For years, the creator economy was treated as a useful sideshow. A scrappy, occasionally chaotic extension of social media marketing. Brands would hand a product to an influencer, approve a few posts, wait for the engagement numbers and then move on to the “proper” work of strategy, creative, media planning and publishing.
That distinction now feels painfully out of date.
Creators are no longer just distribution partners. Many of them are production studios, media owners, community managers, cultural analysts, entertainment franchises, product developers and performance marketers rolled into one. They don’t just borrow attention from audiences. They build it, nurture it and monetise it directly. In doing so, creator-led media is starting to compete with two of the most established pillars of the creative economy: agencies and publishers.
This doesn’t mean every creator is suddenly an agency, or that every agency is doomed. Nor does it mean every publisher is about to be replaced by a charismatic YouTuber with a ring light and a terrifyingly efficient editing workflow. But it does mean the centre of gravity is shifting. Brands are investing more in creator marketing because creators often sit closer to the audience than traditional intermediaries do. Audiences, particularly younger ones, are spending more time with creator-led content. Platforms are rewarding personality, specificity and community. And the money is following.
Goldman Sachs has previously estimated that the creator economy could roughly double from $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027, driven by influencer marketing spend, platform payouts and the monetisation of short-form video. The same analysis estimated around 50 million global creators, though only around 4% were “professional” creators earning more than $100,000 a year, which is a useful reminder that this is both a huge market and a brutally uneven one.
The sharper question, then, isn’t whether creators are important. That argument is over. The question is what happens when creators stop being a line item in someone else’s campaign and start becoming the campaign, the channel, the publisher and sometimes even the brand.
Why the Creator Economy Is Reshaping Media and Marketing
Oksana Gornostaeva
The creator economy is reshaping media and marketing because it collapses roles that used to sit in separate buildings, separate departments and separate invoices. A good creator understands the audience, makes the content, distributes it, reads the feedback, optimises the next idea and maintains the relationship. That’s a very different model to the traditional chain of brand, agency, media owner, production company and publisher.
In the old model, scale belonged to institutions. If a brand wanted reach, it needed access to broadcasters, print titles, outdoor media owners, search inventory, social platforms or large publishers. If it wanted cultural relevance, it briefed an agency to interpret the zeitgeist and turn that interpretation into creative work. If it wanted trust, it borrowed it from established media environments or paid for the credibility of a familiar public figure.
Creators have complicated that model because their value is not only in what they make. It’s in the continuity of the relationship they have with an audience. A creator doesn’t appear in someone’s feed as a one-off interruption. They’re part of a routine. They’re watched during lunch breaks, commutes, gym sessions, late-night scrolls and Sunday morning YouTube holes. That repeated presence gives them a kind of soft power traditional advertising often struggles to buy.
Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report argued that social video platforms, creators, user-generated content and recommendation systems are helping establish a new centre of gravity for media and entertainment. It also found that roughly half of Gen Z and millennial respondents felt a stronger personal connection to social media creators than to TV personalities or actors.
That personal connection matters. It helps explain why creator marketing has become more than a subset of influencer marketing trends. At its best, creator marketing isn’t just “person with followers holds product.” It’s a form of cultural translation. The creator understands the codes of their community, the jokes that will land, the formats that feel native, the topics that are already alive and the level of polish that will either help or hurt the message.
This is why the creator economy feels so disruptive to agencies and publishers. It’s not simply taking budget from them. It’s challenging some of their oldest assumptions. Agencies have traditionally sold strategic and creative distance: the ability to stand back, interpret the market and shape a brand’s message with professional discipline. Publishers have sold audience access and editorial authority. Creator-led businesses increasingly offer a third proposition: proximity.
They’re close to the culture because they’re inside it. They’re close to the audience because they speak to them every day. They’re close to performance because they can see almost instantly what people watch, skip, save, share, challenge or buy. That doesn’t automatically make them better than agencies or publishers, but it does make them harder to dismiss.
Why Brands Are Increasing Their Investment in Creator Marketing
Momentum Worldwide
Brands are increasing their investment in creator marketing because it sits at a useful intersection: attention, trust, content volume, cultural relevance and measurable outcomes. In a fragmented media market, that combination is difficult to find in one place.
