The creator economy heat check: What’s hot (and not) for the rest of 2025

Said pie is expected to reach $480 billion by 2027, per Goldman Sachs projections, so the land grab makes sense. 

To help make heads or tails of the shifts happening in the marketplace, Alexander Lee, senior entertainment media reporter, and Krystal Scanlon, platforms reporter, join the Digiday Podcast to parse through what’s in, what’s out and who’s getting paid in the creator economy right now.

Also on this episode, what the Trump administration’s greenlight of the $8 billion union of Paramount and Skydance signals for mergers and acquisitions, and trickle down effects of the White House AI Action Plan on marketing and advertising. 

Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Lee and Scanlon, which have been edited for length and clarity. 

OUT: Esports, diversity and TikTok ban worries

Lee: One thing that I would say is definitely out is esports—at least in the sense of competitive gaming, with gamers playing at the highest level for large prize pools. I don’t think that that’s going to see a resurgence anytime soon. A lot of the businesses that previously cut their teeth in esports have pivoted to creators with varying levels of success. So these businesses are not necessarily doomed, but esports as a concept is something that advertisers are just not interested in anymore.

McCoy: There’s a couple of creators that are feeling the squeeze here, to your point—marginalized creators, but you’ve also got general lifestyle creators that I’m seeing feel the squeeze as that [preference for] nicheness continues…For all of the money that’s being poured into this space, it’s not being divvied up to those people and they’re being squeezed out of this space. And that’s even if they have a platform to come to. Because in the first half of this year, we had the TikTok ban, and now we’ve got that’s been pushed back. Krystal, remind me, is it three times at this point?

Scanlon: Three times and counting. It’s such a non-subject. It’s to the point, it’s boring for me, it’s boring for everyone. No one discusses it anymore, just because I think it’s just been kicked down the can so many times now. If it went away, creators would hate it, especially the ones that rely on it. However, when we talk about it, is it actually going to happen? 

IN: LinkedIn, B2B creators and creator AORs

Lee: LinkedIn is a platform that is viewed as a huge opportunity by both influencers and influencer marketers right now. There’s a couple of reasons why: One reason is because LinkedIn is pushing creators very hard. It is constantly tweaking its algorithm, rolling out new measurement metrics for creators, flushing out the options for posting new types of content—video and all of these things have brought more creators who were previously most active on Instagram and Tiktok onto the platform. In addition to that, we’ve seen the rise of this B2B creator, whose main key performance metrics are very different from a standard creator that a brand might work with.

Scanlon: Basically, brands no longer want to work with agencies ad-hoc on single campaigns. They’re looking for longer term partnerships with an agency that can effectively oversee their entire creator marketing strategy. The part where it might get a little bit of friction, ad-hoc, depends on how that dynamic is laid out if you’ve got a media agency, a social agency and a creator agency all in that mix. Because a lot of what the creator agency of record does is very much an overlap with what a social agency does.