The creator economy can feel a bit like a large, unstoppable boulder barrelling down a hill. That’s because as theaters struggle, cable dies, network TV clings to life and streamers finally flirt with profitability, the creator ecosystem has been thriving. That was true last year, and all signs indicate that the momentum will continue throughout 2026.
YouTube topped TV viewership every month throughout 2025, according to Nielsen metrics (Note: This doesn’t include December, which Nielsen has yet to report). As for advertising, the Interactive Advertising Bureau predicted that U.S. ad spend for the creator economy would hit $37 billion in 2025, a 26% increase compared to the previous year, and the industry expects that to continue this year.
“Hopefully, a shift finally in media dollars from advertisers will start catching up with consumer behavior. There’s always a lag,” Jo Cronk, co-CEO of the creator and social agency Whalar, told TheWrap. “30-to-60-second TV spots — of course, there’s a place for them. But we have to really ask ourselves, ‘How often do we view, connect and act on a 30-second TV spot compared to something that we see on our phone?’”
But what exactly is ahead for the new year? Expect more platform diversification, whether creators are moving from shortform content to longform or branching out into podcasting and live streaming. AI is going to remain a major threat, but it will encourage more platforms like YouTube and TikTok to invest in creator-focused tools and may even inspire an entire aesthetic change for the internet.
The brand deals, meanwhile, are going to get bigger as fewer creator-focused agencies and middlemen companies remain thanks to continued consolidation. As for Hollywood, power players are more interested in teaming up with creators than ever before. But these partnerships are playing out on creators’ terms more and more.
Welcome to the 2026 grindset.
Hollywood will continue to collaborate with creators on their terms
Between theaters gambling on creator-made movies like “Dude Perfect: The Hero Tour” and Netflix making deals with Mark Rober and Ms. Rachel, last year was big when it came to Hollywood partnering with creators. Collaborations between these two worlds are expected to continue in 2026. But these deals will increasingly happen on creators’ terms.
“Hollywood will absolutely continue tripping over itself trying to figure out how to work with creators,” Zach Katz, CEO and founding partner of the creator management company Fixated, told TheWrap. Katz noted that many of his clients are interested in partnering with major studios. He believes there will be “a lot of money” invested in creators over the next couple of years and that networks and studios are going to make “a lot of errors.”
“Over the next couple of years, these two worlds will really merge and find a groove in a way that we haven’t seen yet,” Katz said. “Hollywood has never taken its eye off of that. It knows [creators are] its survival.”
Conal Byrne, the chief executive officer of the iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group, has already started to see this shift play out. More production companies have started to use podcasts as a new form of research and development for film and TV projects. Instead of hiring a writers room and cranking out a lot of scripts that may never be seen, some players have started to use podcasts to release and shape stories on a faster timeline. That audience-tested content can then be more easily sold to TV networks. That’s the strategy Tenderfoot TV, the production company behind “Up and Vanished” and “Atlanta Monster,” has utilized.
“In podcasting, you have an opportunity to take that entire process and actually incentivize creators to do it but to do it — so to speak — in public,” Byrne told TheWrap. “I really do see this model taking hold across film and TV. It just might take a little while to get there.”
Some also believe that 2026 will be the year creators are more robustly acknowledged by Hollywood. That’s certainly what Sean Downey, president of the Americas and global partners at Google, believes. After a concentrated effort to get creators an Emmy nomination that started in 2024 as well as several recent Golden Globe and Grammy nominations for creators, YouTube thinks that 2026 is the year it may finally happen.
“This next year is going to be the year we see creators break into prestigious film and television awards nominations,” Downey told TheWrap, pointing to Ms. Rachel’s two Children’s and Family Emmy Awards nominations. “They’re the new Hollywood — it’s time.”
The AI era will make authenticity more valuable
“Authenticity” may be one of the most overused and groanworthy buzzwords in the creator ecosystem, but as AI gets better at making slick, professional-looking videos, imperfect and “real” looking content will be in vogue.
“Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource, which will in turn drive more demand for creator content, not less,” Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, wrote in his predictions for the new year.
Mosseri predicted that a “raw” aesthetic like blurry photos or shaky videos will become more popular, praising the work of creators like Jordan Howlett, who films most of his videos facing his bathroom mirror. “In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn’t just aesthetic preference anymore — it’s proof. It’s defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it’s imperfect,” Mosseri wrote.
Jason Wilhelm, the co-founder and president of Fixated, agreed, noting that we’re at the end of the “highly scripted, overly dramatized” era, such as competitions that promise to give away millions. He noticed that this type of content stopped performing as well during the back half of the year.
“The people who lean into this very authentic, real type of content are the people who are really going to excel. You’re going to see that across all different genres,” Wilhelm said.
Industry consolidation will accelerate
Last year set a mergers and acquisitions record for creator industry transactions, beating the one that was previously set in 2024. That’s a trend everyone in the industry expects will continue. As creators become bigger power players, companies that serve as the middle men between creators, brands and bigger partners like networks or publishers are expected to disappear.
“It’s really hard for brands to communicate with creators and vice versa,” Arthur Leopold, CEO and co-founder of the creator-focused advertising company Agentio, told TheWrap. ”There’s no standardization … So when [deals] finally are negotiated, they’re not starting off on the best foot.”
From Leopold’s experience, the best matches between creators and brands happen when there’s a genuine connection between the two: a creator likes the product, and the company is comfortable with the creator. “It’s really important for creators and brands to be connected directly, not through agencies or the middlemen. At the end of the day, these are the most creative people in the world, and they need to hear directly from the source,” Leopold said.
Instead of a massive list of creator management companies that are largely indistinguishable from each other, it’s expected that the creator industry will look more like the movie, TV or music industries: a small group of established and well-known power players that represent the top talent.
AI will be creators’ biggest threat — and their biggest tool
The rise of AI slop prompted waves of worry and outrage from creators throughout 2025. Even MrBeast and IShowSpeed spoke out against the technology. That’s why Mosseri predicted that there will be increased pressure for social media platforms to make it clear what images and videos are generated by AI.
“All the major platforms will do good work identifying AI content, but they will get worse at it over time as AI gets better at imitating reality,” Mosseri wrote. “Labeling content as authentic or AI-generated is only part of the solution though. We, as an industry, are going to need to surface much more context about not only the media on our platforms, but the accounts that are sharing it in order for people to be able to make informed decisions about what to believe.”
While there are no signs that AI-generated content will be slowing down, last year also led to suites of AI tools specifically designed for creators from companies like TikTok and Adobe. That’s also a trend that will continue.
“In 2026, I think we’ll continue to see the theme that AI [tools] will be useful and time saving,” Downey said, pointing to YouTube features like editing with AI and auto dubbing with lip sync. “Like anything else, it’ll be most important for creators to learn about all the tools they have available to them, get comfortable using them and then apply them in however it may best serve their next big idea.”
Brands and talent will collaborate more
For a long time, brands could make an ad, hold onto it, then replay it across all of social media. But as certain platforms like the Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram are prioritizing newer content, it’s becoming more important for brands to step up their advertising game. That’s where creators come in. Creators, who are experts at quickly creating virality and online communities, will be pulled into marketing campaigns even more, whether that means working in-house for a brand or creating their own companies like Alex Cooper’s Unwell Creative Agency.
“That’s going to really transform the way that creators and brands work together. For a lot of this sort of middle aperture that is creating a lot of friction today, they’re either going have to play by the new rules or they’re going lose out on a ton of deal making that’s going to go to creators who just want to be the fastest partners with the brands that they’re most excited about,” Leopold said.
“There will be significantly more collaboration, and I believe part of that is there will be a higher volume of collaboration and a higher quality of collaboration as well,” Cronk said. “Too often creators are still thought of as something to add on to the end, whereas the brands that are succeeding are putting creators at the heart of the stories that they’re telling. I see that creators are going to become even more mainstream.”