The numbers tell their own story. IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report projected that US creator ad spend would reach $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year on year and growing nearly four times faster than the overall media industry. The same report said creator advertising had more than doubled from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024, with nearly half of creator ad buyers now considering creators a “must buy.”
In the UK, the direction of travel is similar. IAB UK reported that the UK digital advertising market reached £40.5 billion in 2025, with social media investment increasing by 21% to £11.5 billion and video advertising growing by 20% to £9.3 billion. Within social platforms, video accounted for 59% of total investment, which gives a clear sense of why creator-led video is becoming so attractive to advertisers.
That investment is not just about reach. It’s also about efficiency. Brands are under pressure to make more content, for more platforms, in more formats, at higher speed and often with tighter budgets. The traditional campaign model was built around big moments. Creator-led marketing is built around momentum. It can turn one idea into a short-form video, a behind-the-scenes post, a livestream mention, a newsletter note, a podcast read, a community discussion and a shoppable link without needing six separate production cycles.
This is one of the reasons micro and mid-tier creators have become such a major part of influencer marketing trends. They don’t always offer the biggest audience, but they can offer specificity, credibility and engagement within a clearly defined community. 84% of UK marketers planned to work with more creators over the following 12 months, with micro-influencers leading the way and performance expectations rising.
The World Federation of Advertisers has also found that 54% of multinational brand marketers planned to boost influencer marketing spend in 2025, while 60% said influencer marketing was becoming more important. That same research also shows the growing professionalisation of the space, with more brands relying on influencer agencies, social agencies and PR partners to manage relationships, contracts, disclosure and risk.
That last point is important. The rise of creator marketing doesn’t necessarily remove agencies from the equation. In many cases, it creates new demand for them. As creator partnerships become larger, longer-term and more commercially important, brands need help with strategy, negotiation, brand safety, measurement, legal compliance, creative direction and integration with wider campaigns. The creator economy might be competing with agencies, but it’s also forcing agencies to build new muscles.
The smarter brands have also realised that creators shouldn’t just be treated as media placements. When a creator is brought in at the end of a campaign, the result often feels bolted on. When they’re involved earlier, they can help shape the idea so it actually works in the environments where it’s meant to live. That’s a very different relationship. It asks brands to give up some control, but it can also make the work far more believable.
How Creators Are Taking on Roles Traditionally Filled by Agencies
Ellie Howkins
The most disruptive thing about creator-led media is not that creators are making content. It’s that some creators are now performing functions agencies have historically owned.
The first is audience insight. A good creator doesn’t need a six-week research phase to understand what their community is talking about, because the research is happening continuously. Comments, DMs, watch time, stitches, duets, saves, shares and unsubscribes all become a live focus group. That doesn’t replace robust strategy, but it does create a different kind of intelligence: immediate, behavioural and culturally embedded.
The second is creative development. Creators are often format-native in a way many brands still aren’t. They understand why a polished ad might die on TikTok, why a looser video might outperform a beautifully art-directed one, why a YouTube thumbnail is a creative asset rather than an afterthought, and why a podcast audience will tolerate a long brand read if it feels genuinely integrated. Agencies can absolutely learn those things, and many have, but creators often learn them through direct exposure rather than theory.
The third is production. Many established creators operate with professional teams: editors, producers, researchers, camera operators, strategists, community managers, agents, merch teams and commercial leads. The stereotype of the lone influencer is increasingly misleading. The most successful creator-led businesses are often small media companies with unusually visible founders.
The fourth is media distribution. This is where the model gets genuinely challenging for agencies. In traditional advertising, creative and media were often separate disciplines. The creator has both in the same body. Their face, voice, tone and audience relationship are the media channel. Their content is not simply placed into a context; it creates the context.
The fifth is performance optimisation. Creator-led campaigns can be tested, tweaked and extended in real time. Hooks can change. Cut-downs can be remade. Comments can become content. Audience objections can be answered within hours. A creator can spot when something is working and push it further without waiting for a post-campaign report.
