Where the Money Is Actually Flowing in the Creator Economy

Wow! We are still buzzing from our first Scalable Summit on Wednesday. We initially thought we’d have about 250 attendees, but we ended up with more than 400 people coming!

When we left our jobs last year and took the leap into independent journalism and the creator economy, we never could have expected this. We’re so blown away by the energy, excitement and thoughtful conversations.

It’s hard to fit all of the takeaways from a full-day event into one newsletter, so today we’re focusing on something everyone in the room wanted to know: Where’s the money right now?

Creator ad spending, the largest revenue source in the industry, is forecasted to reach roughly $44 billion in 2026, according to the IAB. We remember when it was estimated at just $900 million about a decade ago! 

Back then, creator partnerships simply meant sponsored social media posts, but now creators are part of every major media channel and investments from top brands are growing.

Visa has doubled the company’s investments in creators over the past year, the company’s CMO Frank Cooper said during our panel on influencer marketing’s next chapter. “I hope to double it again,” he added.

OpenAI is also doing more influencer marketing, David Duxin, the company’s business and partnerships lead, said on stage. Its AI rivals have been doing the same: Microsoft and Google, for example, have paid influencers upwards of $600,000 for months-long campaigns to promote their AI tools.

At the same time, more influencer marketing budget is being directed toward paid ads rather than direct partnerships with creators. In Meta’s first quarter earnings report, the company said that partnership ads now have a $10 billion revenue rate.

“The platforms are essentially incentivized now to ensure that short-form content with a sponsor doesn’t perform well,” explained Agentio CEO and co-founder Arthur Leopold. Brands that want to reach audiences need to be boosting creator content as paid ads to ensure that content breaks through.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy expressed a similar sentiment around paid clipping during the opening session. Unlike social platforms, Twitch doesn’t make most of its money from advertising: Between two-thirds and three-quarters of its revenue comes directly from viewers, including paid subscriptions, Clancy said.

Instead of paying social apps such as Instagram and TikTok to boost content, creators are now paying services like Whop to get short clips of their content to go viral. The social platforms aren’t monetizing these clips directly, as they are often posted organically by third-party accounts.

“As soon as it starts impacting the bottom line for these companies, they’ll start toning back,” Clancy said. “The more you have these clip farms doing it, the less marketers need to go and pay to promote their content directly through the platforms.”

Last week, Instagram said that accounts that primarily aggregate and re-upload other creators’ work will no longer be eligible for recommendations across the app. Many people took this as a potential crackdown on paid clipping.

Tessa Lyons, vice president of product at Instagram, framed the emphasis on original content differently during a fireside chat in the afternoon: “We want the people who are doing the creative work to get the value of that distribution rather than aggregators or others.”

Original videos, along with improving its recommendation algorithm, have also helped make Reels more popular. That’s made Instagram a fiercer competitor to TikTok, which is also now encouraging creators to make higher-quality content.

Marisa Hammonds, global head of creator marketing and community at TikTok, put it this way: “When I say high-quality storytelling, what I mean is it’s content that’s original. There’s some sort of expertise, your unique perspective to share and it’s really intentional.” She added that this kind of content can help creators get discovered, grow and earn more on the platform.

Meanwhile, more creators are looking beyond influencer marketing—and subscriptions—to make money. For some, that means Hollywood. 

Rich Bloom, Tubi’s general manager of creator programs and executive vice president of business development, took the stage to discuss its creator programs, including a new partnership with TikTok to help short-form creators develop long-form content and the company’s wide slate of creator shows.

Still, not everyone was convinced that Hollywood is the right path for all creators. “There is probably more money to be made as a creator by owning your own digital footprint and distribution than by selling the occasional project to a streamer,” Ian Schafer, president of Issa Rae’s production company Ensemble, said on stage.

But the prestige that comes with a Hollywood show is hard for creators to resist. “Oh my god, of course! Are you hiring?” quipped creator and actress Amanda McCants after she was asked whether she would take the kind of deal that Tubi is offering to creators it is partnering with.

“You have a budget? I’ll cut it in half and still get you the product,” she added.

A huge thank you to Agentio, our title sponsor for the event, as well as our premier partners: Motion Society, CAA, Greenberg Glusker, ElevenLabs, Core Advisors, Whalar Group and Fathers Brewing. We couldn’t have done this event without your support!

And a big thanks to our business partner The Lighthouse, for all of your support and for providing an incredible venue and team on the ground. 

We dive into some of the behind-the-scenes of putting together an event like this in our podcast today. You can tune wherever you get your podcasts.

Going bigger isn’t always better when it comes to creator programs. 

That’s one lesson we took from our conversation with Geo Karapetyan, a 13-year veteran of NBCUniversal who was recently named senior vice president of Olympic partnerships. Karapetyan, who was a speaker at our Scalable Summit, was also a guest on our podcast this week. 

Content from creators in NBCUniversal’s Creator Collective generated 450 million views on social media during the Winter Olympic Games in Italy earlier this year, according to data provided by NBC exclusively to Scalable. That was up by 47% from the 2024 Summer Games in Paris when it first launched the program, which brings creators to the Olympics to create content. The growth is particularly notable given that the Summer Olympics are typically more popular with viewers. 

The results also came with slightly fewer creators in the program. The company invited 25 creators to Italy, compared to 27 in Paris. 

Ahead of this year’s Games, the company reassessed the types of creators and content based on what performed well in Paris. What worked? Local takes on the city tailored to an American audience and behind-the-scenes content about the games, including the food inside the Olympic Village. What didn’t work? General food content. “It didn’t resonate because it was too generic about Paris and not about Paris during the Games,” Karapetyan told us.

The NBC team applied those learnings to the program in Italy, including by taking creator Jordan Howlett into the Olympic Village to try to the foods that athletes eat. Howlett’s video about trying the chocolate cake has garnered nearly 1 million views on YouTube Shorts alone.

In terms of content, not much was off-limits for creators, with one major exception: competition footage. That could have interfered with NBC’s programming and that ofrightsholders in other countries. Karapetyan also told us he personally reviewed all of the creators’ content himself!

While Karapetyan wouldn’t share many details about the company’s plans for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, he told us it’s considering an “even more intimate look behind the scenes” and “something experiential.” The company is also working with Team USA ahead of the Games to help build out their social profiles, as it did in Italy and Paris.

That makes sense. Local takes on Los Angeles likely won’t be as interesting to an American audience. And given that the city is the epicenter of the entertainment industry and the creator economy, there will be plenty of opportunities to get more creative with the program.

For those Games, Karapetyan also said they may be thinking bigger. “I am confident that we're gonna bring back the Creator Collective in some form, if anything larger than what we had seen in Paris and Milan,” he said. If so, we hope the team reviewing the content also grows!

Watch our full conversation with Geo in this YouTube video, embedded below

We interviewed France on our podcast this week about what it takes to reach audiences in today’s algorithmically-driven social media world. We also discussed what life after “Queer Eye” has been like—and what’s next—following the show’s final season earlier this year after nearly a decade on Netflix.

Last month, France released a new comedy series on YouTube called “Honorable Gays” alongside creators Rob Anderson and Eric Sedeño. The trio discusses stories from Reddit’s subreddit “Am I the A**hole?”, giving their takes on family feuds, relationship dramas and more. 

But that doesn’t mean France is leaving traditional entertainment behind. He’s returning for season two of Hulu’s “Deli Boys,” where he plays a very different type of role: a South London gang leader. 

Tan shares what makes a good scripted star vs. unscripted star—and three wardrobe staples everyone should own.

You can check out the full interview below, on Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts. 

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