As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal. Just because you post something does not mean your followers will see it. LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch that 2025 was the year the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely.
This is not news to creators. Patreon CEO Jack Conte has discussed this for years. Throughout the year, the industry at large has reacted to this phenomenon in different ways, from influencers to streamers. According to executives spoken to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers. Some see creators as an antidote to AI-generated content, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of content themselves.
Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. This business model only works if people retain trust in individual creators. It could be an existential threat if the relationship between creators and their audiences continues to fragment.
However, through a study commissioned from Northwestern University, LTK found that trust in creators increased twenty-one percent year-over-year, which was a pleasant surprise to Box. She stated that if asked at the beginning of 2025 whether trust would go up or down, she would have probably said down, as people understand it is an industry. But actually, AI pushed people to rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.
By that, Box means consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the study, ninety-seven percent of chief marketing officers intend to grow influencer marketing budgets in the new year.
That does not mean 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. For other creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, the strategy for owning their audience can more closely resemble growth hacking.
As Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, put it, in a world driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust another human being more, how do you market when you sort of cannot control that?
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. Wei explained that this has been going on for a bit, with top streamers utilizing the method to hit millions of impressions. If distribution is algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.
Wei thinks clipping will become even more popular, as it is a reaction to fragmentation in social media relationships. Even the biggest creators find it hard to reach their fans directly. While going viral is easier with followers, you do not need a track-record on a platform for it to decide your video should be distributed broadly. So, if these clippers post a short highlight from a creator’s stream, they can earn money based on views.
Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, told TechCrunch that clipping feels like an evolution of meme accounts. It has become a race among creators to push content out far and wide, competing to see who can get the most views on the same intellectual property.
Reed Duchscher, founding CEO of the talent management company Night, coaches creators on maximizing virality. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber to an empire. He is also behind streamer Kai Cenat’s clipping strategy, though Duchscher is not as enthusiastic about its broader potential as Wei.
Duchscher stated that clipping is important for creators to flood the zone with content and get their face out there. However, it is very hard to get to scale because there are only so many clippers, and spending large media budgets on it comes with complications. Perhaps clipping only works now because the technique has not yet become so prevalent that it is seen as spam.
Wei said the creator wins by getting more content out, and the clippers win by getting paid. Everybody wins, except that if you take this to its logical conclusion, we just get lots and lots of low-quality content.
The prevalence of this low-quality content on social media has become enough of a threat that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year.
Box pointed out that over ninety-four percent of people say social media is no longer social, and over half are rotating time into smaller niche communities they know are real, on platforms like Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack.
As the relationship between a creator and their audience becomes more difficult to maintain, Duchscher predicts creators with more specific niches will succeed. He thinks macro creators with hundreds of millions of followers will become even harder to emulate. Pointing to success stories with millions of followers but not necessarily mass appeal, Duchscher adds that algorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want, making it harder for a creator to break out into every niche.
Atkins agrees, arguing the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. Thinking about the creator economy is like thinking about the internet or AI; it is going to affect everything. He mentions the gardening creator brand Epic Gardening as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a tangible presence, as the creator bought the third largest seed company in the United States.
Though the creator economy is in flux, it is a resilient industry accustomed to navigating the whims of the algorithm, persisting for decades. Creators are literally impacting everything, Atkins said. He bets there is a creator who is an expert at cement mixing for skyscrapers.