The Relentless, Inevitable March of the Creator Economy

In the grand media tradition of windowing, all my writing is posted first on my Substack, The Mediator. This essay was posted on The Mediator one week ago.

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Imagine that from the time you were young, you worked hard to join a very exclusive, powerful club. Eventually, you made it, cementing your steadfast, lifelong belief that you, among very few, belonged there.

Then, another club opened next door. It let everyone in. It felt like a mockery of what you had achieved. But it kept growing, attracting more members, siphoning off more attention. Young people fantasized about joining that club, not yours. Your club now seemed stodgy and out of step. It would challenge some of your fundamental beliefs about yourself.

This describes how many in traditional media feel about so-called “creators.” They regard them as “less than,” crassly commercial, and certainly not artists. A recent dust up about The Hollywood Reporter christening a new Creator A-List is illustrative. As Justine Bateman tweeted at the time, this is a list “…of infomercial salespeople. It’s not Hollywood.”

Whatever one’s value judgments — whether the creator economy is a positive, democratizing force, or a bastardization of art and full of self-promotional hucksters, or something in between — numbers don’t lie. It is growing rapidly at the expense of traditional media and, as I explain below, will inevitably continue to do so.

Tl;dr:

• Let’s subdivide the media and entertainment (M&E) market into the corporate media economy and the creator media economy. Since M&E overall isn’t growing much, the relationship between the two is mostly zero-sum.
• Based on a bottoms-up analysis of the largest creator media outlets, I estimate that the creator media economy generated close to $250 billion in revenue last year, roughly 10% of the global M&E market. It is growing far faster and over the last four years accounted for almost half of global M&E growth. Conservatively, I estimate it will exceed $600 billion and 20% of global M&E revenue by 2030.
• There are very powerful technological, cultural, demographic and economic reasons it could grow even faster than this:
• 1) Even absent GenAI, the volume of creator content should grow much faster than corporate media as creation gets ever more accessible;
• 2) GenAI will trigger a tsunami of creator content across media. Just as bits became the atomic unit to distribute information goods, tokens are becoming an atomic unit for the creation of information goods;
• 3) The quality distinction between corporate media content and the best creator content will continue to narrow;
• 4) Falling trust in institutions and rising demand for authenticity structurally favor creators;
• 5) Monoculture is in decline as consumers atomize into microcultures, disadvantaging the traditional media business model;
• 6) Demographics are destiny, and younger demos spend much more time with creator content; and
• 7) The current monetization gap for the creator media economy (the delta between time share and dollar share) should narrow over time.
• All this is mixed news for creators and creatives. For traditional media, there are only two choices: figure out how to participate in the creator economy or accept a perpetually diminishing business.