Under a “Rise of the Creatopreneur” post that brand consultant Alexandra Manderstam shared on LinkedIn, one comment summed up why creators are turning into businesses.
Tobias Hoss, co-founder and adviser in the creator economy and a former McKinsey consultant, wrote that “The hardest part of building a business is distribution. Creators solved that first and are now building backwards into product. That is a completely different and more powerful sequence.”
That is the difference that makes a creator brand behave like a start-up. A traditional company builds a product and then spends heavily for years to find customers for it. A creator works the other way round. They already have an audience that trusts them before the product exists.
Streaming and YouTube have overtaken traditional TV
Data on television shows where attention has moved to the platforms creators control. According to Nielsen’s The Gauge, in May 2025 streaming surpassed the combined share of broadcast and cable for the first time, at 44.8% against 44.2% of time spent in front of the TV.
YouTube alone reached 12.5% of all TV viewing, which Nielsen described as the highest share ever recorded for a single streaming service. According to the same report, YouTube Main grew by more than 120% since 2021.
The market around it is growing. According to Goldman Sachs Research, the addressable creator economy market is expected to roughly double by 2027, from about $250 billion in 2023 to about $480 billion. Manderstam’s post cites an even higher estimate, a doubling to $500 billion by 2030. The estimates differ on the exact figure, but they agree that the market is growing steeply.
Unilever shifts spending to creators
What the market values access to audiences at is shown by who is paying for it now. On 14 March 2025, Unilever announced under its new CEO Fernando Fernandez that it would move half of its advertising budget to social media and creators, up from about 30% previously, and would begin working with twenty times as many influencers.
“There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said, according to eMarketer. A brand with its own production capacity and global distribution is buying access to audiences from individuals.
The product is built from the audience
The continuation of Hoss’s sentence, “building backwards into product”, has concrete figures. MrBeast runs the confectionery brand Feastables. According to investor documents obtained by Bloomberg, Feastables had revenue of $251 million in 2024 and a profit of more than $20 million. The media business, meaning the videos themselves, brought in comparable revenue of $246 million, but ended up with a loss of close to $80 million. The product built on the audience earned more than the content that audience created.
A smaller case goes the same way. Chamberlain Coffee, the coffee brand of YouTuber Emma Chamberlain, raised $7 million in June 2023 from investors including Volition Capital and United Talent Agency. It used the money for a range of packaged coffee and entry into US retail. The audience was there before the first pack of coffee.
The audience becomes a financeable asset
This is where the part begins that Josh Stein, founder of Attention Capital, opened in a comment under the post. “Launching a company off an audience takes working capital, and most creators fund that leap out of pocket or by selling equity early, which is a strange outcome for businesses with real revenue and a returning customer base,” he wrote. A creator with recurring income and a returning audience funds growth from their own pocket or sells equity too early.
A market is forming around this problem. Stein’s Attention Capital is built on a thesis summed up in the line “Private credit discipline applied to attention as an asset class. Audience behavior that repeats under stress is collateral.” In his view, an audience that behaves consistently even under pressure is collateral against which loans can be made.
That capital takes the form of both debt and equity sales, and the difference between them is fundamental. Spotter has deployed more than $1 billion to pay creators cash upfront in exchange for the rights to their older video content, while creators keep the income from new videos.
“Creators aren’t one-hit wonders. Their content has a long shelf life, and audiences continue to engage with it for years. That’s a fundamentally investable asset,” said Spotter CEO Aaron DeBevoise, according to Forbes.
MrBeast, by contrast, raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation by selling equity, according to the same article. With debt, a creator keeps ownership, while with an equity sale they give it up, and Stein points to exactly that difference.
A European case and missing infrastructure
That the model works outside the American YouTube market is shown by Steven.com, a company built around Steven Bartlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO. On 27 October 2025 it closed an eight-figure investment at a valuation of $425 million from Slow Ventures and Apeiron Investment Group. According to Podnews, it was “Europe’s biggest ever creator holding company fundraising round”. It includes the media division FlightStory, the podcast platform FlightCast and the investment arm FlightFund.
The difference from the United States lies in what is missing around such companies. Credit infrastructure that turns an audience into a pledgeable asset is so far emerging mainly in America. A European creator with the same numbers mostly funds the leap into product by selling equity or from their own pocket, which is the least favourable position that Stein describes.
Manderstam sums up creator diversification as founding companies, building communities and selling courses and memberships. What they share is one variable, audience attention. That can be bought, lent or sold, and whoever created it decides how much of the company built on it they keep.
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