Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter. If you’ve received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.
If the latter – and you want to subscribe, get it here!
This Week: It’s December and that means we’re just a month away from my annual trends and signals for the coming three years (due between Christmas and New Years), along with the 1 Billion Followers Summit in January in Dubai! I handpicked over 100 speakers across 50 sessions, and you’re going to love every one! See you there?
TOP STORIES
UNLEASH THE BEAST!
Mr Beast apologizes for some of his recent videos, calling them “not as good as I wanted”. He promises “ultra grind mode” will deliver “the greatest content of my life in 2026”. I wonder if that means he’ll back off from so many personal appearances and ancillary revenue streams to focus 100% on content. Perhaps his appearance at 1 Billion Followers Summit in January will signal the end of his global gallivanting. Whatever he does in 2026, I’ll be eagerly watching! (X. 1BFS)
THERE’S GOTTA BE A BETTER WAY
YouTube took nearly a year to finally admit it was wrong to cancel creator Norse797, and his account with nearly 110,000 subscribers for “spam and defective practices”. All because of a stray comment he made at 13 on an old account he abandoned years ago – after never uploading a thing. At least this story has a somewhat happy ending, as an untold number of other banned accounts remain in limbo without a human appeals process with a shred of decency and common sense. Yes, YouTube’s scale is massive and eliminating bad actors is absolutely essential. But why do so many undeserving creators become collateral damage? I would love to hear from YouTube about how they are trying to fix this. (Yahoo, X)
AI EXTENDS THE MATH-BASED MEDIA REVOLUTION
Fascinating essay from @Doug Shapiro arguing that AI isn’t a rogue breakthrough, it’s just the next stop on the media digitization through-line. We began by chopping words up into 128 characters with 7-bit ASCII, then carved images into 8-bit black-and-white pixels (which, amusingly, still gave us about 2.6 times more nuance than those “99 shades of grey”), and eventually cut audio up into 12-bit samples.
AI works differently. Instead of dumb samples, it uses tokens and something called latent space, which is basically a mathematical map of everything the model has learned. Rather than a pixel being just a pixel, a token sits inside a shared semantic space, a spider-web of relationships showing how ideas connect. “Apple” isn’t just a word, it’s mapped near “banana,” “orchard,” and “fruit bowl,” and far away from “semiconductor” unless context pulls them together (thanks, Steve Jobs).
Image diffusion models do a similar trick. They don’t generate pictures by poking pixels; they sample from that shared semantic space, where “a cat in a window at dusk” is already a pattern the model can navigate. The model moves through that space and snaps the result back into an image.
This shift from media as discrete bits to media as continuous meaning changes the game. Digitization made distribution continuous. AI makes creation continuous, argues Shapiro. Any length, any form, any variation can be spun from the same underlying meaning-map. For creators and media companies, the leverage away from the purveyors of bits toward whoever controls the models, the data, and the interfaces that help people navigate that space.
Although not technically “media,” live IRL events give us a rare human-only break from this increasingly over-quantized world. If you can take it in with your own senses instead of via a glowing rectangle, you’re getting the real thing. And for everyone who questioned my Math/Mass Communications double major at UVM… “Told you so!” (The Mediator)
- Related: The Slop Tsunami begins with audio. With 3,000 AI generated episodes each week, what could possibly go wrong? (WPN)
- Quote of the Week: From @Rex Woodbury musing on Nano-Banana Pro: “AI-generated content is about to explode—much of it slop, but some of it breathtaking—and we’ll need new places to discover and monetize it” (Digital Native)
B2B BUYERS TRUST PEOPLE, NOT BRANDS
LinkedIn’s new B2B Buyer Report reads like a user manual for why creator-led insight now beats brand messaging. Buyers trust expert voices, do most of their research before ever talking to sales, and reward clear, personality-driven analysis over corporate wallpaper. It’s basically proof that the creator economy has invaded B2B, and that smart brands should be showing up where the real industry operators are. Like, say, this newsletter. (Download Full Report)
- Related: Don’t miss the excerpt from the full report that lays out the pros and cons of B2B events! (LinkedIn)
SPONSOR
Why Sponsor Inside the Creator Economy: LinkedIn’s new B2B Buyer Report (highlighted above) makes the case better than I ever could: buyers trust expert voices more than brands, and they spend most of their research time reading the people who actually understand the space. That’s exactly my audience: marketers, media execs, founders, top creators and operators who shape budgets and make decisions.
A weekly sponsorship puts your company inside a trusted, high-intent environment, shows up repeatedly where it actually matters, and aligns your brand with the point-of-view content buyers say moves them. If you want to speak to the people building the next wave of media, creators, and AI, this is where they show up every week.
Drop me an email and check out our sponsorship information here.
