One day we'll all be creators

“Niche creator partnerships will thrive in 2025 as brands prioritize quality, storytelling, and shared values over follower counts,” said Julia Baker, senior executive producer at Stagwell agency Instrument.

Once you know the tricks, it's hard to scroll through TikTok and not see the attempts to grab your attention and play nice with the algorithm. Rather than talking to each other, users trying to win the TikTok game are talking to reflections of each other, miming human connection so lines of code will reward them with more attention.

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

“[Being a creator] is something that anybody can do, and they’re watching everyday people start creating content and a massive following and make pretty sizable income — and then get that star power,” Stevens said.

America has fallen out of love with brands and inlove with people. This is evident in every corner of American life — from politics and business to technology and media. People are the new brands.

Two summers ago meolah posted a video prophesying saying she hoped the next generation of influencers would be regular people. Quickly, the back half of her video where she states, “I’m trying to see what a bitch in Wisconsin is doing right now” became a viral audio.

Creators are no longer just influencers, reality TV stars, adult entertainers or #fitspo evangelists; they’re your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your local bartender and that one guy at Trader Joe’s who always bags your groceries just right. It is a preview of what’s to come.

First, some numbers: Gen Z spends an average of 109 days per year looking at a screen. Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent consuming information, up from 40% in 1980.

one in three U.S. teens under the age of 18 have been approached by brands to advertise their products, according to social commerce platform Whop’s survey of teens aged 12 to 18 in the country. Two in five (42%) of U.S. teens are also actively earning money online, averaging some $717 in earnings in the last year, the study found. Additionally, ne... See more