As social media becomes more dependent on algorithmic feeds, content creators are adapting to a new reality: Posting something doesn’t guarantee your audience will see it.

“I believe 2025 marked the year when algorithms completely dominated, rendering follower counts meaningless,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box stated to TechCrunch.

This revelation isn’t new for creators — Patreon CEO Jack Conte has passionately highlighted this issue for years — but throughout the year, the broader industry has responded to this shift in various manners, spanning from influencers to streamers.

According to the executives TechCrunch interviewed regarding the impending future of the creator economy, content creators are discovering new methods to foster and nurture connections with their audiences — some serving as remedies to AI clutter, while others are inundating the space with a fresh kind of clutter themselves.

Box’s firm, LTK, links creators with brands via affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on recommended products. This business model wholly relies on audiences maintaining faith in individual creators. With worries about fragmentation in the creator-audience connection, this could pose a significant risk to the company.

However, a study commissioned by Northwestern University revealed that trust in creators rose by 21% year-over-year, which pleasantly surprised Box.

“If you had asked me at the start of 2025, ‘Will trust in creators increase or decrease?’ I would’ve likely said decrease, as people realize it’s a business — they comprehend how it functions,” she remarked. “However, AI has led people to shift their trust towards real individuals with genuine experiences.”

By this, Box implies that consumers are increasingly inclined to seek out content from the creators they recognize and trust. The study indicated that 97% of chief marketing officers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in the upcoming year.

Nonetheless, managing these relationships isn’t simple. LTK creators, dependent on affiliate earnings, are counting on this AI-induced skepticism to guide audiences toward more direct interactions through paid fan communities or less algorithm-centric platforms like LTK. For different types of creators, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, the approach to maintaining their audience often resembles growth hacking.

Clipping armies of teenagers

As Sean Atkins, CEO of the short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, expressed, “In a world dominated by AI and algorithms, where individuals trust other humans more amidst the micro division of attention, how do you market when control is elusive?”

Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a financial service for creators, pointed out that creators possess a new advantage: teams of teenagers on Discord whom creators compensate for clipping their content, which those same teenagers then share extensively on algorithm-driven platforms.

“This has been happening for a while,” Wei explained. “Drake does it. Many of the largest creators and streamers engage in this — Kai Cenat [a leading Twitch streamer] participates — generating millions of impressions… If it’s algorithmically driven, clipping makes perfect sense, as it can originate from any random account with high-quality clips.”

Wei anticipates that clipping will gain even more traction this year as a response to the fragmentation in social media relationships. Even the most prominent creators face challenges in reaching their fans directly, which drives them toward clipping. While achieving virality on these algorithmic platforms is certainly easier with a substantial follower base, there’s no requirement for a prior record on a platform to determine whether a video should be widely shared. Thus, if these “clippers” share a brief highlight from specific creators’ streams, they can profit based on the views the video garners.

“Clipping seems like an evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, which creates content for younger audiences, conveyed to TechCrunch. “It has become a competition among creators to take this content and disseminate it broadly, almost racing to see who can amass the most views on the same intellectual property.”

Reed Duchscher — founding CEO of Night, the talent management agency representing Kai Cenat and other leading creators — expertly guides creators in maximizing their virality. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher fostered the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast from a YouTuber into an empire. He also oversees Kai Cenat’s clipping strategy, although Duchscher doesn’t share Wei’s enthusiasm regarding its wider potential.

“Clipping is crucial for a creator, as you need to saturate the space with content, and it’s a great method to increase visibility,” Duchscher stated to TechCrunch. “However, it’s also quite challenging to scale, as there are only a limited number of clippers online, making substantial media investments complicated.”

Perhaps clipping is effective now because the strategy has not yet gained such prevalence that it’s perceived as spam.

“The creator benefits by getting more of their content out,” Wei mentioned. “The clippers benefit because this group of teenagers is receiving payment. Everyone benefits, except that if this trend continues, we may end up with a surfeit of low-quality content.”

Niche appeal prevails

The rise of low-quality content on social media has become significant enough that Merriam-Webster designated slop as its word of the year.

“Over 94% of individuals claim social media is no longer social, and more than half are reallocating their time to smaller, niche communities that they know are genuine and that they can engage with,” Box noted, referencing platforms like Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack. 

As the connection between a creator and their audience grows increasingly challenging, Duchscher anticipates that creators with more defined niches will thrive — he believes that “macro creators” like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D’Amelio, who gather hundreds of millions of followers, will become even more difficult to replicate.

Citing success stories like Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, who boast millions of followers but lack widespread appeal, Duchscher emphasizes, “Algorithms have become adept at presenting us with precisely the content we desire. It’s increasingly tough for a creator to break into every specific algorithm.” 

Atkins concurs, asserting that the creator economy encompasses much more than merely entertainment. “The creator economy is often viewed through the entertainment lens, which I consider a mistake, as contemplating the creator economy is somewhat akin to thinking about the internet or AI — it’s set to influence everything.”

Atkins cites the gardening creator brand Epic Gardening as an illustration. What began as a YouTube channel now holds a tangible, significant position in the gardening sector.

“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 remarked.

Although the creator economy is in a state of flux, it remains a robust industry — one well-versed in navigating the whims of the algorithm, persevering for decades, even if those unfamiliar may view it as an entirely new domain.

Creators are “literally influencing everything,” Atkins stated. “I bet there’s a content creator who specializes in cement mixing for skyscrapers.”