For years, the creator economy was described as a pipeline: creators made attention, platforms distributed it, and brands paid for access. Shira Lazar’s What’s Trending offers a different model. It treats the creator not as talent inside a media business, but as the starting point for one.
That distinction matters now because the company is reportedly generating mid-six-figure revenue in difficult years and low-seven-figure revenue in stronger ones. The business has three people, around four million followers across platforms and a revenue mix that includes advertising, brand partnerships, licensing, distribution and events. What’s Trending’s official home describes the company as part of Lazar’s broader work as a host, founder and digital-media creator.
Those details come from Digiday’s interview with Lazar, which frames the company as an early bet on creator-led media. The more interesting point is what the business has become since that bet was made.
The creator is the distribution strategy
Lazar launched What’s Trending in 2011 after seeing that internet personalities were attracting attention without having many outlets built around them. The company began with video coverage of online culture, moved across YouTube and then adapted to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok as audience behavior changed.
The platforms changed. The central asset did not. What’s Trending remained attached to a recognizable host, a clear editorial point of view and a subject area that could travel across formats.
That is why the company’s lean structure is both an advantage and a constraint. A three-person team can move quickly and keep the brand coherent. It can also limit investment in audience acquisition, sales, programming and new products. Lazar’s next phase is therefore less about finding another platform than building the infrastructure needed to make the model more consistent.
The shift resembles the broader movement from individual creator to small media company. Platforms increasingly use content formats to pull audiences back into recurring viewing behavior, but What’s Trending shows the other side of that relationship: creators are building their own programming systems around the audiences they already hold.
The business is bigger than publishing
What’s Trending now extends into influencer marketing, branded creative services, licensing, distribution and live events. Its relationships with MSN, Spotify and Screenvision also push the content beyond the social feeds where the audience was first built.
That diversification is not just a revenue tactic. It changes what a creator-led brand can sell. The product is no longer a post, video or sponsorship slot. It is access to a host, an audience, a format, a point of view and a network of cultural relationships.
There is a useful tension here. Creator businesses are often praised for being personal and lightweight, while their long-term stability depends on building systems that do not rely on one person doing everything. What’s Trending is trying to preserve the recognizable creator at the center while adding the commercial and editorial structure of a media company.
That may be the more durable direction for the creator economy. Creators who remain only platform-dependent businesses are exposed to algorithm changes and unstable deal flow. Creators who build repeatable formats, distribution relationships and multiple revenue lines can begin to operate like publishers without losing the personality that made people follow them.
The strategic consequence is clear: the next generation of creator businesses will not simply monetize influence. They will package identity, editorial judgment and distribution into media companies of their own.