PLATFORMS
YOUTUBE
Testing Feed Customization: YouTube’s working on a way to give users more control over their feed. Yes, please! (YouTube)
Related: Changes to the feed and “shockingly bad” search can’t happen too soon, according to this insightful rant. (MakeUseOf)
SlopTube: YouTube expands access to AI tools for creators. (SocialMediaToday)
Thanks Team! CEO Neal calls out 17 new features launched in the last month. (@neal_mohan)
META
Is Longer Better? You can now post 20-minute reels on Instagram. That doesn’t mean you should. (SocialMediaToday)
Cancel Facebook: Top social media analyst @Matt Navarra says it’s time to delete Facebook from your world. (Geekout)
Related: Probably not a bad idea to drop Facebook. Meta’s own quietly cancelled research suggested people’s mental health improves when they do. (CNBC)
TIKTOK
Happy December! Just 14 days until the latest extension of the TikTok ban law expires. (TikTok Countdown Clock)
Creators + Brands TikTok keeps pitching the idea that creators drive brand impact. The usual caveats apply, but worth a read. (TikTok)
QUIBIS
OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY
Dinosaurs Mating? Omnicom just swallowed IPG at the exact moment the market is shifting toward creators, AI-driven performance, and brands building in-house content studios. “Bigger” might not age well. (Axios)
Can’t Hide Anymore: The era of fake reach is over, according to @jeremy Boissinot, and I’m all for it. (LinkedIn)
Boxxywood? Roblox is making a big bet on India for game development and users too. (High Chaos Run)
Great Name: New service turns YouTube tutorials into step-by-step interactive learning experiences. The first 3 are free. (Tubedummies)
Followers Are Dead: An exhaustive look at what other metrics might matter for creators and brands, although it is still clear conversion needs work. (NoGood)
The Value of B2B Events: LinkedIn’s marketing blog lays out the pros and cons of B2B events, as part of its B2B Buying report. The full report also details why “trusted voices” (like this newsletter) beat brand messaging for driving buying decisions. (LinkedIn)
Grow Your Discord! What’s the best way to bring in new members to your Discord? It’s not reviews, those never work. Instead bumps and paying are your golden keys. Community One lays out the top 7 server lists and how you can leverage them. (Community One)
Not Just in Hollywood: Creators also seeing crossover media success in India. (Social Nation)
CREATOR TECH – AI, AR, VR, MORE
Nice Guys DO Finish First: Congrats to @Hank Green for winning the “App of the Year” with “Focus Friend” (Google)
Shots Fired: Adobe buys SEO and analytics platform SEMRush, another signal that AI Search offers a real opportunity to beat back Google. (SBC News)
Compute Must Double Every 6 Months: Google’s head of AI infrastructure asks his team to do the nearly impossible. (CNBC)
Related: A longish discussion of Pinterest’s decade of ML development concludes that “The next phase of AI at Pinterest will depend on how quickly we can evolve efficiency, velocity, and enablement.” Consistent with what Google’s AI chief said above (Medium)
AI Knows You: Ex YouTube creative launches Palo, “the first Personal AI for creators”. I couldn’t test it, as I don’t have over 100k followers on YT+IG+TT, so if you give it a whirl, let me know how it works. (Palo.AI – HT @Publish Press)
Shopping Comes to ChatGPT: New “Shopping Research” feature brings product comparisons to ChatGPT. Unfortunately, it lacks context and the ability to think outside the prompt. I asked it to “find the best camera for a LinkedIn Creator” and it came up with a variety of good choices, ultimately recommending Sony’s Alpha ZV-E10. Yet it completely ignored the best answer: either a Pixel 10 Pro or an Iphone 17. (OpenAI)
RESEARCH
Edelman’s AI Trust Barometer
Edelman’s new AI Flash Poll hides a surprisingly positive insight for anyone building in the creator economy. First, the downside: in the U.S., people are more than twice as likely to reject AI as embrace it. But don’t miss the surprising insight buried deep in the charts. The most trusted voices on AI aren’t CEOs or institutions… they’re “someone like me.” In other words, creators.
Platforms and brands can keep pitching “AI for everyone” (OpenAI’s recent ads don’t exactly help), but creators may be the ones who shift public perception. When people personally experience AI helping them understand something complex, trust jumps by as much as 40+ points. That turns explainers, demos, and real-life use cases into the killer app for AI… delivered, again, by “someone like me.” Hey AI companies: Stop harping on the inevitable and hire some creators to show how it actually helps. (Edelman)
Creator Economy-AI Research Extends Edelman’s Findings
When it comes to creators, AI is scaling creativity, but trust continues to fall. Influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy found that 80% of marketers increased their AI creator-spend this year (and plan to go even further next year), but consumer preference for AI-generated creator content fell off a cliff… from 60% in 2023 to 26% today. Why? All that AI slop clogging up their feeds.
Creators keep charging ahead, as 80% say AI reduces workload and boosts earnings, and nearly 90% are increasing their AI-generated output. But AI is primarily used to conceptualize and prototype, not for the end product. Also more than half of creators admit to violating AI labelling rules. (Billion Dollar Boy).
Creators Are Burning Out at Scale
A new study finds that 1 in 10 report suicidal thoughts, two-thirds face anxiety or depression, and a staggering 89% lack any specialized mental-health support. This is a huge warning shot for an industry built on a hamster-wheel of “always on” servitude to the almighty algorithm, without any of the safety nets found in other high-pressure occupations. Note: This wasn’t a random survey. Creators were recruited through a few specific partner orgs, including the sponsor. Useful directionally, but not predictive.
Where’s Jim? Home until New Years Eve, then off to Dubai to produce the 1 Billion Followers Summit Economy Track! See you there?
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100% written by me. AI used very sparingly for edits.
I’ve built and sold multiple creator economy startups to top media companies – including an MCN to Discovery and VidCon to Paramount. Subscribe here on LinkedIn to get this newsletter every Monday.
Let me know what you think – email me at jim@louderback.com. Thanks for reading and see you around the internet.
