Many brands rank creators in their affiliate programmes by the number of posts. Whoever publishes the most sits at the top of the funnel and gets the biggest budget.
Liam Dean, founder of the agency For You, which focuses on selling through TikTok Shop, described this logic on LinkedIn. According to him, however, the number of posts will soon run dry, both for creators and for the brands that rely on them.
His starting point was a line from the London CreatorFest. “Creators need to think like studios, not people posting for views,” said Grace Andrews, a creator and former brand and editorial director of the London agency Flight Story, according to Dean.
Two tiers of creators and the cost of high frequency
Dean divides creators into two tiers. The first contains Momentum creators, of whom there are many and who are easy to activate. The second contains Taste makers, whose audiences follow them for their own sake.
According to him, moving between the tiers does not come from higher frequency. A Momentum creator does not become a Taste maker by adding more posts of the same kind.
Brands make the same mistake in reverse. They give all creators the same brief and expect the mass of frequent publishers to start behaving commercially like the top tier. Then they wonder why it does not happen.
The chase for numbers has a measurable cost. According to the Creator Mental Health Study, which the Creators 4 Mental Health initiative published in November 2025 among 542 North American creators, 62% of them experience burnout and 69% obsessively track the performance figures of their content.
A format, a tested hook and a consistent point of view
What moves a creator from the first tier to the second, according to Dean, is repeatability. A format that can be run again. A hook structure the creator has tested. An opinion consistent enough that the audience comes to expect it from that person. That is how a stream of posts becomes a system.
Andrews framed this at CreatorFest in terms of ownership. According to a report by the Hello Partner portal, she argued that ownership of rights to content moves creators from renting an audience to owning it. A creator with their own rights owns an asset that does not disappear with the reach of a single post.
Capital is moving towards rights to content
That this is more than rhetoric is shown by the money. It is also a different pile of money from brand budgets for individual posts. Here, the payment is for the rights to an entire show. In May 2026, Spotify and Netflix agreed a deal worth up to $100 million over several years with podcaster Jay Shetty. Netflix received exclusive rights to the video version of his show On Purpose, and Spotify received the audio.
Shetty left YouTube, where he had a channel with 5.6 million subscribers, for this deal. According to Tubefilter, three other companies were also bidding for the show with offers in the hundreds of millions of dollars. His show is therefore being licensed in much the same way as a film studio’s catalogue.
The market for such assets is growing. According to data from the advisory firm Quartermast Advisors, 70 acquisitions took place in the creator economy in the first half of 2026, 23% more than in the same period of 2025.
Alongside media and talent companies, technology companies have also appeared among the buyers. OpenAI bought the TBPN show and HubSpot bought the Futurepedia service. Content rights and the tools for monetising them are being bought as a separate asset class.
The European context and brand budgets
The debate is not confined to the United States. CreatorFest, where the line about studios was spoken, took place in July 2026 in London and addresses the European market of brands, creators and platforms.
For a European brand director who splits a budget among dozens of creators, this shifts the selection criterion. It moves from the number of posts to whether the creator has a format that holds up and that their audience recognises.
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