{"id":379861,"date":"2025-12-30T06:49:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T06:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/379861\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T06:49:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T06:49:06","slug":"social-media-follower-counts-have-never-mattered-less-creator-economy-execs-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/379861\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say"},"content":{"rendered":"

As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal<\/a>: Just because you post something doesn\u2019t mean your followers will see it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,\u201d LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t news to creators \u2013 Patreon CEO Jack Conte has ardently banged this drum<\/a> for years \u2013 but throughout the year, the industry at large has reacted to this phenomenon in different ways, from the influencers to the streamers.<\/p>\n

According to the executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers \u2013 some acting as a salve to AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves.<\/p>\n

Box\u2019s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. The business model depends entirely on audiences retaining trust in individual creators. Given concerns about fragmentation in the creator-audience relationship, this could pose an existential threat to the company.<\/p>\n

But a study commissioned from Northwestern University found that trust in creators<\/a> increased 21% year-over-year, which was a pleasant surprise to Box.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you asked me at the beginning of 2025, \u2018Hey, is trust in creators going to go up or down?\u2019 I would have probably said down, because people understand it\u2019s an industry \u2013 they understand how it\u2019s working,\u201d she said. \u201cBut actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

By that, Box means that consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the study, 97% of chief marketing officers intend to grow influencer marketing budgets in the new year.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean that owning these relationships is straightforward. LTK creators, who rely on affiliate income, are betting this AI-induced skepticism will drive people toward more direct relationships through paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other kinds of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, the strategy for owning their audience can more closely resemble growth hacking.<\/p>\n

Teenage clipping armies<\/p>\n

As Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, put it, \u201cIn a world that\u2019s driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust another human being more in this micro atomization of attention, how do you market when you sort of can\u2019t control that?\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Eric Wei, cofounder of Karat Financial, a financial services company for creators, creators have a new secret weapon: armies of teenagers on Discord who creators pay to make clips of their content, which those same teenagers post en masse on algorithmic platforms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s been going on for a bit,\u201d Wei explained. \u201cDrake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it \u2013 Kai Cenat<\/a> [a top Twitch streamer] has done it \u2013 hitting millions of impressions\u2026 If it\u2019s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wei thinks that clipping is going to become even more popular this year, since it\u2019s a reaction to this fragmentation in social media relationships. Even the biggest creators are finding it hard to reach their fans directly, which is why they turn to clipping. While going viral on these algorithmic feeds is certainly easier if you have a ton of followers, you don\u2019t need any track-record on a platform for it to decide that your video should be distributed more broadly. So, if these \u201cclippers\u201d post a short highlight from certain creators\u2019 streams, they can earn money based on how many views the video gets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cClipping feels like an evolution of meme accounts,\u201d Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, which produces content for young audiences, told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s become a race among many creators to try and take this content and push it out far and wide, almost competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reed Duchscher \u2013 founding CEO of Night, the talent management company that represents Kai Cenat and other top creators \u2013 masterfully coaches creators through maximizing their virality. As MrBeast\u2019s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber to an empire<\/a>. He\u2019s also behind Kai Cenat\u2019s clipping strategy, though Duchscher isn\u2019t quite as enthusiastic about its broader potential as Wei.<\/p>\n

\u201cClipping is important if you\u2019re a creator, because you do need to flood the zone with content, and it\u2019s a good way to get your face out there,\u201d Duchscher told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s also very hard to get to scale, because there\u2019s only so many clippers on the internet, so to spend large media budgets\u2026 there\u2019s just a lot of complications.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps clipping only works now because the technique has not yet become so prevalent that it\u2019s seen as spam.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe creator wins because they get more of their content out,\u201d Wei said. \u201cThe clippers win because now this army of teenagers are getting paid. Everybody wins, except that if you take this to its logical conclusion, we just get lots and lots of slop.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more niche, the better<\/p>\n

The prevalence of slop on social media has become enough of a threat that Merriam-Webster called slop<\/a> its word of the year.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver 94% of people are saying that social media is no longer social, and over half of them are rotating time elsewhere into smaller niche communities that they know are real and that they can talk to and interact with,\u201d Box said, pointing to platforms like Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the relationship between a creator and their audience becomes more difficult to maintain, Duchscher predicts that creators with more specific niches will succeed \u2013 he thinks that \u201cmacro creators\u201d like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D\u2019Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, will become even harder to emulate.<\/p>\n

Pointing to success stories like like Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, who have millions of followers but not necessarily mass appeal, Duchscher adds, \u201cAlgorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want. It\u2019s much harder for a creator to break out into every niche algorithm.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Atkins agrees, arguing that the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. \u201cThe creator economy generally is viewed through this lens of entertainment. I think that\u2019s a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a little bit like thinking about the internet or AI \u2013 it\u2019s going to affect everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Atkins mentions the gardening creator brand Epic Gardening<\/a> as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a real, tangible presence in the world of gardening.<\/p>\n

\u201cEpic Gardening bought the third largest seed company in the United States, so now he\u2019s the third largest seed company [owner], as a content creator,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Though the creator economy is in flux, it\u2019s a resilient industry \u2013 one that\u2019s accustomed to navigating the whims of the algorithm, persisting onward for decades, even if the uninitiated may see it as a brand new realm.<\/p>\n

Creators are \u201cliterally impacting everything,\u201d Atkins said. \u201cI bet you there\u2019s a creator who\u2019s an expert at cement mixing for skyscrapers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal: Just because you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379862,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,204548,204549,204550,204551,204552,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-379861","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-clipping","14":"tag-dhar-mann","15":"tag-eric-wei","16":"tag-karat-financial","17":"tag-reed-dushsher","18":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}