Creator economy executives say follower numbers on social media have never mattered much

As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, content creators are navigating 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 followers weren’t quite as important anymore,” Amber Vins Box, CEO of LTK, told TechCrunch.

This isn’t news to creators — Patreon CEO Jack Conti has been beating this drum enthusiastically for years — but over the course of the year, the industry at large has reacted to the phenomenon in different ways, from influencers to streamers.

According to executives TechCrunch spoke with about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and grow their relationships with their followers — with some serving as a balm for AI Slope, while others are flooding the territory with a new form of Slope themselves.

Box, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on the products they recommend. The business model relies entirely on audiences maintaining trust in individual creators. Given concerns about fragmentation in the relationship between creator and audience, this could pose an existential threat to the company.

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

“If you ask me at the beginning of 2025, will trust in creators go up or down?” I would probably say that, because people understand it’s an industry, they understand how it works. “But in reality, AI has pushed people to transfer trust to real humans who they know have real life experiences.”

Box means 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 chief marketing officers plan to increase influencer marketing budgets in the new year.

This does not mean that having these relationships is simple. LTK’s creators, who rely on affiliate income, are betting that this AI-induced uncertainty will push people toward more direct relationships through paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK. For other types of creators, like streamers, video podcasters, and short film makers, the strategy of owning their audience can look a lot like growth hacking.

Teen cut armies

As Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, said, “In a world driven by artificial intelligence and algorithms, where people trust another human more with that partial distraction, how do you market when you 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 teens on Discord who the creators pay to create clips of their content, which those same teens post en masse on algorithmic platforms.

“This has been going on for some time,” Wei explained. “Drake is doing it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it.” – Kai Senat [a top Twitch streamer] It did – it reached millions of impressions… If it’s algorithmically determined, the cut suddenly makes sense, because it could come from any random account that has really good clips.

Wei believes clipping will become more popular this year, because it is a reaction to this fragmentation of relationships on social media. Even the biggest creators find it difficult to reach their fans directly, which is why they turn to cropping. While going viral on these algorithmic feeds is certainly easier if you have a large following, you don’t need any track record on the platform to decide that your video should be distributed more widely. So, if these “snippers” post a short clip from certain creators’ streams, they can earn money based on the number of views the video gets.

“Cutting feels like an evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsberg, president of QYOU Media, which produces content for young audiences, told TechCrunch. “It’s become a race between multiple creators to try to take that content and make it go viral, almost competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP address.”

Reed Dutcher — founding CEO of Night, the talent management firm that represents Kai Cenat and other top creators — masterfully coaches creatives by maximizing their exposure. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber into an empire. He’s also behind Kai Cenat’s cutting strategy, although Duchscher isn’t quite as enthusiastic about its wider potential as Wei.

“Crop is important if you’re a creator, because you need to flood the area with content, and it’s a good way to highlight your face,” Duchscher told TechCrunch. “It’s also very difficult to scale at scale, because there are so many cutting tools online, so spending big media budgets…there’s a lot of complexity.”

Clipping may only work now because the technique has not yet become so widespread that it is viewed as spam.

“The creator wins because they put out more of their own content,” Wei said. “The Clippers are winning because this army of teenagers is getting paid now. Everyone wins, except if you take it to its logical conclusion, we’re going to get lots and lots of flops.”

The more specialized, the better

The prevalence of neglect on social media has become enough of a threat to pose a threat, which Merriam-Webster has dubbed the “throwaway” of the year.

“More than 94% of people say social media is no longer social, and more than half of them are rotating time elsewhere in smaller niche communities that they know are real and that they can talk to 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, Dutcher predicts that creators with more specific niches will succeed — he believes that “macro creators” like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D’Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, will become more difficult to emulate.

Pointing to success stories like Alix Earle or the Outdoor Boys, who have millions of followers but not necessarily mass appeal, Duchscher adds: “Algorithms have become very good at giving us exactly the content we want. It’s very difficult for a creator to break into a new world.” all Specialized algorithm.”

Atkins agrees, arguing that the creator economy extends beyond mere entertainment. “The creator economy is generally viewed through this entertainment lens. I think that’s a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a bit like thinking about the internet or artificial intelligence — it’s going to impact everything.”

Atkins cites gardening innovators’ brand Epic Gardening as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a real, tangible presence in the gardening world.

“Epic Gardening purchased the third largest seed company in the United States, and is now the third largest seed company [owner]“As a content creator,” he said.

Although the creator economy is in flux, it’s a resilient industry — one that’s accustomed to dealing with the whims of the algorithm, and that continues for decades, even if newbies might see it as a whole new world.

Content creators “literally influence everything,” Atkins said. “I bet you there’s an innovator who’s an expert at mixing cement for skyscrapers.”