Year-End Memo 2025 — III of IV

The creator economy is not about making content. It never was.

It is about owning distribution — and the significant fact of the last decade is that distribution changed hands. It used to be owned by institutions. It is now owned by individuals.

That is the whole story. Everything else is downstream.

The chain that broke

The old model was a relay, and every runner took a cut:

Talent → Agent → Publisher → Audience

Each layer existed because it solved a real scarcity. The agent solved access. The publisher solved manufacturing, capital, and shelf space. The distributor solved logistics. These were not parasitic inventions; they were answers to genuine constraints.

The constraints dissolved. The layers did not notice immediately.

The new model:

Creator → Audience

Every layer removed is value reclaimed — and, less comfortably, risk absorbed. The intermediary took a margin, but it also took the downside. Removing it means keeping both.

[DIAGRAM 3]

What actually changed

Four things, none of which are about content:

  • Publishing is free. The marginal cost of reaching one more person went to approximately zero.
  • Audiences are global. Geography stopped being a constraint on who could find you.
  • Trust is peer-to-peer. Credibility routes through people, not mastheads.
  • Value flows directly. Payment rails reach the individual without an institution in between.

The middleman economy is over — not because middlemen were bad, but because the scarcities they resolved stopped being scarce.

Independence, not virality

This is the distinction that separates the people building something durable from the people optimising a feed.

Going viral is an event. Going independent is a structure.

The serious operators are not chasing reach. They are assembling the components of a small media company: an audience they can reach without permission, products they control, and a community that constitutes a market rather than an audience. They understand that a platform is a channel, not a foundation — and that anything built entirely on rented land can be repriced or removed without notice.

Which is why single-stream dependence is the central risk of this model. If one platform''s algorithm, ad rate, or policy decision determines your income, you have not achieved independence. You have changed employers without negotiating terms.

What the evidence shows

Kit''s 2024 State of the Creator Economy — a survey of roughly 1,000 creators — gives the clearest available picture of the shift from hobby to business:

  • 28% of respondents were self-employed as creators
  • 6% made the transition to full-time creative work in the preceding year
  • 18% earned more than $100,000 annually
  • 66% used AI in their content workflow in 2023, nearly double the 34% recorded in 2022

On diversification, the report''s finding is that the majority of full-time creators operate three or more distinct income streams, with the most established running six or more. Diversification is not a tactic in this population. It is the defining structural feature of the ones who survive.

And a figure that belongs in the same paragraph, because omitting it would be dishonest: 59% of full-time creators reported burnout in the year surveyed, against 42% of hobbyists.

That number deserves more attention than it usually gets in writing about this sector. Removing intermediaries removes their overhead and their margin. It also removes the structures that used to absorb operational load, smooth income volatility, and impose boundaries between work and life. The independent operating model transfers those burdens to one person. A model in which the majority of full-time participants report burnout is not a finished model. It is an early one with an unsolved cost, and anyone advising people into it owes them that caveat.

Owning distribution is necessary, not sufficient

There is a trap in the word "distribution." A creator can own their list, their storefront, and their entire funnel, and still command no trust if the relationship is broadcast rather than reciprocal. Influence is separating from scale: what determines it is less audience size than felt closeness — an attachment economy, to use the Deriss framing. The asset is not the distribution channel. It is the density of belief inside it.

The practical implication for anyone building here: measure the wrong thing and you will optimise yourself into irrelevance. Audience size is becoming a vanity metric even for people whose business is audience. The metric that predicts durability is what proportion of that audience would follow you to a new platform tomorrow.

The creator economy was never about going viral. It was about going independent.

Sources

  • Kit (formerly ConvertKit), 2024 State of the Creator Economy Report (survey of ~1,000 creators; published 2024). https://kit.com/reports/creator-economy-2024
  • ConvertKit / PR Newswire, New Report by Top Creator Platform ConvertKit Unveils a Paradigm Shift: The Rise of Full-Time Creators (2 May 2024). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-report-by-top-creator-platform-convertkit-unveils-a-paradigm-shift-the-rise-of-full-time-creators-302133207.html

The term "attachment economy" is a Deriss framing.

Methodology & IP. Complete research text, free to read and cite with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. The scoring rubrics, weightings, and proprietary datasets behind the Deriss Terminal are not disclosed here and remain protected; the Terminal applies them to an organisation''s own material without exposing method or sources.

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