The number of followers on social networks has never been greater, say creator economy leaders

As social media increasingly relies on algorithmic feeds, creators find themselves in a new normal: Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it.

“I think 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so follows completely stopped mattering,” Amber Venz Box, CEO of LTK, told TechCrunch.

This isn’t news to creators – Patreon CEO Jack Conte has been vocal about it I hit this drum for years – but throughout the year, the industry as a whole has responded to this phenomenon in different ways, from influencers to streamers.

According to executives TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to leverage and cultivate their relationships with their followers — some acting as a balm against AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves.

Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. The business model depends entirely on the public’s trust in individual creators. Given concerns about the fragmentation of the creator-audience relationship, this could pose an existential threat to the company.

But a study commissioned by Northwestern University found that trust in creators grew 21% year over year, which was a pleasant surprise for Box.

“If you asked me at the start of 2025, ‘Hey, is trust in creators going to increase or decrease?’ I probably would have answered negatively, because people understand it’s an industry – they understand how it works,” she said. “But in reality, AI has pushed people to trust real humans who they know have real experiences.”

What Box means is that consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from creators they know and trust. According to the study, 97% of CMOs intend to increase their influencer marketing budgets in the new year.

This does not mean that it is easy to assume these relationships. LTK’s creators, who rely on revenue from their affiliates, are betting that this AI-driven skepticism will push people toward more direct relationships through paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other types of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short film makers, the strategy for harnessing their audience may be more like growth hacking.

Clipping armies of teenagers

As Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, says: “In a world driven by AI and algorithms, where people are trusting another human being more in this micro-atomization of attention, how do you do marketing when you kind of can’t control that?

According to Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a financial services company for creators, creators have a new secret weapon: armies of teenagers on Discord whom creators pay to make clips of their content, which these same teenagers publish en masse on algorithmic platforms.

“This has been going on for a while,” Wei said. “Drake does it. Many of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have done it – Kai Cénat [a top Twitch streamer] did it – with millions of impressions… If it’s determined by an algorithm, the clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that only has really good clips.

Wei believes clipping will become even more popular this year, as it is a reaction to this fragmentation of relationships on social media. Even the biggest creators struggle to reach their fans directly, which is why they turn to clipping. While it’s certainly easier to go viral on these algorithmic feeds if you have a ton of followers, you don’t need a history on a platform for it to decide that your video should be distributed more widely. So, if these “clippers” post a short clip from certain creators’ feeds, they can earn money based on the number of views of the video.

“Clipping feels like an evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, which produces content for young audiences, told TechCrunch. “It’s become a race between many creators to try to take this content and put it out there everywhere, almost competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP.”

Reed Duchscher – founding CEO of Night, the talent management company that represents Kai Cenat and other top creators – masterfully coaches creators in maximizing their virality. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the fast-paced, snappy style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber to a empire. He’s also behind Kai Cenat’s slicing strategy, although Duchscher isn’t as excited about his wider potential as Wei.

“Cutting is important if you’re a creator, because you need to flood the area with content, and it’s a good way to get your face out there,” Duchscher told TechCrunch. “It’s also very difficult to scale because there are only a limited number of clippers on the Internet, so spending large media budgets… there’s just a lot of complications.”

Maybe slicing is only working now because the technique hasn’t yet become so widespread that it’s considered spam.

“The creator wins because they put out more content,” Wei said. “The Clippers win because now this army of teenagers gets paid. Everybody wins, except if you go all the way, we just get lots and lots of slop.”

The more niche the better

The prevalence of slop on social media has become enough of a threat that Merriam-Webster has called slope It’s the word of the year.

“More than 94 percent of people say social media is no longer social, and more than half of them spend time elsewhere in smaller, niche communities that they know are real and can talk and interact with,” Box said, pointing to platforms like Strava, LinkedIn and Substack.

As the relationship between a creator and their audience becomes more difficult to maintain, Duchscher predicts that creators with more specific niches will succeed – he thinks “macro creators” like MrBeast, PewDiePie or Charli D’Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, will become even harder to imitate.

Referring to success stories like Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, who have millions of followers but aren’t necessarily popular, Duchscher adds: “Algorithms have become so good at giving us exactly the content we want. It’s much harder for a creator to get started in each niche algorithm.

Atkins agrees, saying the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. “The creator economy is usually seen through the lens of entertainment. I think that’s a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a bit like thinking about the Internet or AI: it’s going to affect everything.”

Atkins Mentions Gardening Designer’s Brand Epic Gardening as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a real, tangible presence in the gardening world.

“Epic Gardening bought the third largest seed company in the United States, so it is now the third largest seed company. [owner]as a content creator,” he said.

Although the creator economy is evolving, it is a resilient industry – accustomed to being guided by the whims of the algorithm and persisting for decades, even though the uninitiated may see it as a whole new field.

Creators “literally impact everything,” Atkins said. “I bet you there is a designer who is an expert in mixing cement for skyscrapers.”