The Creator Economy Isn't a Passing Trend —You're Just Watching 1995 Happen Again

I keep hearing the same dismissal.

"The creator economy is a bubble." "It's just influencers with ring lights." "Wait until the ad money dries up."

These are the exact words people used about the internet in 1995.

In February of that year, Newsweek published an article titled "The Internet? Bah!" Clifford Stoll wrote: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

He called predictions of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms "absurdity."

Seventeen years later, Newsweek stopped printing and became exclusively available online.

The pattern isn't new. The blindness is.

You're Not Seeing What's Actually Being Built

When you hear "creator economy," you think influencer. Someone with a camera and a brand deal.

That framing is already obsolete.

MrBeast employs over 250 people. Writers, editors, producers, logistics coordinators. His production budgets exceed $5 million per video. His Amazon Prime show Beast Games cost more than $100 million to make.

His consumer brand Feastables hit $200 million in annual revenue faster than any consumer packaged goods brand in history. Venture capital firms valued it at over $500 million in its last funding round.

This isn't a guy with a webcam.

This is a media infrastructure being rebuilt from first principles. The team running his empire is 400 people deep, with monthly payroll around $5 million.

You're watching traditional media companies get outbuilt by people who started with a YouTube channel.

The Money Tells You What's Real

When smart money moves, it's not chasing trends. It's repositioning for structural shifts.

The creator economy is worth $191.55 billion right now. Projections put it at $528 billion by 2030. Some models go higher—$1.3 trillion by 2033, growing at 23.3% annually.

That's not incremental growth. That's category redefinition.

Advertising spending on creators in the U.S. hit $37 billion in 2025, up from $13.9 billion four years ago. That's a 26% increase compared to 2024 ad spend—four times the growth rate of ad spending across the entire media industry.

Merger and acquisition activity reached a record high in 2025, with 81 deals completed during the year. That's a 17.4% increase from 2024.

Beast Industries raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. E.l.f. Beauty acquired Hailey Bieber's Rhode for $1 billion.

When private equity and Fortune 500 companies write billion-dollar checks, the "fad" narrative collapses.

The Pattern You're Missing

The skeptics aren't wrong because they lack data. They're wrong because they're using the wrong frame.

In 1995, people evaluated the internet through the lens of existing media. They asked: "Can this replace my newspaper?" The answer was no, so they dismissed it.

They missed that the internet wasn't replacing newspapers. It was creating an entirely different infrastructure for information distribution.

The same mistake is happening now.

People ask: "Can creators replace traditional media companies?" The answer is no, so they stop thinking.

But creators aren't replacing traditional media. They're building a parallel infrastructure with fundamentally different economics.

Traditional media: High fixed costs, centralized production, distribution through gatekeepers, revenue tied to advertising or subscriptions.

Creator infrastructure: Variable costs, decentralized production, direct audience relationships, revenue from multiple streams—ads, products, services, equity.

The business models aren't comparable. You're watching two different systems operate under different rules.

What Actually Separates Signal from Noise

Most people building in the creator economy will fail. That's true.

Most people building on the internet in 1995 also failed. That didn't make the internet a fad.

The question isn't whether everyone succeeds. The question is whether the infrastructure being built is durable.

Here's what matters:

Creators are using content as zero-CAC customer acquisition. They're not monetizing attention directly. They're building audiences and converting them into customers for actual businesses with defensible economics.

The production sophistication is increasing, not decreasing. Teams are growing. Budgets are expanding. The operational complexity rivals traditional media companies.

The capital is getting smarter, not dumber. Early money chased vanity metrics. Current money is funding infrastructure, tools, and businesses with clear unit economics.

The distribution advantage is structural, not temporary. Platforms reward direct relationships. Algorithms favor consistent output. Creators who build audiences own an asset that traditional media companies have to rent.

This isn't hype. This is infrastructure.

The Real Risk Isn't the Bubble—It's Being Late

The people dismissing the creator economy today will be the same people scrambling to understand it in three years.

I've seen this pattern before. The skeptics aren't stupid. They're just operating with outdated models.

They see influencers and think "marketing channel." They see YouTube and think "video platform." They see brand deals and think "temporary arbitrage."

They miss that the infrastructure being built is **non-substitutable** for a specific class of business.

If you're building something that requires direct audience relationships, rapid iteration, and multi-stream monetization, there's no traditional alternative that gives you the same leverage.

The creator economy isn't competing with traditional media. It's absorbing the functions traditional media used to serve and adding capabilities that didn't exist before.

What This Means for You

If you're building in this space, the dismissals are actually useful.

They tell you where the market still has room to move. When everyone agrees something is obvious, the opportunity is gone. When half the room thinks you're wrong, you're probably early.

The people who won in 1995 weren't the ones who waited for consensus. They were the ones who saw the infrastructure being built and understood what it made possible.

The same dynamic is happening now.

You can dismiss it as a fad. You can wait for more proof. You can keep using the old models to evaluate the new infrastructure.

Or you can recognize that the skeptics are making the same mistake twice.

The internet didn't need permission to become inevitable. Neither does this.