Why a Half-a-Trillion-Dollar Creator Economy Is Just the Beginning

As creators become more entrepreneurial, advertisers look to up their spending next year on digital on the heels of Cannes Lions

By Kayla Cobb and Tess Patton

The Mandala Beach on the Cannes Croisette was a hive of budding business activity at the Lions Creativity festival this month. Sure, the Madison Avenue brands were strutting, as usual, and everyone had their smartest-person-in-the-room patter down about AI.

But in terms of pure follow the money, it was creators who won the week. At marketing firm Influential’s space at the Mandala Beach, rising influencer Amanda Dimoldenberg (3.1 million subscribers on YouTube) held court alongside Dhar Mann (25.4 million subscribers on YouTube), while huge stars like will.i.am and Jason Derulo performed. A few hundred feet down the beach, you found Kai Cenat (19.3 million TikTok followers) and Alix Earle (7.5 million followers) in the center of activity.

The creator economy is now a $185 billion industry — and is about to become a half-a-trillion-dollar rising behemoth.

“We are sitting in the heart of what used to be, or still is, an epicenter of the film industry, and the conversation around creativity is centered on the entire creator track,” Kenny Gold, the managing director and head of social for Deloitte Digital, told TheWrap. “So in the biggest gathering of marketers in a given year, this is a sign that the creator economy continues to grow.”

Gold’s assessment isn’t unusual. The shift was apparent during this year’s upfronts, television’s annual gathering for advertisers in New York City. Despite flashy performances from entertainment mainstays like NBC and Disney, the most energy and excitement came from YouTube’s stage.

Anderson .Paak performs at the Spotify Beach concert featuring Cardi B, Lola Young and Mark Ronson during Cannes Lions 2025. (Dave Benett/Getty Images)

That excitement is an outgrowth of a creator industry that’s benefiting from a more robust support infrastructure, with bigger, more far-reaching agencies, new monetized creator programs and AI tools that are bringing down production costs. All of this has enabled more creators to think of themselves as entrepreneurs rather than just social media personalities, and advertisers are starting to notice.

“The landscape has evolved in such a vast way over the last 12 to 24 months where creators really are now media and entertainment companies at the tip of the spear,” Neil Waller, the co-CEO and co-founder of the social media and influencer agency the Whalar Group, told TheWrap.

The numbers back it up. Creators are estimated to generate $184.9 billion in revenue globally in 2025, up 20% from 2024, according to a report from WPP Media, formerly GroupM, while Goldman Sachs says it will hit $480 billion by 2027.

Waller noted that “most” of the conversations his team had with brands at Cannes Lions this year included plans to increase spend with creators “about 20 to 30%.” He also noted that many brands plan to invest in the space even more in 2026: “I think there will be another big leap.”

The evolution of the modern-day creator

For years, the creator economy was viewed by outsiders as a digital Wild West. Someone would post something online that would generate attention, and their friends would wonder how their silly videos paid the rent. Those days are long over.

“A lot of creators would use the words, ‘I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a business owner.’ That’s not something they would have said a few years ago,” Waller said. When Waller co-founded Whalar nine and a half years ago, he estimated that 95% of the creators he worked with had jobs and posted in their spare time. “Now, 95% of the creators we work with are full-time and start having employees and companies.”

A big reason for this shift has to do with creators like MrBeast, who set an example for how to transform a social following into a larger, diversified business. Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, isn’t just someone who has over 400 million YouTube subscribers and 188 million TikTok followers. He leveraged his fame to create the Feastables chocolate brand, the Lunchly snack brand and the virtual restaurant chain MrBeast Burger. In 2023, Forbes estimated he earned $82 million and that was before Prime Video’s “Beast Games.”

MrBeast in “Beast Games” (Prime Video)

While MrBeast gets all the attention, a legion of other creators are following in his footsteps with particular attention to the business element. Many are much smaller in reach — a 2023 NeoReach study found that 48% of creator-earners made $15,000 or less a year — but others are rolling the dice on investing in themselves and the resources they need.

“We saw [growth in the creator economy] a few years ago when creators were starting their own consumer brands, but now it’s not just that. They’re starting full-blown media companies,” Gohar Khan, a content creator who has 6.74 million YouTube subscribers, told TheWrap during YouTube’s Upfronts presentation. “That’s the path I want to take, and I foresee myself being there for the next 20 years.”

Khan has already taken steps toward his goal, purchasing a two-bedroom apartment that he transformed into a content studio for his channel Gohar’s Guide. Khan noted that the investment has already helped him bring his more ambitious ideas to life. But that increased studio space and his desire to bring on more hires also comes with “a bit of pressure.”

“I do want to bring in more people in-house. But with that comes the responsibility of sustaining the creator business well enough to also sustain their salaries,” Khan said. “That’s a pressure I think I’m ready for, but I know it’s going to come very soon.”

Mann has taken his YouTube content to the next level by building a 125,000-square-foot production campus in Los Angeles. The content creator, with a global social media following of over 136 million across 83 active channels, now employs nearly 200 people to bring his uplifting, family-friendly content to the “Dhar Mann Fam.”

“We’re seeing investments happening for growth where large private equity funds are taking interest in creators and studios and putting hundreds of millions of dollars investing in this space,” Mann told TheWrap. “I think the next stage of this is the mergers and acquisitions that are going to start to take place.”

Instead of simply responding to the latest viral trend, many creators now plan several episodes out ahead of time, developing a consistent content schedule that also gives them room for flexibility while depending on monetization from their existing library of content.

One of the reasons Goldman Sachs has such an ambitious target are the brand partnerships and potential merchandising opportunities that have emerged, with some creators taking brand interest a step further. For example, influencer Alix Earle took equity in prebiotic soda Poppi in exchange for becoming a brand ambassador ahead of its $1.95 billion acquisition and joined the team behind SipMargs as an investor, operator and “brand builder,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

“There’s just an infinite number of ways that [creators] have been able to monetize their social part of social media,” said USC Annenberg professor and former television executive David Craig told TheWrap. “That’s a very different economy and feature from what Hollywood does. Hollywood creates intellectual property.”

A more robust support system for creators

Harvard Business School professor John Deighton told TheWrap it was not until the last two to three years that enough infrastructure had been built to make the business model around the creator economy “feasible for someone to decide to give up their day job or supplement their day job with the creation of content.”

On the platform side, there’s been a reduction in flash-in-the-pan Creator Funds designed to draw in new creators. In place of these limited offerings, several platforms have launched more stable "Creator Programs." They often include revenue sharing and bonus options for creators who meet a specific criteria. For example, YouTube unlocks ad revenue for creators once they surpass 1,000 subscribers, while TikTok and Snapchat reward creators once they hit 10,000 followers and 50,000 followers, respectively.

Several platforms also now allow creators to make subscription-based content, which serves as an additional revenue stream. YouTube and TikTok currently have subscription offerings for creators, and Instagram lets creators place some content behind a paywall. There’s also the rise of AI tools, many of which are specifically designed to help creators brainstorm and bring down production costs.

“Social media ends up becoming much more of a kind of marketing strategy for them to build their online community,” Craig said of the new subscriber models.