This doesn’t mean creators are better at everything agencies do. Agencies still offer breadth, brand stewardship, cross-channel orchestration, senior strategic counsel, production scale, governance and the ability to manage complex stakeholder environments. Most creators don’t want to write a global brand architecture deck or manage a pan-European compliance review. Quite fair enough.
But the overlap is growing. A creator can now help launch a product, shape the messaging, produce the assets, distribute the campaign, host the community, capture the feedback and convert attention into sales. For some briefs, that’s not a nice addition to the agency model. It’s a direct alternative. The agency world knows this, which is why creator capability has become a serious acquisition and investment area.
That’s the real shift. Creator marketing is maturing from “Can we get someone with followers to post this?” to “How do we build creator-led systems into the way brands communicate?”
How Creator-Led Media Is Challenging Traditional Publishers
Creative Reflux
If agencies are being challenged on creativity, production and cultural insight, publishers are being challenged on attention, loyalty and distribution.
Traditional publishers used to have the advantage of habit. People bought the paper, turned on the channel, visited the homepage or subscribed to the magazine. The publication was the destination. Online platforms have weakened that relationship. Audiences now encounter media through feeds, recommendations, search, newsletters, podcasts, clips, group chats and creators. The brand on the masthead still matters, but it’s no longer always the first thing people notice.
This is especially significant because publishers aren’t only competing with creators for casual entertainment. They’re competing with them for explanation, commentary, taste, recommendation and identity. A creator who reviews films, explains politics, covers football transfers, analyses fashion, breaks down finance or curates design trends can become a publisher in all but name. They may not have a newsroom, but they have an editorial proposition: follow this person and the world will make a little more sense.
That’s a powerful offer in an overloaded information environment. Publishers have scale and institutional credibility, but they can feel distant. Creators have personality and continuity. They can make audiences feel seen. They can also make niche subjects commercially viable because they don’t need the same overheads as legacy publishing businesses.
The UK video market shows how dramatically consumption has shifted. Reuters reported from Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 that Britons watched YouTube for an average of 51 minutes a day on smartphones, tablets and PCs in 2025, while YouTube was used by 94% of UK online adults in May 2025. The same report noted that Alphabet and Meta accounted for more than half of all time spent online in the UK.
For publishers, this is both threat and opportunity. The threat is obvious: audiences are spending more time in environments where individual creators and platform-native personalities command enormous attention. The opportunity is that publishers can use the same dynamics to rebuild relevance. Broadcasters and publishers don’t need to abandon their brands, but they do need to accept that the homepage is no longer the front door for many audiences.
This is already happening in TV. Ofcom’s Media Nations report noted that YouTube has evolved into a competitor in more traditional TV-like viewing, with its advertising revenue-sharing model reducing direct content risk and giving creators a monetisation route. The report also pointed to deals such as The Sidemen’s Netflix documentary series and MrBeast’s Amazon reality competition as examples of streaming platforms tapping creator-driven fanbases.
That’s the creator economy trend publishers can’t ignore: creator-led media is no longer confined to social feeds. It’s moving into streaming, live events, books, consumer products, newsletters, podcasts, education, commerce and membership communities. In other words, it’s building publishing businesses from the audience up rather than the masthead down.
The Advantages Creator-Led Businesses Have Over Traditional Models
American Express
Creator-led businesses have several structural advantages over traditional agencies and publishers, though each comes with its own risk.
The first advantage is speed. Creators can move at the pace of culture because they don’t always need to pass through the same layers of approval. A trend emerges in the morning and can become content by lunchtime. A comment can become a script. A mistake can be corrected publicly. A new format can be tested without waiting for a quarterly planning cycle. That speed is not always elegant, and it can certainly be dangerous when creators or brands move faster than judgement allows. But in fast-moving cultural spaces, speed is a genuine competitive advantage. Traditional organisations often talk about agility. Creators are forced to practise it daily.
The second advantage is specificity. Publishers often need broad enough audiences to support advertising models at scale. Agencies often need ideas that can travel across markets, channels and stakeholders. Creators can go narrow. Very narrow. A creator can build a profitable media business around miniature painting, running shoes, vintage synthesizers, ADHD productivity, football tactics, fragrance reviews or London restaurant openings. The audience might be smaller, but the relationship can be much deeper.
