Influencers Are the Retailers of the 2020s

Creators will be the new big-box retailers. Your favorite YouTuber or TikToker might become your go-to store for everything from gadgets to groceries.

Influencers, now a slowly fading cliché in the Internet’s tableau vivant, found success articulating the cult of personality, and marketing themselves as direct-to-consumer-goods. The shift away from this algorithmic surrender can be traced to the macro and micro “creator economies” spawned by the likes of Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans and even Cameo... See more

And let’s see what happens over the next decade as Instagram builds out its commerce operation. Perhaps we’ll all be stores someday. (Whatever that means.)