#creator-economy

#creator-economy

At $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, celebrities are expected to maintain their monopoly on Big Game commercials this year, keeping influencers and creators in the wing for social and experiential campaigns. "It's just viewership demographics. You cast a really wide net of people watching it, and you want as many people as possible to recognize the person you're putting on the screen," said Jerry Hoak, chief creative officer at The Martin Agency.

Even more influencers than usual are flocking to Dubai this weekend for the 1 Billion Followers Summit that will take over the city's financial district, the Museum of the Future, and government hub Emirates Towers. Touted as the world's largest gathering for content creators, the three-day event kicked off Friday with 30,000 attendees expected - including YouTuber MrBeast, Republican figurehead Lara Trump, and Dubai resident and former soccer star Rio Ferdinand.

At the start of the year, we asked 11 experts to share their social media predictions for 2025. They pointed to big shifts - world-building, private communities, AI in everything and everywhere, LinkedIn's rise, and a creator economy moving toward more sustainable businesses. Now that the year is behind us, it's a good moment to pause and check the tape. Some predictions held up almost perfectly. Others played out more slowly or looked different than expected.

The world's largest tech showcase does not come without theatrics. Innovations and gadgets like a lollipop that sings to you as you consume it, a laundry-folding robot, and a "smart" LEGO brick have stolen the spotlight so far at CES 2026. But underscoring this year's programming is a strong focus on an industry that relies on a similar theatrical flair: entertainment.

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed Scalable, a newly launched, female-led media company dedicated to covering one of the fastest-growing sectors in media and technology: the creator economy. The agency will work with Scalable across opportunities in media, partnerships, live events, and brand extensions as they continue to expand their footprint. Scalable is founded by longtime collaborators Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg, who have chronicled the creator economy, social media, and the broader tech landscape for more than a decade,

Across X and other social channels, creators have begun posting screenshots and testimonials about sharply higher payouts tied to the most recent revenue‑share distribution. Analyzing the screenshots and reports, it's evident that creators are seeing two to three times their previous checks, with some describing the new numbers as "the first time X feels like a real income stream" instead of pocket change.

At the time, I wrote that his reply to an X user, "Ok, let's do it," with a tag to X Head of Product Nikita Bier and a warning to "rigorously enforce no gaming of the system," felt like a line in the sand for how serious X was about paying people who keep its feeds alive. Now, early 2026 payout reports suggest that X is starting to follow through.

One of the biggest shifts in 2025 was how quickly everyday moments turned into shared cultural moments.

He argues that the algorithms have grown too sophisticated at sorting viewers into their own individual silos. If a viewer seeks out automotive content, they receive more automotive content. If they like health and beauty, their feed is largely restricted to health and beauty. The days of a single creator punching through to hundreds of millions of viewers are effectively over. Donaldson's rise required a specific historical moment, one where recommendation engines still permitted the emergence of mass figures. That window has closed.

Adler, who has also conducted research on the closely watched Otis Report on the Creative Economy, ranked metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) by creators in the top 10% in terms of Instagram followers, using data from an influencer marketing firm. The top two by total creator count were LA (over 12,000) and New York (nearly 11,000), followed by Miami (about 6,000).

The creator economy gives, and it can also take - suddenly. That's one lesson behind the abrupt exodus of talent from the esports and marketing company FaZe Clan last week. Building a business led by an influencer or celebrity can make you a boatload of money. Just ask the teams behind Kim Kardashian's Skims or George Clooney's Casamigos tequila, which both crossed $1 billion in value.

OpenAI's launch of Sora 2 sent shockwaves through the social media economy. AI slop was already rampant, and now there was a more realistic form of video with even narrower tailoring. Then came the lifelike images of Google's Nano Banana. How will creators fare in the age of AI? Lightspeed Ventures partner Michael Mignano takes a more extreme view: that it signals the "end of the creator." On "Sourcery," Mignano described a future of social media where content is generated instantaneously.

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.

Creators and the creator economy aren't going anywhere, given the market has truly embraced just how important they are to the industry, and it's no longer a nice-to-have. Which is why Digiday has charted how the creator economy is expected to expand in 2026, including revenue, the types of creators brands are planning to work with, along with what platforms will be key for that content.