one place, making it especially ripe to soak in new information.

In 2021, two people you've probably never heard of- FaZe Rug and Adin Ross- faced off in a one-on-one basketball game at a Los Angeles gym. Winner gets $25,000. Sam Gilbert led a two-person team that streamed it live on YouTube from a single iPhone. The players weren't professional athletes, and it was, Gilbert says, "a very below average basketball game." Still, nearly 80,000 people tuned in live, most of them under 34 years old.

Facing a job market that had shed thousands of newsroom positions and a landscape where one-third of working journalists now identify as "creator journalists," academia will have no choice but to pivot - or risk losing its relevance. The journalism curriculum of the future won't just teach students how to report the news; it will teach them how to be their own newsroom: part reporter, part product manager, part audience strategist and part small business owner.

Latin America's digital creator economy is expanding fast, yet many creators in the region still feel invisible in the global content market. While the influencer industry is projected to reach $21.1 billion by 2025, much of that momentum continues to benefit creators in North America and Europe, leaving equally talented voices across Latin America competing for limited opportunities. For thousands of Latin American women who have built loyal, engaged communities, the gap between effort and reward has become especially discouraging.

LinkedIn just made a decision that's about to destroy most creators' reach. The platform decided faceless education is dead. That means generic business advice gets buried. Safe content gets ignored. Yet most people keep posting like nothing changed. When I visited LinkedIn's New York headquarters in September they told me something that should have been obvious. People don't come to LinkedIn for Wikipedia. They come for connections with real humans who happen to know useful things. The algorithm now reflects this reality.

For years, audience research such as Next Gen News has shown that news consumers seek affinity and trust from individuals, not institutions. Audience members want to follow faces, not mastheads. News publishers who think that offering salary, benefits, and a byline is incentive enough for a journalist to bring their own audience to the publisher are fooling themselves. The creators news consumers follow on YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and Ghost offer personality, affinity, and transparency.

It may seem like publishers are " pivoting to video " all over again, with news outlets like Time, CNN, The New York Times adding more vertical video to their sites and apps in the last few months. But it's different this time around. The big push into video production 10 years ago was centered on distribution to social media platforms, following Facebook's shift to prioritizing video content.

MrBeast is building out a platform to match creators and marketers, the CEO of the top YouTuber's company said at The New York Times' DealBook Summit on Wednesday. Jeffrey Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, said the company was "building a two-sided marketplace in a global creator platform, matching creators with Fortune 1,000 marketers who want to be able to access the creator influencer economy in an efficient way to be able to build demand for their products and services."

Radisson Hotels & Resorts launched Creator Hub, a program for creators with 1,00030,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok. Participants earn hotel stays, VIP Radisson Rewards, and more in exchange for content. Travel and hospitality remain hot for creator programs, with TikTok even launching an initiative to help hotels drive bookings through creators. Want more creator economy news, trends, and insights? Sign up for my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn, Threads, and Instagram.

He will represent digital creators and podcasters, while also helping drive digital strategies for CAA clients across its film, music, television and sports divisions. Goodfried co-created LonelyGirl15, the pioneering Internet sensation, and co-founded EQAL, a digital content studio for consumer brands and artists like Jennifer Lopez, Bethany Frankel and Lauren Conrad. After selling EQAL in 2013, Goodfried joined UTA as an agent in its digital media department, in 2020 joined up with TikTok and social media star Charli D'Amelio, before launching DamGood Management in 2023.

In a post on X on Wednesday, the 27-year-old creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, told his 33.4 million followers that he hasn't been fully satisfied with the quality of his latest videos. "After some reflection, I just want to say I think some of our newer youtube videos haven't been as good as I wanted. I apologize," MrBeast wrote. "Ya boy is going to go into ultra grind mode and make the greatest content of my life in 2026. Promise," he added.

"The popularity of YouTube podcasts among conservatives is driving a boom in small businesses tailoring ads to their millions of listeners, paying hosts like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens to read out promotions in the hope that fans will place orders. The phenomenon has enriched both the hosts and YouTube, supporting further growth of the businesses using ideology to sell."

But what sets "Two Sleepy People" apart is that it was funded and produced entirely by digital creators. The Austin-based creator collective Creator Camp was established in 2021 as a way to disrupt Hollywood by giving creators the funding, tools and distribution they need to expand beyond social media. And Ryan's drifting, cerebral romantic comedy is Camp Studio's first bet out of its three-feature theatrical deal with Attend Theatrical Marketplace.

My first job out of college was at Microsoft, where I worked as a program manager and product manager from 2018 to 2023. In January 2023, I left my Big Tech job to work for a creator commerce platform. There, I developed an AI product, which led to me landing a senior AI role at Microsoft in July 2024. In the current job market, AI feels like the safest domain to be an expert in.

The creator economy has spent the last decade quietly normalizing one assumption: if a platform enables you to earn, the platform deserves a percentage of what you make. Subscription fees, digital product marketplaces and course platforms all typically operate on take rates, turning creator revenue into shared revenue, often heavily shared. Tyler Denk, the CEO and co-founder of Beehiiv, believes that assumption is overdue for a reset. And his company's latest product expansion is designed around challenging it.

Key Stat: 32% of US and UK consumers say AI is negatively disrupting the creator economy, up from 18% in 2023, according to July 2025 data from Billion Dollar Boy. Beyond this chart: Gen Z's AI tolerance depends on the use case. Some 54% prefer no AI involvement in creative work, but only 13% feel this way about shopping, according to an August 2025 Goldman Sachs survey.

"Now where we're moving is actually a blend of creativity, because now it's a creator economy of authenticity that's coming out," she said on an Inc. panel for National Entrepreneurship Month (watch the session below). "Being able to tell stories like we did previously in the broadcast generation of ads, and then layering in the ability to actually measure that with data."