When Stanislav Hruška left Seznam years ago and built the subscription-based Talk TV around StandaShow, it was a textbook illustration of a thesis that every other conference has repeated since. The creator is no longer a supplier of content but a media outlet. Their own audience, their own channel, their own revenue. The figures from the last year appear, at first glance, to confirm the story, and at the same time they contradict it.
Advertising spend in the creator economy in the US is expected to reach $37 billion in 2025, growing 26% year on year, according to the IAB in its 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report. That is roughly four times faster than the media market as a whole, which grows by 5.7%.
The segment has more than doubled in three years, from $13.9 billion (2021) to $29.5 billion (2024), and for 2026 the IAB estimates $44 billion.
“Leveraging the Creator Economy to connect with audiences is no longer experimental for marketers. It's essential,” said David Cohen, CEO of IAB.
The consensus is complete, and budgets are following it. But the budget that brands pour into the segment and the money that eventually ends up with a specific creator are two different numbers. And between them stands the one who holds the distribution.
Who actually lives off the growth
Money flows into the segment, but it does not spread out. According to the State of Creator Compensation report from CreatorIQ, in 2025 the top 10% of creators received 62% of all payments, compared with 53% in 2023. The share of the top 1% jumped from 15% to 21% over the same period.
The median creator earned $3,000, even though the average per campaign came to $11,400. The growing pie is therefore being taken by an ever narrower group.
For a brand entering the segment, this changes the brief. Budget growth does not mean that a thousand new partners are opening up. It means that competition for the same top tier of names, which already takes most of the money, is intensifying.
Where the friction is
The IAB itself accompanies its budget optimism with a list of what still does not work. “The creator marketing ecosystem is still highly fragmented, with varying partnership models, siloed budgets, and limited standardization making it tough for marketers to assess things like audience fit or creator credibility at scale,” said Zoe Soon, VP at the IAB Experience Center, speaking to Marketing Dive.
A third of advertisers name simply “finding the right creator” as the main problem. And the report itself notes that “brands still struggle to identify the right creators, measure business outcomes, manage rights, and repeat what works.”
The whole dispute is hidden in the phrase “manage rights”. Whoever holds the rights and the distribution holds the lever. And for now that lever lies somewhere other than with the creator.
Platforms still hold the distribution
The best evidence of how the whole segment is built comes from YouTube's own numbers. It says it has paid creators, artists and media companies over $70 billion over the past three years, as it stated in June 2025 on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. That figure is different from brands' advertising budgets: it is a direct flow from one platform to creators, and by far the largest in the world. At the same time, it is a dependence. That payout flows through one algorithm, one set of monetisation rules and one interface, which the creator neither owns nor changes.
Even MrBeast, the name cited as proof that the creator has outgrown television, built his flagship competition on Amazon, not on his own platform. Prime Video extended his Beast Games competition by two further seasons in May 2025, and the show streams exclusively on Prime Video in more than 240 countries, with a $10 million prize in the first series. The creator supplied the audience and the format. Reach and budget came from the streaming service.
Investors treat them as startups and act accordingly
The most precise reading of this thesis comes from capital. In February 2025 Slow Ventures announced a $60 million fund dedicated to financing creators directly, with cheques of $1 million to $3 million per creator. The fund targets those with “ambitions to build companies tailor-made for their passionate communities”. Here the creator is treated as a founder, the audience as a market, and the career as a cap table.
Here “creators are the new startups” holds literally true. It also contains the other half that hype leaves out. A startup means outside capital, dilution and shared control over what gets built. A creator who accepts such financing gains infrastructure for growth, but at the same time stops being the sole owner of the equation. That is the real form that taking control of media takes today. The creator becomes a company, with everything that goes with a company, including outside shareholders.
The Czech picture is smaller, but the same
In Czechia the same dynamic looks similar on a smaller scale. Podcast advertising reached $2.862 billion in the US in 2025, growing 17.6% year on year, according to the IAB and PwC report. Digital audio as a whole reached $8.4 billion, with growth of 10.2%. The format on which a Czech creator such as Hruška builds is therefore growing as an advertising channel too, not just as content to listen to.
Talk TV is the Czech version of the whole thesis in one place. A creator who built his own distribution and subscriptions, and in doing so freed himself from dependence on a single algorithm. But he remains a smaller player alongside established streaming services, and his model stands or falls with one name. That is precisely the price of independence that the global figures show on a large scale.
For a brand director, this produces a more sober brief than the one offered from a conference stage. There is genuinely money in the segment, and it is growing faster than elsewhere. But it is distributed unevenly, and the key to reach is still held by the platform or the investor. A creator becomes a media outlet exactly to the extent that they secure distribution and rights, and so far only a few have managed that.
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