The creator economy’s next decade

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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Around 50 million people now call themselves creators. Only 4% of them earn more than $100,000 a year, down from roughly 10% just four years ago.

The creator economy spent its first decade enabling anyone with a phone and a point of view to build an audience. The vast majority who built one but can't make a living from it are a pretty strong indicator of where that led us. Having an audience has stopped being intrinsically valuable, turning it into a business has become the hard part. The gap between the two is widening.

I've had to bridge that gap multiple times. I used to be Head of Growth at The Daily Aus, where we took an Instagram-first news brand and built a newsletter audience of 180,000 subscribers. Now I run Brand Chemistry on the same playbook, from zero to 125,000 subscribers. Both audiences were built on beehiiv, who are partnering with me for today's article because the lesson from both my experiences was exactly what they’re helping creators with. Audience size earns attention. Owning the audience earns money.

Use code ISAAC30 to get 30% off your first three months on beehiiv.

For its first ten years, the creator economy ran on reach. It was scarce and hard to win, so reach was the asset. Build a big enough following and the rest was assumed to follow.

Two things have drastically changed the equation. First, algorithms have moved from a social graph (your content is shown to your connections/followers) to an interest graph (algorithms show your content to people it thinks will like it, regardless of whether they follow you). That meant having a huge follower count tangibly means less and less. Each piece of content is evaluated independently with no guarantee your followers will see it at all.

Second is, of course, AI. Content is now effectively free to produce, and reach is very cheap to manufacture. By the end of 2025, an estimated 30% of outbound marketing from large companies was artificially generated, up from under 2% in 2022. When everyone can generate endless content and game the distribution system where audience size has very little impact, a large following is basically only useful as social proof or credibility. The metric for value ten years ago means a lot less today.

That’s why the percentage of creators who can earn a living from content keeps shrinking. The barrier that used to separate creators who earned good money from creators who didn't was just building a bigger audience in the first place. That barrier is mostly gone. Millions of people have big audiences, the supply exploded, and the thing that was supposed to be valuable became relatively ordinary. From a marketing perspective that’s especially important, because it also became achievable internally. Instead of leaning heavily on influencer marketing, it became easier than ever for brands to compete directly for their own reach. The catch is that you're renting the audience connection. The version that lasts is an audience you own, and for most people that starts with a newsletter.

I’m sure you’ve heard a million times before about how important it is to "own your audience", including from me. Social platforms may give you the ability to outsource discoverability which is very powerful and has led a lot of platforms away from the inbox. But just as the algorithm gives, it can also take away.

The exact same logic has reshaped the marketing side of the equation too. Brands rented the audiences creators had built, one sponsorship at a time, which is most of what turned the creator economy into an actual "economy." Now brands build owned audiences in-house as well.

The “rented vs owned” advice is still right, but it’s narrower than the actual scope of the opportunity. Owning the list of email addresses was only ever the first step. That audience relationship sits on top of your data, your discovery, your revenue, and your customer experience. The next decade is about owning the rest of the stack.

You could be able to export your email list and still own almost nothing about it. The behavioural data, the content, the ability to do anything with either, all of it still relied on a platform you couldn't build on.

That's all changing because of two key factors.

The first is access. An open API and a native MCP integration mean your audience data isn't trapped inside one platform. You can pipe it into your own systems, connect it to the tools you already run on, and point your own AI at it. “Ownership” starts to mean access to the data underneath your audience list, in a form you can actually use.

Creators can now see which AI crawlers are pulling their work, and decide with a single toggle which to allow and which to block. Putting that one choice back into the hands of the individual creators is massive. You can choose to protect your archive for licensing and future monetisation, or open it up to be discovered through AI search and assistants. Either way you make the call, instead of having it made for you by a third-party platform.

This definition of ownership is expanding in real time. The fastest-growing distribution channel is an AI model answering a question, so “owning your audience” without controlling how AI accesses your content is just renting again, one layer up.

The old “owned vs rented” trade-off was pretty brutal, but everyone just accepted it. Owned channels like email and podcasts built deep trust but had almost no discovery. You can't go viral in an inbox. Rented channels like social had all the discovery and none of the ownership. So you got to own the relationship or get discovered, never both. Most creators, marketers and media publishers split the difference by living on rented platforms and hoping to convert a fraction across to owned ones.

Now, discovery is becoming something you control too. Recommendation networks and referral programs come built-in. For example, newsletters using beehiiv’s recommendation network now grow around 2.75x faster, with more than 30,000 publications referring readers to each other. You can be discovered by the audiences of other newsletters without being on the hamster-wheel of feeding an algorithm. The growth engines that used to belong to social platforms can now run on your own infrastructure.

It also works at scale, which is what turns "nice for creators" into serious business infrastructure. TIME is one of the biggest publishers on the planet, and as a media company these concepts of audience ownership are directly correlated to their commercial outcomes. They moved their more than two million subscribers and 13 newsletters onto beehiiv because they can see the content landscape shifting towards this expanded definition of ownership.

The same system that helps a solo writer reach their first thousand readers also runs one of the largest media brands in the world.

The last layer (or ‘bottom line’ if you will) is the money. For most of the creator economy, owning your audience didn't necessarily mean controlling the income from it. Revenue came through intermediaries like an ad platform or a marketplace or even just a payment platform, each of which would take a cut and leave the actual creator with pretty slim margins.

Before The Daily Aus I launched and ran paid subscriptions at Mamamia, Australia’s largest independent media company. There were plenty of tools that we could’ve used to spin up a paid subscription quickly, but they all take a percentage of earnings. My job was to grow our subscriptions, but my time and effort would have also been growing that third-party company. Our only alternative was to build our own infrastructure from scratch. Creators don’t have access to a whole engineering team like I did, and even in-house marketing teams aren’t likely to get engineering resources allocated away from core product development for stuff like this.

Built-in monetisation now closes that gap. An ad network and premium subscriptions gives access to revenue that doesn't need a sales team to start. beehiiv takes 0% of what you earn, so you get the full upside. A creator can be paid from the first send instead of waiting until the audience is large enough to interest a sponsor, and the income runs through the same system that holds the audience, the data, and the discovery.

Put the layers together and the picture changes completely from the traditional social media creator. You own the list, the data, the discovery, and the revenue in one place, on infrastructure you control. That's the point at which an audience becomes a business, with a proper operating system to run it on.

If the last decade of content was measured by the size of your audience, the next will be measured by ownership of the infrastructure underneath it.

"Own your audience" was the right instinct, but it was only aimed at the audience list layer when the real value comes from all of them. The list, the data, the discovery, the revenue, and now even the terms on which AI gets to use your work. Every single one of those used to be rented. Now they're things a creator can actually control.

Every business now runs content channels and competes for attention, which makes it a media business whether it planned to be one or not. Platforms will keep rising and falling, and AI is busy rewriting the rules again and again and again. The one asset that survives all of it is an audience you own all the way down.

The first decade rewarded those who played the game well. The next will reward those who take ownership and control enough to play their own game.

I’m using beehiiv to help me do that. You can sign up for free, or use my code ISAAC30 to get 30% off your first three months.

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