The word creator has become part of the everyday vocabulary of marketers, investors and the media in recent years. The creator economy is no longer a marginal phenomenon but a multi-layered ecosystem with its own economic logic. But the more often we use the word creator, the more its meaning blurs.
A creator is a person whose primary product is the content itself, around which an audience, distribution and monetisation develop. This is where the economic logic begins that distinguishes the creator economy from influencer marketing.
According to estimates, Goldman Sachs expects the value of the creator economy to reach about $480 billion by 2027. And this is not just about sponsored posts. It is about newsletters, podcasts, courses, communities, content licensing, own products, live streams and increasingly direct media formats that compete with traditional publishers.
The four faces of a creator
Defining exactly who a creator is, is not simple at all. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University mapped more than 40,000 names across 24 countries in its October 2025 report and offered its own definition:
“Individuals (or sometimes small groups of individuals) who create and distribute content primarily through social and video networks and have some impact on public debates around news and current affairs. News creators are independent from wider news institutions for at least some of their news output.”
It immediately adds that the boundaries between categories are extremely unclear in practice. Many creators, moreover, naturally cross them or change over time. Nevertheless, it identified four basic types.
Commentators are the most visible. Political talk shows on YouTube, podcasts with millions of listeners and opinion channels competing with prime-time television. Next are investigators. They work less visibly, but all the more importantly: citizen journalists, authors of long-term investigations and fact-checkers whose work would often not have come about in traditional newsrooms. A third type are explainers, who translate complex topics into a language that works on platforms. For example, Hugo Travers, known as HugoDécrypte , has more followers on TikTok in France than traditional media brands. The last type are specialists. They build deep community media around a specific topic: Fabrizio Romano, whom 27 million people follow on X, is a more credible source on football transfers than most sports newsrooms.
The creator as a new media player
According to Digital News Report 2025, roughly one in five adults in the USA regularly follows a creator or influencer for news, and more than a third of young people under thirty do. Media are responding to this change. 77% of editors-in-chief admit they are actively working to make their journalists behave more like creators and build their own audiences.
YouTube alone contributed more than $55 billion to US GDP in 2024, according to research by Oxford Economics.
This is exactly why the creator economy is growing. More and more people have managed to build sustainable media businesses outside traditional structures. You can read more about how this economy works as a whole in this article.
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