As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal: Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it.
“I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.
This isn’t news to creators – Patreon CEO Jack Conte has ardently banged this drum for years – but throughout the year, the industry at large has reacted to this phenomenon in different ways, from the influencers to the streamers.
According to the executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers – some acting as a salve to 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 audiences retaining trust in individual creators. Given concerns about fragmentation in the creator-audience relationship, this could pose an existential threat to the company.
But a study commissioned from Northwestern University found that trust in creators increased 21% year-over-year, which was a pleasant surprise to Box.
“If you asked me at the beginning of 2025, ‘Hey, is trust in creators going to go up or down?’ I would have probably said down, because people understand it’s an industry – they understand how it’s working,” she said. “But actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.”
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By that, Box means that consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the study, 97% of chief marketing officers intend to grow influencer marketing budgets in the new year.
That doesn’t mean that owning these relationships is straightforward. LTK creators, who rely on affiliate income, are betting this AI-induced skepticism will drive people toward more direct relationships through paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other kinds of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, the strategy for owning their audience can more closely resemble growth hacking.
Teenage clipping armies
As Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, put it, “In a world that’s driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust another human being more in this micro atomization of attention, how do you market when you sort of can’t control that?”
According to Eric Wei, cofounder of Karat Financial, a financial services company for creators, creators have a new secret weapon: armies of teenagers on Discord who creators pay to make clips of their content, which those same teenagers post en masse on algorithmic platforms.
“That’s been going on for a bit,” Wei explained. “Drake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it – Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] has done it – hitting millions of impressions… If it’s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips.”
Wei thinks that clipping is going to become even more popular this year, since it’s a reaction to this fragmentation in social media relationships. Even the biggest creators are finding it hard to reach their fans directly, which is why they turn to clipping. While going viral on these algorithmic feeds is certainly easier if you have a ton of followers, you don’t need any track-record on a platform for it to decide that your video should be distributed more broadly. So, if these “clippers” post a short highlight from certain creators’ streams, they can earn money based on how many views the video gets.
“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 among many creators to try and take this content and push it out far and wide, 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 through maximizing their virality. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber to an empire. He’s also behind Kai Cenat’s clipping strategy, though Duchscher isn’t quite as enthusiastic about its broader potential as Wei.
“Clipping is important if you’re a creator, because you do need to flood the zone with content, and it’s a good way to get your face out there,” Duchscher told TechCrunch. “It’s also very hard to get to scale, because there’s only so many clippers on the internet, so to spend large media budgets… there’s just a lot of complications.”
Perhaps clipping only works now because the technique has not yet become so prevalent that it’s seen as spam.
“The creator wins because they get more of their content out,” Wei said. “The clippers win because now this army of teenagers are getting paid. Everybody wins, except that if you take this to its logical conclusion, 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 called slop its word of the year.
“Over 94% of people are saying that social media is no longer social, and over half of them are rotating time elsewhere into 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, Duchscher predicts that creators with more specific niches will succeed – he thinks that “macro creators” like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D’Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, will become even harder to emulate.
Pointing to success stories like like Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, who have millions of followers but not necessarily mass appeal, Duchscher adds, “Algorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want. It’s much harder for a creator to break out into every niche algorithm.”
Atkins agrees, arguing that the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. “The creator economy generally is viewed through this lens of entertainment. I think that’s a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a little bit like thinking about the internet or AI – it’s going to affect everything.”
Atkins mentions the gardening creator brand Epic Gardening as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a real, tangible presence in the world of gardening.
“Epic Gardening bought the third largest seed company in the United States, so now he’s the third largest seed company [owner], as a content creator,” he said.
Though the creator economy is in flux, it’s a resilient industry – one that’s accustomed to navigating the whims of the algorithm, persisting onward for decades, even if the uninitiated may see it as a brand new realm.
Creators are “literally impacting everything,” Atkins said. “I bet you there’s a creator who’s an expert at cement mixing for skyscrapers.”