The third advantage is trust through familiarity. It’s not that creators are automatically more trustworthy than institutions. Many aren’t. The creator economy has plenty of grifters, undisclosed ads, fake expertise, inflated metrics and synthetic authenticity. But audiences often feel they understand the person behind the content. They know their habits, biases, humour, taste and flaws. That familiarity can make a recommendation feel more personal than a display ad or a brand campaign.
The fourth advantage is content-market fit. Traditional media often creates content and then works to find the audience. Creators tend to develop content in public, learning from audience response as they go. Their format, tone and subject matter evolve through feedback. That can create a strong fit between what they make and what their community actually wants.
The fifth advantage is monetisation diversity. The best creator-led businesses don’t rely on one income stream. They can combine ad revenue, sponsorship, affiliate income, subscriptions, merchandise, events, licensing, courses, products, consultancy and platform payouts. Goldman Sachs noted that creators earn through brand deals, platform revenue shares, subscriptions, donations and direct payments from followers, with brand deals identified as the main revenue source in its survey data.
The sixth advantage is lower legacy cost. A creator-led media company can be built without printing presses, broadcast infrastructure, a large editorial floor or a traditional agency headcount. That doesn’t make it easy, but it can make experimentation cheaper. It also means creators can survive on audience sizes that would be commercially awkward for older models.
The seventh advantage is personality. Agencies and publishers often try to reduce dependency on any one individual because institutions are meant to last. Creator-led businesses do the opposite. They build around a recognisable human presence. That can create huge emotional value, but it also creates fragility. If the creator burns out, gets cancelled, loses interest, changes platform or simply stops being relevant, the business can wobble.
That fragility is one of the big caveats in the creator economy. Creators can be nimble, close to culture and commercially powerful, but they’re also exposed. Algorithms change. Platforms fall out of favour. Audiences move. Brand deals dry up. Personal lives become business risks. The creator economy might look glamorous at the top, but it’s not a stable labour market for most people.
This is why agencies and publishers still matter. Their structures, while sometimes slow, can provide continuity, professional standards, editorial oversight, legal protection, succession planning and operational depth. The future is unlikely to be creators instead of institutions. It’s more likely to be creator-led thinking moving inside institutions, while the most successful creators build institutions of their own.
Will the Creator Economy Replace Agencies and Publishers?
Lemonade Illustration Agency
No, the creator economy won’t replace agencies and publishers wholesale. But that answer is less comforting than it sounds.
The creator economy doesn’t need to replace agencies and publishers to disrupt them. It only needs to take enough attention, enough budget and enough cultural authority to change what clients and audiences expect. That’s already happening.
For agencies, the risk is being reduced to coordination while creators own the relationship with the audience. If a brand believes the most valuable idea comes from the creator, the most effective production comes from the creator and the most efficient distribution comes through the creator’s channels, the agency’s role has to become sharper. It can’t just be the place where content gets made. It has to be the place where brand, culture, commerce, craft and governance come together in ways a creator alone can’t easily provide.
For publishers, the risk is becoming invisible infrastructure. A newsroom might still break the story, but the audience may encounter it through a commentator, streamer, podcaster, newsletter writer or TikTok explainer. The publisher does the expensive work; the creator captures the relationship. That’s not sustainable unless publishers become better at turning their own journalists, editors, critics and experts into recognisable audience-facing figures.
But creators face limits too. Many creator-led businesses struggle with scale beyond the founder. They can be brilliant at community but weaker at operational resilience. They can be culturally fluent but strategically inconsistent. They can be close to audiences but vulnerable to audience capture, where the need to please the community narrows the range of what they can say or make.
There are also serious trust and compliance issues. As creator marketing attracts more money, it attracts more scrutiny. Disclosure, transparency, content accuracy, brand safety and local legal compliance are no longer optional admin. In this climate, there’s a real need for clearer contracts, disclosure, accuracy, ethical considerations and monitoring, especially as regulatory and reputational pressures grow.
