There's an old joke in Hollywood:

The three stages of a career are:

Well, the creator economy just added a fourth stage:

Last month at Cannes, Forbes dropped its annual Top 50 creators list, and for the first time ever, the group cleared a combined $1 billion.

Sounds like a party.

It's not when you check how it’s distributed. So I think I’ll do that.

Also in this edition:

🌏 The Under-16 Audience Just Became a Regulated Asset (Thoughts Are My Own)

🧠 Your New Job Title: Chief Judgment Officer (Thoughts Are My Own)

🎙️ TikTok Bans Robot Voices from Shop Lives

💵 YouTube's $500/Month Country Club Price

📱 Facebook Pays for Reels Again

👻 Creators Flock to Snapchat, Brands Shrug

💪🏼 Jobs from Rockwater Industries, WOL Entertainment Inc., and Sony Music Entertainment.

🎭 …and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let's get into it.

TLDR:

Let's start with the numbers.

$1.02 billion combined for the Top 50. Up 20% from last year. Up 80% from 2022.

MrBeast at the top with $300 million. Dhar Mann at $65 million. Steven Bartlett at $52 million. Ms. Rachel made $26 million teaching toddlers their ABCs and parents that children impacted by war are children too.

(Side note: I got to spend a day at Dhar Mann Studios earlier this year. That $65 million is not an accident. That place runs like a Fortune 500 company that happens to make videos.)

So the creator economy is thriving, right?

For fifty people, absolutely.

Here's the problem: the top 10 on that list took home about $621 million.

That's over 60% of the pie eaten by 20% of the list.

And the list itself is 50 people out of tens of millions of creators.

Now zoom out to the rest of the industry.

From a survey from The Influencer Marketing Factory earlier this year, nearly half of creators still earn under $10,000 annually, and only about 6% clear six figures.

So while the headline says "creators are rich now," the reality is a middle class fighting for a shrinking share of brand attention.

Why are the top 50 pulling away?

It's not audience size. It's business infrastructure.

Look at what the top earners actually have:

Packaged products. Not "I'll do a dedicated video," but a menu with pricing.

Owned audiences. Email lists, communities, direct relationships that don't evaporate with an algorithm change.

Performance data. Receipts a brand can see in thirty seconds.

The mega-creators walk into a brand meeting looking like a media company.

The mid-tier creator walks in looking like a line item.

And brands, who are under more ROI pressure than ever, are choosing the media company.

So what do we do about it, fellow reps?

Stop selling reach. Start building proof.

Every client on your roster should have one revenue stream they can prove with a screenshot. A storefront. A paid community. A sponsor case study with real numbers.

Visible revenue is the new follower count.

The creators who figure this out will climb into the bracket where brands pay attention.

The ones who don't will keep competing on metrics the game no longer rewards.

The $1 billion isn't the story.

The $621 million is.

Here's a fun exercise.

Write down everything you did for a client last week.

Now cross out everything an AI could do.

Building the brand target list? Crossed out.

Drafting the pitch email? Crossed out.

Pulling the campaign analytics into a recap deck? Crossed out. (Side note: I vibe-coded that one myself.)

Scary, right?

Now look at what's left.

Knowing that a certain brand ghosts on net-90 terms.

Knowing that a "$50k offer" is really $30k once you read the usage clause.

Knowing your client is one bad comment section away from a meltdown, and steering them out of the deal that would cause it.

That's judgment.

And judgment is the only thing on your invoice that can't be replicated by a very confident chatbot.

For a decade, reps got paid partly for access and partly for labor.

The labor is getting automated. Fast.

Access is getting flattened. Every brand can find every creator now.

Judgment is the moat.

So my advice: stop describing your value in tasks and start describing it in outcomes and saves.

"I got you out of a contract that would've cost you $80k in usage rights" beats "I sent 40 pitch emails" every single time.

The reps who thrive in the AI era won't be the busiest ones.

They'll be the ones who can name exactly what their fee buys.

Bill for the judgment.

Let the robots do the typing.

The creators, brands, governments, and platforms are making waves this week in the name of fortune, fame, and fun.

🎙️ TikTok banned AI-generated voices and pre-recorded audio from TikTok Shop Lives so hosts now have to actually engage with viewers in real time. A platform legally requiring humans to be human? What a time to be alive(streamed)! And, no, I don’t care that that pun is forced and didn’t really work!

📱 Facebook's Creator Fast Track is now paying qualifying creators for posting Reels. Meta is writing creator checks again! Set a calendar reminder to check if this program still exists in 12 months.

👻 A quarter of creators plan to expand into Snapchat this year thanks to its improved unified monetization program, even though it barely registers on brands' priority lists. Someone's early and someone's wrong.

💵 YouTube channel memberships now support premium tiers up to $499.99/month. Your client's superfans officially have a country club option. If your creator has a diehard community and no whale tier, that's a monetization conversation you should have this week.

M&A Coordinator, Rockwater Industries

Every creator economy company seems to be either buying other companies or getting sold to other companies. In fact, if you have $50 million burning a hole in your pocket, I’ll give you Stealth Talent today and I’ll do your laundry for a year! But seriously, learn from some of the best at Rockwater if you want to figure out how mergers and acquisitions work in the creator economy.

Head of Creator Management, WOL International Inc.

Did you know there are a bunch of agencies laser-focused on TikTok Live creators and TikTok pays them an absurd amount of money to onboard creators and teach them how to do it well? It’s true! And WOL is one of them! If you do it right, this is a cash cow. The biggest challenge will be derisking the business by moving into other platforms and initiatives.

Senior Director, Creator Strategy & Viral Marketing - AWAL, Sony Music Entertainment

The term ‘viral marketing’ will always make me cringe, as it’s trying to make virality sound like a strategy instead of a lottery ticket, but everyone in the industry knows there are certainly tactics that increase the chance of extreme algorithmic preference (‘virality’ as in ‘shares become more shares become more shares’ isn’t how it works anymore). But anywas…music is having one heck of a moment and if you can nail trends, hooks, and finding perfect 20 second song segments, this could be a ton of fun.