Nina Špitálníková is an expert on Korea and the North Korean regime. In mid-April 2024 she launched a channel on the subscription platform Herohero, and according to Hospodářské noviny she gained around 2,000 subscribers within two weeks. They paid her CZK 176 a month. According to Forbes from summer 2025, she already had 3,500 paying users and monthly gross income of over CZK 500,000.
Her channel is a small, one-person operation. But it shows where value in the creator economy is moving: from reach to trust and expertise, for which a narrow audience is willing to pay directly.
Fatigue with the reach era
Brand consultant and co-founder of CULTISH Alexandra Manderstam writes in a LinkedIn post that “the traditional influencer era might be well and truly over.” According to her, the mood has turned over the past year. Luxury shopping videos and perfect homes, which used to work as aspiration, are now read in times of economic uncertainty more as a reminder of what an ordinary viewer cannot reach.
This also matches the data. Almost two-thirds of British Gen Z say social media does more harm than good, according to a March survey by the organisation More in Common and the think tank The New Britain Project, carried out for the National Education Union. Among Britons in general, 72% think social networks have a negative effect on young people.
Brands are spending more on creators
Budgets are nevertheless growing. According to EMARKETER, American brands will spend roughly $10.5 billion on influencer marketing in 2025, and that spending is set to rise to $13.7 billion by 2027. “Brands are investing in creators more than ever,” sums up Manderstam.
The brief is changing. Brands, she says, are looking for “expertise, targeted audiences, valuable content with a clear point of view, community and influence over just reach.” A narrow audience that trusts a creator therefore weighs more than a bare view count. Špitálníková, with her paying audience, is a different kind of partner for a client than a creator with a million anonymous followers.
Money is moving to smaller creators
Brands are also shifting budgets towards smaller accounts. Nano and micro creators now get 49.9% of American spending on creators, up from less than a fifth a few years ago, according to a February forecast by EMARKETER. Max Willens, EMARKETER's chief analyst, told the Creator Trends 2026 summit that the industry has “moved away from the legacy digital thinking of hunting for cheap reach”.
Back to the old internet
Manderstam talks about how “we're circling back to the old internet.” According to her, creators are taking the attention and trust they have built and “tuning it into a real body of work.” The model of direct subscriptions, which the American platform Patreon once opened up, is now a full business.
Substack, a platform for paid newsletters, raised $100 million in a Series C round in July 2025 at a valuation of $1.1 billion, and passed five million paid subscriptions, up from two million in 2023. Herohero builds on the same logic in Europe: creators set their own price, and the platform takes 10%.
Manderstam closes her text by saying that the next phases are “curated communities, showing up in real life, deeper content, content that actually teaches you something or makes you feel truly seen.” Špitálníková, Substack and Herohero all rest on the same principle. An audience that pays creators directly is smaller than anonymous reach, but easier for a client to measure.
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