Can the creator economy stay afloat amid the AI ​​deluge?

Online creators and their business models have been on our minds this week after popular YouTuber MrBeast announced that his company is buying fintech startup Step, followed by Hollywood studios sending a series of cease and desist letters to ByteDance over the launch of its new video generation model Seedance 2.0.

These seemingly incoherent headlines point to a media landscape in the midst of transformative change, as popular YouTubers look to diversify their business models, with the threat and promise of increasingly powerful generative AI tools on the horizon.

In the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosek, Rebecca Bellan, and I discuss what’s next for the creator economy, and whether there will be any room for the next generation of creators to excel.

“What is the next saturation point?” Kirsten asked. “Not all of these people can go out and sell products. Will there simply be fewer successful creators? Or will something else happen, technologically speaking, or a different way that allows them to find an audience to make money?”

You can read a preview of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, below.

Anthony: [The news] Our colleague Lauren led this great article about the business model for content creators in general, meaning they don’t rely solely on ad revenue anymore. I think it’s still a very large part of their business, but she’s broken down a number of the most popular YouTubers and seen each one of them expanding — usually into e-commerce, but also into other revenue streams.

Mr. Best, for example, already has this type of food product, including chocolate, generating hundreds of millions of dollars and was already profitable for him in 2024, while his media company was losing money. It was all too wild for me.

Kirsten: If Mr. Best can’t make a profit with his media company, who can? To me, that was an amazing statistic.

I’m not surprised that the whole ad revenue game isn’t necessarily working out for creators and influencers because it’s just reached a saturation point. I guess my big question is, what is the next saturation point? Not all of these people can go out and sell products. So, is the number of successful creatives getting smaller? Or will something else happen, technologically speaking, or a different way that will allow them to find an audience to make money?

Rebecca: It’s interesting, there’s a lot of ways you can think about what else could happen, right? Maybe they will create digital twins of themselves and put their digital twins in a bunch of different situations that can make them [other kinds of] money.

But again, coming back to this it’s no surprise, these people are now celebrities, right? Someone told me on the phone recently that there are many [the] The younger generation doesn’t know our celebrities, they know TikTok celebrities. We’ve seen celebrities for years selling products and making money from them, right? I used to watch Rachel [Ray]She was a famous chef and sold her own olive oil, or olive oil.

We slow down projects [Equity] Sometime last year. They have a fund for creatives and basically what they do is they’ve raised a venture capital fund to basically support creatives in their work, if they have a niche following, maybe they’re really interested in woodworking and here’s their collection of chisels, I don’t know.

I think it’s an interesting path forward and something we’re seeing as journalists: how we’re also trying to be creative and create a brand for ourselves so we can diversify our revenue. It sounds terrible to say it out loud like that.

Anthony: I’m smiling, but it’s the smile of someone whose soul is slowly turning to ash inside.

So we took a break from talking about AI, but I’ll obligatorily bring AI back into the conversation. Obviously one of the other related developments over the last week or so is that ByteDance, the Chinese company that launched TikTok and is still an investor — we won’t get into all of that — has launched a new version of its model, Seedance 2.0, which at least initially was primarily only available to Chinese users.

But you’re starting to see people posting videos made with Seedance, including this viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. That prompted this public conversation about: Is Hollywood doomed? More specifically, a group of Hollywood studios, including Netflix, are sending letters to ByteDance saying: “You can’t do this, you allow all users to create videos using all our IP addresses, all our movie stars.” For two days, there was no response at all from ByteDance, but then they said: “Sorry, sorry, sorry, for some reason we launched this without any real guardrails, but we will do better in the future.”

Kirsten: So the timing of this is absolutely perfect because I’m now editing a story Rebecca wrote. It has nothing to do with Seedance, but it has to do with artificial intelligence and filmmaking. So I’ll give future kudos to Rebecca for being so timely about that. Rebecca, I know you have a lot to say about this, besides, Hollywood is upset. Is it more complicated than that?

Rebecca: Yes, of course. I mean, relating this to creators, I think a lot of people are going to be using these tools to produce all kinds of content and we’re going to be completely inundated. That would be intense.

But when we talk about that, whether it’s creating films or ads or just content in general with AI video tools, I think there’s this tension between one, that’s going to lead to a lot of low effort versus two, and it can also democratize access for a lot of people who don’t have the money or the budgets or the teams to share a lot of the stories that they want to tell.

Also, if you’re a small business and you want to do a little shampoo ad – just to be aware of it, because there’s a shampoo ad that’s going viral – or you sell coffee and you want to do a little ad for it, [this] It can give you the tools to do this. Is this a bad thing? Isn’t this a bad thing? Do we need more content in the world? There are a few paths to walk.

Kirsten: Is this a bad thing, Anthony?

Anthony: As far as the creative side of it, my general feeling is that [that] The response to a lot of this is kind of neglect – frankly, a lot of it He is slop, and I think this will continue to be the case – this will be the assessment of authenticity. Therefore, there is an opportunity for these great creators not to get attached to the idea of ​​“I have a digital twin of myself,” but [instead,] “No, I’m the real Mr. Beast, not the digital simulation walking around.”

And I think this also shows – of course, every social network has its ups and downs, but OpenAI’s Sora, from what I understand, went up quite a bit initially and then has been struggling to retain users more recently, because there’s a certain void in the experience when you feel like there’s no real human being on the other side.

But I also think this will make the scene more difficult, both for established creators to monetize […] And then I think it’s going to be especially hard for new content creators because there’s going to be a lot of stuff. Trying to actually hack it would become very difficult.