The number of followers on social media has never been more important, say creative economy executives | TechCrunch

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 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so the number of followers didn’t matter at all anymore,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.

This isn’t news to creators — Patreon CEO Jack Conte has been fervently beating this drum for years — but throughout the year, the industry as a whole has responded to this phenomenon in different ways, from the influencers to the streamers.

According to the executives TechCrunch spoke with about the near future of the maker economy, makers are finding new ways to leverage and cultivate their relationships with their followers — some acting as a salve for AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop.

Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. The business model is completely dependent on the public’s trust in individual creators. Given concerns about fragmentation in the relationship between creators and audiences, this could pose an existential threat to the company.

But a study commissioned by Northwestern University showed that trust in makers rose 21% year-on-year, which was a pleasant surprise for Box.

“If you were to ask me at the beginning of 2025, ‘Hey, will trust in creators rise or fall?’ I probably would have kept it low because people understand it’s an industry – they understand how it works,” she said. “But actually, AI has pushed people to rotate trust toward real people who they know have real-life experiences.”

This means Box means consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the survey, 97% of Chief Marketing Officers plan to increase their influencer marketing budget in the new year.

That doesn’t mean owning these relationships is easy. LTK creators, who rely on affiliate revenue, are betting that this AI-induced skepticism will drive people to more direct relationships through paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other types of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, the strategy of owning their audience can be more like growth hacking.

Teenage cut-outs

As Sean Atkins, CEO of short video production company Dhar Mann Studios, put it: “In a world driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust another human more in this micro-atomization of attention, how do you market it when you actually have no control over that?”

According to Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a financial services provider for creators, creators have a new secret weapon: armies of teens on Discord whose creators pay to make clips of their content, which those same teens post en masse to algorithmic platforms.

“That’s been going on for a while,” Wei explained. “Drake is doing it. Many of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have done it – Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] did it – generated millions of impressions… If it’s algorithmically determined, suddenly cutting makes sense because it can come from any account that just has really good clips.

Wei thinks clipping will become even more popular this year because it is a response to this fragmentation in relationships on social media. Even the biggest creators find it difficult 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 a track record on a platform to decide that your video should be distributed more widely. So when these clippers post a short highlight from certain creators’ streams, they can make money based on the number of views the video receives.

“Clipping feels like an evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, which produces content for young audiences, told TechCrunch. “It has become a race among many creators to try to spread this content far and wide, almost competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP address.”

Reed Duchscher – founder and CEO of Night, the talent management company representing Kai Cenat and other top creators – masterfully coaches creators to maximize 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 also supports Kai Cenat’s clipping strategy, although Duchscher isn’t as excited about its broader potential as Wei.

“Clipping is important if you’re a creator because you have 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 difficult to scale because there are only so many clippers on the internet, so spending big media budgets… there’s just a lot of complications.”

Perhaps clipping is only working now because the technology has not yet become so common that it is seen as spam.

“The creator wins because they get more of their content out there,” Wei said. “The Clippers are winning because now this army of teenagers are getting paid. Everybody wins, except when you take this to its logical conclusion, we get a lot of sloppy behavior.”

The more niche, the better

The prevalence of slop on social media has become such a threat that Merriam-Webster named slop its word of the year.

“More than 94% of people say social media is no longer social, and more than half of them spend time in smaller niche communities that they know are real and can talk 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 find success. He thinks “macro makers” like MrBeast, PewDiePie or Charli D’Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, will become even harder to match.

Pointing to success stories like Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, which have millions of followers but don’t necessarily have mass appeal, Duchscher adds: “Algorithms have become so good at giving us exactly the content we want. It’s much harder for a creator to break out in each niche algorithm.”

Atkins agrees, arguing that the creative economy extends far beyond entertainment. “The creative economy is generally viewed through this lens of entertainment. I think that’s a mistake because thinking about the creative economy is a bit like thinking about the internet or AI: it will impact everything.”

Atkins calls the brand for garden designers 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 it is the third largest seed company [owner]as a content creator,” he said.

Although the creative economy is in flux, it is a resilient industry – one that is used to dealing with the whims of the algorithm and persevering for decades, even though the uninitiated may see it as a brand new domain.

Creators “literally influence everything,” Atkins said. “I bet there’s a maker out there who’s an expert at mixing cement for skyscrapers.”