That’s where agencies and publishers still have an advantage. They understand governance. They know how to manage risk. They can build systems around talent. They can protect brands from confusing popularity with suitability. They can help separate genuine cultural influence from inflated follower counts and vanity metrics.
The real answer, then, is that creators won’t replace agencies and publishers in a clean, dramatic handover. Instead, the market will split.
Some brands will use creators as media partners within agency-led campaigns. Some will build long-term creator ambassador networks. Some will commission creators directly, bypassing traditional partners for certain briefs. Some publishers will turn journalists into creator-style personalities. Some creators will become publishers. Some agencies will become creator network operators. Some publishers will become studios for talent-led franchises. And some traditional businesses will lose ground because they insist on treating creators as a novelty long after the audience has moved on.
The winners won’t be defined by whether they’re creators, agencies or publishers. They’ll be defined by whether they can earn attention repeatedly, convert it responsibly and build trust that survives beyond the next platform trend.
What Agencies and Publishers Can Learn from the Creator Economy
Simon & Schuster UK
The first lesson agencies and publishers can learn from the creator economy is that attention is relational, not just distributable. It’s not enough to place content where audiences are. The content has to feel like it belongs there, and the person or brand delivering it has to have earned the right to appear.
The second lesson is that consistency beats occasional brilliance more often than the industry likes to admit. Agencies are excellent at campaign peaks. Publishers are excellent at editorial calendars. Creators are often excellent at recurring rituals: the weekly episode, the daily post, the monthly ranking, the recurring joke, the familiar opening line, the community Q&A. Those rituals build habit, and habit is one of the most valuable assets in media.
The third lesson is that niche does not mean small. A niche audience can be commercially enormous if it’s clearly defined, emotionally invested and underserved by mainstream media. Agencies and publishers that still treat niche communities as fringe are missing how culture now forms. Mass relevance often starts in small, intense spaces.
The fourth lesson is that audience feedback is a creative input, not just a performance metric. Creators read the room constantly. They don’t always obey it, but they rarely ignore it. Agencies and publishers could do more to integrate live audience learning into the creative process without surrendering editorial or strategic judgement.
The fifth lesson is that talent is media. That’s uncomfortable for institutions built around logos, mastheads and agency brands, but it’s unavoidable. People follow people. They trust voices, faces, perspectives and taste. Publishers need to let more of their experts become visible. Agencies need to recognise that strategists, creatives, producers and makers can be part of their public value, not just hidden behind case studies.
The sixth lesson is that creator partnerships work best when they’re partnerships. Brands that over-script creators tend to sand away the qualities they’re paying for. Agencies can add huge value here by becoming translators rather than controllers: protecting the brand while preserving the creator’s voice.
The seventh lesson is that measurement needs to mature. Views and likes are not enough. Neither is vague talk of authenticity. The industry needs better ways to measure creator marketing across awareness, trust, search behaviour, conversion, retention, community growth and long-term brand equity.
The eighth lesson is that creators should be considered earlier. Not every brief needs a creator, but when one does, bringing them in after the big idea has been signed off often wastes their value. Creators can help brands understand whether an idea has cultural life before it becomes an expensive asset in search of relevance.
This is where the opportunity becomes practical for creatives. Brands looking for creator marketing support don’t simply need “an influencer.” They may need a social-first agency, a creator strategist, a content producer, a talent partner, a community manager, a video editor, a podcast producer, a performance marketer or a publisher-style editorial team. The most effective creator-led work often comes from assembling the right mix of creative talent around the creator, rather than assuming the creator can or should do everything alone.
That’s also where agencies and publishers can defend their value. Not by pretending the creator economy is a fad, but by becoming better collaborators within it. The best agencies will help brands choose the right creators, build stronger partnerships, protect strategic coherence and turn creator-led ideas into broader brand systems. The best publishers will use creator techniques without abandoning editorial standards. The best creators will professionalise without losing the intimacy that made them valuable in the first place.
The creator economy is competing with agencies and publishers because it’s proving that media doesn’t have to begin with institutions. It can begin with a person, a point of view and a community. That’s disruptive, certainly. But it’s also a reminder of something the creative industries should already know: audiences don’t owe their attention to anyone.
