For years, creators were told to chase followers. Build the audience, own the distribution, post and your community would see it.
That era is officially over.
As algorithmic feeds now dominate nearly every major platform, creators are waking up to a new reality: having followers no longer guarantees reach.
“I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” said Amber Venz Box, CEO of LTK, speaking to TechCrunch.
Creators have known this for a while. Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, has been warning about it for years. But 2025 is when the broader creator economy finally caught up.
Trust over scale
Ironically, as AI-generated content floods feeds, trust in real creators is rising. LTK, whose affiliate model relies entirely on audience trust, could have been threatened by this fragmentation. Instead, a Northwestern University study commissioned by the company found that trust in creators increased 21% year over year.
“If you asked me at the beginning of 2025… I would have probably said down,” Box said. “But actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.”
That trust is translating into money. According to the same research, 97% of CMOs plan to grow influencer marketing budgets in the coming year.
The catch? Owning that relationship is harder than ever.
The rise of clipping armies
To survive algorithmic chaos, some creators are turning to an unusual growth tactic: teenage clipping armies on Discord.
“Drake does it. A lot of the biggest creators and streamers in the world have been doing it,” explained Eric Wei, cofounder of Karat Financial. “Kai Cenat has done it, hitting millions of impressions.”
These paid clippers slice streams into short highlights and post them en masse across platforms. Because algorithms don’t care who posts, only whether content performs, clips from unknown accounts can go viral instantly.
“If it’s algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense,” Wei said.
But even the architects of virality are cautious.
“Clipping is important… you do need to flood the zone,” said Reed Duchscher, CEO of Night. “But it’s very hard to get to scale… there’s just a lot of complications.”
The risk? More content, more noise, more slop.
“Everybody wins,” Wei said. “Except that if you take this to its logical conclusion, we just get lots and lots of slop.”
Smaller, realer, more niche
That slop problem is already reshaping behavior. Merriam-Webster even named slop its word of the year.
“Over 94% of people are saying that social media is no longer social,” Box noted. “Over half are rotating time elsewhere into smaller niche communities.”
Platforms like Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack are benefiting, places where identity, conversation, and credibility still matter.
Duchscher believes this shift favors specificity over mass appeal.
“Algorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want,” he said. “It’s much harder for a creator to break out into every niche algorithm.”
Beyond entertainment
For Sean Atkins, CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, the creator economy is often misunderstood.
“The creator economy is viewed through the lens of entertainment. I think that’s a mistake.”
He points to Epic Gardening as proof, a YouTube channel that evolved into a real-world business.
“Epic Gardening bought the third largest seed company in the United States,” Atkins said. “So now he’s the third largest seed company owner, as a content creator.”
Creators, he argues, are no longer just entertainers. They’re operators, educators, founders, and sometimes industry leaders.
“I bet you there’s a creator who’s an expert at cement mixing for skyscrapers,” Atkins said.
Follower counts may be fading, but influence hasn’t disappeared, it’s just becoming more human, more fragmented, and more intentional. In an algorithm-first world, the creators who win won’t be the loudest, they’ll be the most trusted.