The Mandala Beach on the Cannes Croisette was a hive of budding business activity at the Lions Creativity festival this month. Sure, the Madison Avenue brands were strutting, as usual, and everyone had their smartest-person-in-the-room patter down about AI.
But in terms of pure follow the money, it was creators who won the week. At marketing firm Influential’s space at the Mandala Beach, rising influencer Amanda Dimoldenberg (3.1 million subscribers on YouTube) held court alongside Dhar Mann (25.4 million subscribers on YouTube), while huge stars like will.i.am and Jason Derulo performed. A few hundred feet down the beach, you found Kai Cenat (19.3 million TikTok followers) and Alix Earle (7.5 million followers) in the center of activity.
The Creators economy is now a $185 billion industry — and is about to become a half-a-trillion-dollar rising behemoth.
“We are sitting in the heart of what used to be, or still is, an epicenter of the film industry, and the conversation around creativity is centered on the entire creator track,” Kenny Gold, the managing director and head of social for Deloitte Consulting, told TheWrap. “So in the biggest gathering of marketers in a given year, this is a sign that the creator economy continues to grow.”
Gold’s assessment isn’t unusual. The shift was apparent during this year’s upfronts, television’s annual gathering for advertisers in New York City. Despite flashy performances from entertainment mainstays like NBC and Disney, the most energy and excitement came from YouTube’s stage.
That excitement is an outgrowth of a creator industry that’s benefiting from a more robust support infrastructure, with bigger, more far-reaching agencies, new monetized creator programs and AI tools that are bringing down production costs. All of this has enabled more creators to think of themselves as entrepreneurs rather than just social media personalities, and advertisers are starting to notice.
“The landscape has evolved in such a vast way over the last 12 to 24 months where creators really are now media and entertainment companies at the tip of the spear,” Neil Waller, the co-CEO and co-founder of the social media and influencer agency the Whalar Group, told TheWrap.
The numbers back it up. Creators are estimated to generate $184.9 billion in revenue globally in 2025, up 20% from 2024, according to a report from WPP Media, formerly GroupM, while Goldman Sachs says it will hit $480 billion by 2027.
Waller noted that “most” of the conversations his team had with brands at Cannes Lions this year included plans to increase spend with creators “about 20 to 30%.” He also noted that many brands plan to invest in the space even more in 2026: “I think there will be another big leap.”
The evolution of the modern-day creator
For years, the creator economy was viewed by outsiders as a digital Wild West. Someone would post something online that would generate attention, and their friends would wonder how their silly videos paid the rent. Those days are long over.
“A lot of creators would use the words, ‘I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a business owner.’ That’s not something they would have said a few years ago,” Waller said. When Waller co-founded Whalar nine and a half years ago, he estimated that 95% of the creators he worked with had jobs and posted in their spare time. “Now, 95% of the creators we work with are full-time and start having employees and companies.”
A big reason for this shift has to do with creators like MrBeast, who set an example for how to transform a social following into a larger, diversified business. Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, isn’t just someone who has over 400 million YouTube subscribers and 188 million TikTok followers. He leveraged his fame to create the Feastables chocolate brand, the Lunchly snack brand and the virtual restaurant chain MrBeast Burger. In 2023, Forbes estimated he earned $82 million and that was before Prime Video’s “Beast Games.”
While MrBeast gets all the attention, a legion of other creators are following in his footsteps with particular attention to the business element. Many are much smaller in reach — a 2023 NeoReach study found that 48% of creator-earners made $15,000 or less a year — but others are rolling the dice on investing in themselves and the resources they need.
“We saw [growth in the creator economy] a few years ago when creators were starting their own consumer brands, but now it’s not just that. They’re starting full-blown media companies,” Gohar Khan, a content creator who has 6.74 million YouTube subscribers, told TheWrap during YouTube’s Upfronts presentation. “That’s the path I want to take, and I foresee myself being there for the next 20 years.”
Khan has already taken steps toward his goal, purchasing a two-bedroom apartment that he transformed into a content studio for his channel Gohar’s Guide. Khan noted that the investment has already helped him bring his more ambitious ideas to life. But that increased studio space and his desire to bring on more hires also comes with “a bit of pressure.”
“I do want to bring in more people in-house. But with that comes the responsibility of sustaining the creator business well enough to also sustain their salaries,” Khan said. “That’s a pressure I think I’m ready for, but I know it’s going to come very soon.”
Mann has taken his YouTube content to the next level by building a 125,000-square-foot production campus in Los Angeles. The content creator, with a global social media following of over 136 million across 83 active channels, now employs nearly 200 people to bring his uplifting, family-friendly content to the “Dhar Mann Fam.”
“We’re seeing investments happening for growth where large private equity funds are taking interest in creators and studios and putting hundreds of millions of dollars investing in this space,” Mann told TheWrap. “I think the next stage of this is the mergers and acquisitions that are going to start to take place.”
Instead of simply responding to the latest viral trend, many creators now plan several episodes out ahead of time, developing a consistent content schedule that also gives them room for flexibility while depending on monetization from their existing library of content.