That also means longer brand deals with creators will become more popular. Leopold predicts that the hashtag-heavy campaigns of the past, which often involve brands partnering with a huge amount of creators for a short time, will disappear. Instead he thinks longer partnerships that walk audiences through the journey of using a new product will become more commonplace.
Podcasts will become a commonplace audience growth tool
Everyone TheWrap spoke to about podcasts had the same two general predictions: video podcasts are here to stay, and interest in this space isn’t slowing down anytime soon. On Spotify, 80% of the top podcasts in the U.S. during last year had video, and in October, YouTube viewers watched over 700 million hours of podcasts from their living rooms.
But as podcasting is becoming more popular, the way the format is being used is evolving. The lines between “creator” and “podcaster” have been blurring as more creators are using podcasts to experiment with different content formats and more podcasters are moving into video.
“[Podcasters] have added video because it allows them to communicate with their fans in a new dimension and to really build on the already deep relationship that these hosts have with their fan base. That is quickly becoming the norm,” Jordan Newman, head of content partnerships at Spotify, told TheWrap. “We’re both seeing creators launching podcasts and new concepts, which is wonderful, but we’re also seeing them distribute content on Spotify that they maybe wouldn’t actually call a podcast, even if it has a lot of the hallmarks of a podcast.”
YouTube has seen the same trend. Downey pointed to Brittany Broski, whose popular “Broski Report” video podcast led to her talkshow “Royal Court,” which is now on its third season. This blending between worlds is why YouTube has invested in AI tools that help turn podcast audio into video content.
“What’s really happening here is the natural next step when you have some of the best creators in media — in any genre — in a medium that offers them a lot of creative freedom — podcasting,” Byrne said, noting that he’s seen iHeartMedia podcasts inspire live events, books and social media posts. “It’s less that podcasts are now going to all be video podcasts, and it’s more you have a medium with so many great creators operating at the top of their game.”
More crossover between longform and shortform
Over the past few years, there’s been a fairly sharp divide between shortform (i.e. creators on TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts) and longform creators (i.e. those on YouTube and podcasters). Those lines are going to blur.
As consumer behavior continues to change and it becomes increasingly clear that platform diversification doesn’t hurt viewership, there’s going to be more crossover. “In 2026, we’ll continue to see more creators explore and try new formats to the point where many creators will be across short and longform, and even live, all at once,” Downey said. “It’ll be about trying and experimenting with what works for their ideas and fans.”
Bonus: Scripted content will really take off
Since you lasted this long, one more prediction not backed by interviews but by observations from your friendly neighborhood TheWrap reporter: 2026 will be the year scripted creator content explodes.
Historically, it’s been relatively easy to make brand deals and sell advertisements for unscripted content. A lifestyle creator turning to a camera and endorsing a night cream doesn’t break a fourth wall, which is why creator content has been such a successful reality TV replacement. But because scripted content requires either ad breaks or more subtle product placements, this type of content hasn’t been as easy to monetize. As the advertising infrastructure and general ecosystem around creators becomes more sophisticated and as Hollywood is taking this talent pool more seriously, that’s going to change. Programs like Tubi for Creators are already leading the charge, and more will likely follow.
Even though the advertising industry has been a bit slow to catch up, there’s definitely an audience appetite for scripted creator content. YouTube creators like Kinigra Deon, Dhar Mann and Alan Chikin Chow have built channels with millions of followers and created their own production studios to support their scripted projects. Even shortform creators have gained followings for scripted shows like Jay Renshaw’s “The Chit Show,” Sydney Jo’s “The Group Chat” and WeMadeItTogether’s “When Your House Is Haunted But Rent Is Cheap.”
These shows and channels have been viewed by millions, and when a more stable monetization model emerges, the heads of scripted TV will need to start worrying.
