As social media platforms increasingly rely on algorithmic feeds, content creators are navigating a significant shift: a large follower count no longer guarantees audience visibility. This new reality means that simply posting content doesn't ensure it reaches a creator's dedicated fanbase.

"I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely," LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch. While this trend isn't entirely new—Patreon CEO Jack Conte has been vocal about it for years—the broader industry, from influencers to streamers, is now reacting to this phenomenon in diverse ways.

Executives interviewed by TechCrunch about the future of the creator economy indicate that creators are developing innovative methods to cultivate and maintain relationships with their audiences. Some see themselves as an antidote to "AI slop," while others are inadvertently contributing to a new form of content saturation.

Rebuilding Trust in a Fragmented Landscape

LTK, Box's company, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on product recommendations. This business model thrives on audience trust in individual creators. A fragmentation of these relationships could pose an existential threat to their operations.

However, a study commissioned by LTK from Northwestern University revealed a surprising outcome: trust in creators increased by 21% year-over-year. "If you asked me at the beginning of 2025, 'Hey, is trust in creators going to go up or down?' I would have probably said down, because people understand it's an industry—they understand how it's working," Box remarked. "But actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences."

Box explained that consumers are now more inclined to actively seek out content from creators they know and trust. This sentiment is echoed by chief marketing officers, with 97% planning to increase their influencer marketing budgets in the coming year.

Yet, cultivating these direct relationships is far from straightforward. LTK creators, reliant on affiliate income, are banking on AI-induced skepticism to drive audiences toward more direct engagement, such as paid fan communities or less algorithmic platforms like LTK itself. For other creators, including streamers, video podcasters, and short filmmakers, audience ownership strategies often lean more towards aggressive growth hacking.

Teenage Clipping Armies: The New Growth Hack

Sean Atkins, CEO of short-form video production company Dhar Mann Studios, articulated the challenge: "In a world that's driven by AI and algorithms, where people trust another human being more in this micro atomization of attention, how do you market when you sort of can't control that?"

According to Eric Wei, co-founder of Karat Financial, a financial services company for creators, a novel strategy has emerged: "teenage clipping armies." Creators pay groups of teenagers on Discord to create short clips of their content, which these teenagers then mass-post across various algorithmic platforms.

"That's been going on for a bit," Wei explained, citing examples like Drake and top Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, who have leveraged this tactic to achieve millions of impressions. "If it's algorithmically determined, clipping suddenly makes sense, because it can come from any random account that just has really good clips."

Wei anticipates clipping will gain further traction this year as a direct response to the fragmentation of social media relationships. Even prominent creators struggle to reach their fans directly, making clipping an attractive solution. While a large follower count can aid virality, algorithmic feeds can distribute a video widely regardless of the poster's track record. Clippers earn money based on the views their highlight reels generate.

"Clipping feels like an evolution of meme accounts," Glenn Ginsburg, president of QYOU Media, told TechCrunch. "It's become a race among many creators to try and take this content and push it out far and wide, almost competing to see who can get the most views on the same IP."

Reed Duchscher, founding CEO of Night—a talent management company representing Kai Cenat and other leading creators—is renowned for coaching creators on maximizing virality. As MrBeast's former manager, Duchscher played a key role in shaping the fast-paced, attention-grabbing style that transformed MrBeast into a digital empire. He also supports Kai Cenat's clipping strategy, though he expresses some reservations about its broader scalability.

"Clipping is important if you're a creator, because you do need to flood the zone with content, and it's a good way to get your face out there," Duchscher acknowledged. "It's also very hard to get to scale, because there's only so many clippers on the internet, so to spend large media budgets... there's just a lot of complications." The effectiveness of clipping might also depend on it not becoming so widespread that it's perceived as spam.

"The creator wins because they get more of their content out," Wei summarized. "The clippers win because now this army of teenagers are getting paid. Everybody wins, except that if you take this to its logical conclusion, we just get lots and lots of slop."

The More Niche, the Better

The proliferation of "slop"—low-quality, often AI-generated content—on social media has become such a concern that Merriam-Webster named "slop" its word of the year.

"Over 94% of people are saying that social media is no longer social, and over half of them are rotating time elsewhere into smaller niche communities that they know are real and that they can talk to and interact with," Box noted, pointing to platforms like Strava, LinkedIn, and Substack as examples of this shift.

As maintaining creator-audience relationships grows more challenging, Duchscher predicts greater success for creators with highly specific niches. He believes that "macro creators" like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D'Amelio, who command hundreds of millions of followers, will become increasingly difficult to emulate.

Citing success stories such as Alix Earle or Outdoor Boys, who boast millions of followers without necessarily having mass appeal, Duchscher added, "Algorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want. It's much harder for a creator to break out into every niche algorithm."

Atkins concurs, emphasizing that the creator economy extends far beyond entertainment. "The creator economy generally is viewed through this lens of entertainment. I think that's a mistake, because thinking about the creator economy is a little bit like thinking about the internet or AI—it's going to affect everything."

He offered Epic Gardening as a prime example. What began as a YouTube channel has evolved into a tangible force in the gardening world. "Epic Gardening bought the third largest seed company in the United States, so now he's the third largest seed company [owner], as a content creator," Atkins highlighted.

Despite being in a state of flux, the creator economy is a resilient industry. It has a long history of adapting to the unpredictable nature of algorithms, persisting for decades even if newcomers perceive it as a nascent field. "Creators are literally impacting everything," Atkins concluded. "I bet you there's a creator who's an expert at cement mixing for skyscrapers."