The number of followers on TV has not been anything, the producers’ financial managers say

As social media increasingly relies on algorithmic feeds, developers are moving a new normal: Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it.

“I think 2025 was the year that algorithms took over, so tracking stopped working,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.

This isn’t news to developers – Patreon CEO Jack Conte is interested he played this drum for years – but throughout the year, many companies have reacted to these events in different ways, from the directors to the river.

According to executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creative economy, creators are finding new ways to use and expand their relationships with their followers – some act as a salve to AI slop, while others are flooding the area with a new kind of slop themselves.

Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators get paid for what they create. The business model is completely dependent on the audience to maintain confidence in individual producers. Considering the fragmentation of the relationship with the audience, this can be a threat to the company.

But a study conducted from Northwestern University found this trust the creators a 21% year-over-year increase, which was surprising for Box.

“You could have asked me in early 2025, ‘Hey, is the reliance on manufacturers going down or down?’ I would probably say lower, because people understand that it’s a business – they understand how it works,” he said. “But really, AI has forced people to trust real people who they know have real life experiences.”

By this, Box means that consumers can go out of their way to see products made by people they know and trust. According to this survey, 97% of marketing executives plan to increase their advertising spending in the new year.

This does not mean that having these relationships is easy. The developers of LTK, which rely on peer-to-peer funding, are betting that AI-induced skepticism will lead people to direct relationships through paid social networks or limited platforms such as LTK itself. For some types of producers, such as streamers, video podcasters, and short film producers, the process of finding their audience can be very similar to the destruction of growth.

Young people are cutting the army

As Sean Atkins, CEO of short film production company Dhar Mann Studios, put it, “In a world driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust someone else for this slow-motion visualization, how do you sell when you can’t control that?”

According to Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a company that provides financial support to producers, producers have a new secret weapon: the army of young people on Discord that producers pay to produce their videos, which the same young people write in large numbers on algorithmic platforms.

“This has been going on for a while,” Wei said. “Drake does.” Many producers and presenters around the world have been doing this – Kai Cenat (A top Twitch streamer) has done this – hit millions… If it’s confirmed randomly, the sudden cut makes sense, because it can come from a random account with the best tweets.”

Wei thinks that the jump will be more popular this year, because it is the result of the division of social networks. Even big producers are finding it difficult to reach their fans directly, that’s why they turn to clipping. Although going viral on algorithmic feeds is easy if you have a lot of followers, you don’t need any record on the platform to decide for your video to be shared more widely. So, if these “downloaders” post short reviews from other creators’ streams, they can earn money based on how many views the video gets.

“Cutting seems to be the evolution of meme accounts,” Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, which produces content for young people, told TechCrunch. “It’s become a competition between many developers to try to take this and push it further, almost competing to see who can get the most ideas on the same IP.”

Reed Duchscher – founding CEO of Night, a talent management company that represents Kai Cenat and other top producers – expertly coaches producers on developing their credibility. As MrBeast’s former manager, Duchscher helped develop the fast-paced, engaging style that transformed MrBeast from YouTuber to kingdom. He is also behind Kai Cenat’s cutting style, although Duchscher is not as fond of his abilities as Wei.

“Jumping is important if you’re a designer, because you have to be flooded with content in the area, and it’s a great way to get your face out there,” Duchscher told TechCrunch. “It’s also difficult to expand, because there are a lot of clippings on the Internet, so spending a lot of money on broadcasting … there are a lot of problems.”

Maybe cutting only works now because the method has not become so common that it is seen as spam.

“The producer wins because he gets more,” Wei said. “The cutters win because now this group of young people is getting paid. Everyone wins, unless you give your opinion, we just go down a lot.”

The more niche, the better

The amount of slop on social media has become enough of a threat that Merriam-Webster called it to slide his word of the year.

“More than 94% of people say that social networks are no longer social, and more than half of them are spending their time elsewhere in small communities that they know are real and can talk to and interact with,” said Bokosi, pointing to platforms such as Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack.

When the relationship between the creator and the audience is difficult to maintain, Duchscher predicts that creators with specific niches will win – he thinks that “macro creators” like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D’Amelio, who gather hundreds of millions of followers, will be more difficult to imitate.

Regarding successful stories such as Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, which have millions of followers but do not appeal to many people, Mr. Duchscher adds, “Algorithms have gotten very good at giving us what we want. each one niche algorithm.”

Atkins agrees, arguing that the creator’s economy extends far beyond entertainment. “The wealth of creators is often seen in terms of this entertainment. I think that’s a mistake, because thinking about the wealth of creators is like thinking about the Internet or AI – it will affect everything.”

Atkins mentions the brand of gardeners Epic Gardening for example. What started as a YouTube channel has developed into a real, visible presence in the garden.

“Epic Gardening bought the third largest company in the United States, so now it’s the third largest company (owner), as a manufacturer,” he said.

Although the creative economy is booming, it is a fixed business – which is used to following the logic of the algorithm, continuing for many years, although the uninitiated may see it as a new world.

Producers “touch everything,” Atkins said. “I can assure you that there is a designer who is an expert in cement mixtures for skyscrapers.”