One of the reasons Goldman Sachs has such an ambitious target are the brand partnerships and potential merchandising opportunities that have emerged, with some creators taking brand interest a step further. For example, influencer Alix Earle took equity in prebiotic soda Poppi in exchange for becoming a brand ambassador ahead of its $1.95 billion acquisition and joined the team behind SipMargs as an investor, operator and “brand builder,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Creators really are now media and entertainment companies at the tip of the spear.” – Neil Waller, co-CEO, the Whalar Group
“There’s just an infinite number of ways that [creators] have been able to monetize their social part of social media,” said USC Annenberg professor and former television executive David Craig told TheWrap. “That’s a very different economy and feature from what Hollywood does. Hollywood creates intellectual property.”
A more robust support system for creators
Harvard Business School professor John Deighton told TheWrap it was not until the last two to three years that enough infrastructure had been built to make the business model around the creator economy “feasible for someone to decide to give up their day job or supplement their day job with the creation of content.”
On the platform side, there’s been a reduction in flash-in-the-pan Creator Funds designed to draw in new creators. In place of these limited offerings, several platforms have launched more stable Creator Programs. They often include revenue sharing and bonus options for creators who meet a specific criteria. For example, YouTube unlocks ad revenue for creators once they surpass 1,000 subscribers, while TikTok and Snapchat reward creators once they hit 10,000 followers and 50,000 followers, respectively.
Several platforms also now allow creators to make subscription-based content, which serves as an additional revenue stream. YouTube and TikTok currently have subscription offerings for creators, and Instagram lets creators place some content behind a paywall. There’s also the rise of AI tools, many of which are specifically designed to help creators brainstorm and bring down production costs.
“Social media ends up becoming much more of a kind of marketing strategy for them to build their online community,” Craig said of the new subscriber models.
At the same time, consolidation on the agency side could provide resources to supercharge the creator economy. Omnicom’s recent acquisition of Interpublic Group is expected to give Omnicom clients improved influencer selection and more tools when it comes to campaign targeting and measurement, which means more creators may have the opportunity to work with even bigger brands.
Why is it blowing up now?
While creators have benefited from marketing dollars in the past, this year marks a pivotal change.
“Ad spend is shifting from the traditional linear formats and over to the creator economy,” Dennis Ortiz, principal in technology, media and telecommunications for Deloitte, told TheWrap.
The social media budgets for brands increased an average of 9% from 2023 to 2024, according to Deloitte’s 2025 State of Social Research. That same report found that creators topped the list when it came to the priorities of social media marketing budgets, taking up 24% of the total yearly spend on average.
Part of that has to do with planned ad spends from previous years finally coming to fruition in the market. Since brands typically plan their ad spends months, if not years ahead of time, it takes a while for these investments to appear. But part of this also has to do with creators themselves. As monetization from platforms has become more consistent, business plans and strict content schedules from creators have become more of the norm in the industry. That has emboldened advertisers to invest more in creators.
“That’s a much easier thing to go and talk to brands about rather than not necessarily knowing the schedule,” Waller said. “Those two things running in parallel have ultimately meant that being a creator is a business.”
This space has also taken off due to the rise in microinfluencers, social media personalities that often specialize in a niche topic and average around 10,000 to 100,000 followers. Though their follower count is comparatively low, their audience engagement is high, which is appealing to advertisers. Its investment in these creators rather than the traditional influencers are largely contributing to the boost in the creator economy.
There’s also evidence that this segment still has room for growth. With the digital sector accounting for 18% of the nation’s GDP in 2024, according to an April study from Harvard Business School and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the creator economy has a significant stronghold on the American economy. Digital creators and social media influencers — who generate content and build audiences for a living — now account for more than one in 10 full-time internet-dependent jobs in the U.S. That same IAB study found that the number of digital creator jobs have increased 7.5 times since 2020.
“Creators don’t think of the people that they spend time with as their audience. They feel like they have some form of relationship,” Craig said. “There’s a very big difference between MrBeast’s community and Brad Pitt’s fans.”
Challenges remain
But there are still hurdles when it comes to this industry, the biggest being the lack of consistent measurement tools. Whereas television has Nielsen ratings to tell advertisers how many people their ad reached, the creator economy doesn’t have a set audience measurement standard. It’s that lack of solid numbers that keeps brands that are already wary of the creator ecosystem away. Waller noted that creators are still viewed as “lesser” both in Hollywood and “honestly, still with advertisers.”
“It can’t just be fluffy stuff that you then can’t prove,” Waller said. To try and remedy this, Waller has partnered with data measurement companies like Nielsen, Alter Analytics and Kantar Media.
There is also a ceiling, albeit a high one, to being a creator. Even MrBeast and Charli D’Amelio have tried their hand at traditional film and television projects. Expanding into traditional media allows creators to broaden their audience and potentially partner with more traditional celebrities, which can mean more money. “Hollywood is best at building IP and making value from that. That’s what creators are trying to do. What creators understand is the modern-day speed and cost of making and distributing to audiences,” Waller explained.
There’s also interest on the other side. “People in Hollywood are interested in the creator economy, specifically the ambition, adaptability and close connection creators have to their audiences,” a production head for film and TV told TheWrap.
If the buzz at Cannes Lions is any indication, those conversations are just beginning.