TrendCore 07/26
🎯 The Great Consolidation of the Creator Economy
Happy Monday, Wavemakers!
A few weeks ago fellow Substack writer Sabrina Reed and I had a discussion about consolidation in the creator economy and she suggested I should write about it, so here we go.
1. The Platforms Are Consolidating Discovery
One of the clearest shifts is happening in discovery itself.
For the last decade, creators have largely been optimising for platform algorithms. First YouTube, then Instagram, then TikTok. Each platform had its own logic, and success meant learning how to work within that system.
But discovery is no longer just happening inside platforms. As we’ve discussed before, increasingly, it is being routed through AI systems that sit on top of them.
AI assistants are becoming the first place people ask questions. Instead of searching across multiple sources or scrolling through feeds, users increasingly expect a single synthesised answer.
And in that shift, something important is happening: creators are no longer just competing for visibility within a feed, they are competing to become part of the underlying knowledge layer those systems rely on.
In my latest Weekend Waves, I wrote about YouTube creators effectively becoming a “source layer” for AI-driven answers. When someone asks for recommendations, explanations or cultural context, AI systems don’t generate authority from scratch - they pull from existing voices they consider credible and consistent.
That subtly changes what “winning” looks like. Because it’s no longer just about audience size or even engagement. It’s about becoming the source AI trusts enough to repeat.
💡 Winning is no longer just about audience size. It’s about becoming the source AI trusts.
2. Money Is Consolidating Around Fewer Creators
The same pattern shows up in monetisation.
For most of the creator economy’s early phase, brand spending was experimental. Budgets were spread widely across creators, often driven by reach, aesthetics or novelty rather than performance.
That phase is clearly ending. What’s replacing it is not a reduction in spending, but a concentration of it.
Brands are becoming significantly more selective about where their money goes. Instead of testing broadly, they are concentrating budgets around fewer creators who can consistently demonstrate ROI, drive conversions, or build long-term brand value.
At the same time, vanity metrics are losing importance. Follower counts and raw views matter less than repeat performance and audience quality.
This is something I’ve noticed across multiple Weekend Waves stories: the language brands use is shifting from “reach” to “results,” from “campaigns” to “partnerships,” and from “experiments” to “systems.”
What’s happening here is not a reduction in spending. It’s a reallocation.
Money is flowing more heavily toward fewer creators - but those creators are becoming significantly more valuable as a result. And that leads to a very simple but important shift:
💡 The creator economy is no longer about growth or hype, but about selection.
🔓 Behind the Paywall: What Consolidation Looks Like in Practice
In the premium section, I go one layer deeper into what consolidation actually looks like across the industry:
Why entertainment is increasingly being built around creator-led IP rather than traditional formats
How media companies are shifting from audience competition to cultural relevance and creator ecosystems
And why AI is accelerating everything by increasing creation while compressing attention and concentrating winners
Taken together, these shifts show that consolidation isn’t just happening on the surface of the creator economy - it’s becoming the underlying structure of how value is created across media, entertainment and AI.
