Social media follower counts are more important than ever, creator economy executives say

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 that algorithms completely took over, so followers became completely irrelevant,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.

This isn’t new to creators – Patreon CEO Jacques Conte has been beating this drum passionately for years – but throughout the year, the entire industry, from influencers to streamers, has responded to this phenomenon in different ways.

Executives TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy say creators are finding new ways to leverage and cultivate relationships with their followers, with some acting as saviors of AI slop and others pushing new forms of slop into the zone themselves.

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

However, a study commissioned by Northwestern University found that trust in creators increased by 21% year over year, which was a pleasant surprise for Box.

“What if you asked me in early 2025, ‘Will trust in creators go up or down?’ I probably would have said no because people understand that it’s an industry and they understand how it works,” she said. “But in reality, AI has made people trust real humans with lived experience.”

Box means consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from creators they know and trust. According to this study, 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 income are betting that this AI-induced skepticism will push people toward more direct relationships through paid fan communities and less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other types of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short film makers, strategies for building an audience can look a lot like growth hacking.

Teenage cutout army

said Sean Atkins, CEO of short video production company Dahl Mann Studios. “In a world driven by AI and algorithms, where attention is so fragmented and people trust other humans more, how do you market if you can’t control it?”

According to Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a financial services company for creators, creators have a new secret weapon. It’s about having an army of teenagers on Discord, paying creators to make clips of their content, and those same teenagers posting en masse to the algorithmic platform.

“It’s been going on for a little while,” Way explained. “Drake is doing it. Many of the world’s biggest creators and streamers are doing it – Kai Cenat [a top Twitch streamer] did it – hit millions of impressions… Clipping suddenly makes sense when determined by an algorithm. Because clipping can occur from random accounts that only contain really good clips. ”

Wei believes that clipping will become even more popular this year because it is a response to this fragmentation in social media relations. Even the biggest creators are finding it difficult to reach out to their fans directly, so they’re turning to clipping. While it’s certainly easier to spread on these algorithmic feeds if you have a large number of followers, you don’t need a track record on the platform for the platform to decide whether your video should be distributed more widely. So when these “clippers” post short highlights from a particular creator’s stream, they can earn money based on the number of views the video receives.

“Clipping feels like the evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsberg, president of QYOU Media, which creates content for younger audiences, told TechCrunch. “Many creators are now competing to spread this content widely, competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP.”

Reed Dascher, founding CEO of Knight, a talent management company representing Kai Senat and other top creators, expertly coaches creators in maximizing their virality. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped cultivate the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that turned MrBeast from a YouTuber to an empire. He also promotes Kai Senat’s clipping strategy, but Duxcher is less enthusiastic than Way about its wide potential.

“Clipping is important for creators because they need to fill the zone with content and it’s a good way to get their face out there,” Dachscher told TechCrunch. “It’s also very difficult to scale. There are only a limited number of clippers on the internet, so to spend a large media budget…there are a lot of complications.”

Perhaps clipping only works now because it’s not widespread enough to be considered spam.

“Creators win because they can publish more content,” Wei said. “The Clippers win because this army of teenagers gets paid. Everybody wins, but if you take this to its logical conclusion, we just get a huge cut.”

The more niche the better

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

“More than 94% of people say social media is no longer social, and more than half of them spend their time in small, niche communities where they know they are real and can talk and interact,” Box said, citing platforms like Strava, LinkedIn and Substack.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain relationships between creators and their audiences, Daksha predicts that creators with more specific niches will succeed. Macro creators like MrBeast, PewDiePie, and Charli D’Amelio, who amass hundreds of millions of followers, think it will be even harder to imitate them.

“Algorithms are very good at giving us exactly the content we want. It’s much harder for creators to break into any niche algorithm,” Dakshar added, citing success stories like Alix Earle and Outdoor Boys, who have millions of followers but aren’t necessarily popular with the masses.

Atkins agrees, arguing that the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. “The creator economy is generally viewed through the lens of entertainment, and I think that’s a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a little like thinking about the internet or AI, because it impacts everything.”

Atkins uses the gardening creator brand Epic Gardening as an example. What started as a YouTube channel has created a solid presence in the gardening world.

“Epic Gardening acquired 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.

Although the creator economy is in flux, it is a resilient industry. It’s an industry that’s used to dealing with the vagaries of algorithms and has been moving forward for decades, even though it may seem like entirely new territory for beginners.

Creators “influence literally everything,” Atkins said. “There should be someone who specializes in mixing cement for high-rise buildings.”