Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say

Summary

As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal: Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it. “I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch. This isn’t news to creators – Patreon CEO Jack Conte has ardently banged this drum for years – but throughout the year, the industry at large has reacted to this phenomenon in different ways, from the influencers to the streamers. According to the executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers – some acting creators as a salve to AI slop, while others creators are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves. Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. Since this business model is centered around affiliate marketing, it only works if people retain trust in individual creators. It could be an existential threat if the relationship between creators and their audiences continues to fragment. But through a study commissioned from Northwestern University, LTK found that trust in creators increased 21% year-over-year, which was a pleasant surprise to Box. “If you asked me at the beginning of 2025, ‘Hey, is trust in creators going to go up or down?’ I would have probably said down, because people understand it’s an industry – they understand how it’s working,” she said. “But actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.” Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 By that, Box means that consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the study, 97% of chief marketing officers ...