Content creators are asserting their power like never before: The model has flipped

It’s the creators’ world — we’re just living in it. Social media’s stars came of age on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, building massive audiences while getting paid to promote other people’s products.Now, creators are using the audiences they’ve built to expand beyond traditional brand deals and into entrepreneurship, software and venture investing.

It’s a notable shift poised to disrupt a number of major industries.“It used to be that you’d create a product and go find distribution, but the model has flipped,” Warner Bailey, founder of Assistants vs.Agents, a meme-page-turned-media-juggernaut, said.

“We’ve created trust and we have distribution, we can build products around that.” Bailey, 34, is one of the new generation of founders already cashing in on the growing creator economy, worth an estimated $250 billion in 2023 and expected to double in size to nearly $480 billion by 2027, per Goldman Sachs. Bailey started his Instagram page, a satirization of the entertainment industry, when he was working in the WME mailroom in 2018.Fast forward eight years and he’s got a team of 15 producing a newsletter that averages 400,000 monthly impressions, an entertainment job board that reached a million early-career applicants in its first three months and a daily live show, clips of which are making 42 million Instagram impressions per month.

There are also live events centered around career access and education, plus a book and a tech product in the works. “It took years for us to grow the trust and relationships,” Bailey said, “but that’s what’s now allowing us to scale the business.” What AvA is doing for entertainment, Ivy Insights is doing for tech. Founded by Alex Poscente — 27 and a former advisor for Frank McCourt, Alexis Ohanian, and Kevin O’Leary’s ‘The People’s Bid’ to buy TikTok — the company bills itself as an app factory that turns creators into co-founders through collaborations on...