Online creators and their business models have been on our minds this week after wildly popular YouTuber MrBeast announced his company is buying fintech startup Step, followed by Hollywood studios sending a series of cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance over the launch of its new Seedance 2.0 video generation model.
These seemingly unrelated titles suggest a media landscape in the midst of transformative change as popular YouTubers look to diversify their business models, with the threat and promise of increasingly powerful AI tools on the horizon.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed what’s next for the creator economy and whether there will be room for the next generation of creators to shine.
“What’s the next saturation point?” Kirsten wondered. “Can’t all these people go out and spin off products. So is the pool of successful creators just shrinking? Or will something else happen, technologically speaking, or a different medium that will allow them to find an audience to make money?”
You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Anthony: [The news] led our colleague Lauren to do this great piece talking about the business model of creators in general, and the feeling that they’re no longer just relying on ad revenue. I think it’s still a pretty big part of their business, but he broke down several of the most popular YouTubers and noted that each one of them is expanding — usually in e-commerce, but also in other revenue streams.
Mr. Beast, for example, actually has this line of food products, including chocolate, that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars and was actually profitable for him in 2024, while his media business was losing money. This was all too wild for me.
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Kirsten: If Mr. Beast can’t be profitable with his media company, who can? To me, that was a surprising statistic.
I’m not surprised that the whole ad revenue game isn’t necessarily working for creators and influencers because it just hit a saturation point. I guess my big question is, what is the next saturation point? Not all these people can go out and spin off products. So is the pool of successful creators just shrinking? Or will something else happen, technologically speaking, or a different medium that will allow them to find an audience to monetize?
Rebecca: It’s interesting, there’s a lot of ways you can think of what else could happen, right? Maybe they create digital twins of themselves and put their digital twins in a bunch of different situations that they can make them [other kinds of] money.
But then again, going back to it’s no surprise, these people are now celebrities, right? Someone told me on the phone recently that a lot [the] The younger generation, they don’t know our celebrities, they know TikTok celebrities. And we’ve seen celebrities for years delivering products and making money off of them, right? I was watching Rachel [Ray]she was a famous chef and she was selling her EVOO or her olive oil.
We are slowing down business [Equity] sometime last year. They have a creator fund and basically what they’re doing is they’ve raised a VC fund to basically support creators with their businesses, if they have maybe some niche audience, maybe they’re really into woodworking and here’s their collection of chisels, I don’t know.
I think that’s an interesting path forward, and it’s something that we’re looking at as journalists: How we’re also trying to become creators and create a brand of ourselves that we could diversify our revenue. It sounds horrible saying it out loud like that.
Anthony: I smile, but it is the smile of someone whose soul is turning to ashes inside.
So we’ve taken a break from talking about AI, but I’ll definitely bring AI back into the conversation. Apparently, one of the other related developments last week is that ByteDance, which is the Chinese company that launched TikTok and is still an investor – we won’t go into all that – released a new version of their model, Seedance 2.0, which at least initially was mainly available only to Chinese users.
But you started seeing people posting videos created by Seedance, including this viral video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. This prompted both of them to have this general discussion: Is Hollywood doomed? And, more specifically, a bunch of Hollywood studios, including Netflix, are sending letters to ByteDance saying, “You can’t do this, you’re basically allowing all of your users to make videos using all of our IP, all of our movie stars.” And for a couple of days, there was no response from ByteDance, but then they said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, for some reason we launched this without real guardrails, but we’ll do better in the future.”
Kirsten: So the timing is perfect because I happen to be editing a story right now that Rebecca wrote. It has nothing to do with Seedance, but it has to do with AI and filmmaking. Well, I’m going to give a future ]rops to Rebecca for the timely update on this. Rebecca, I know you have a lot to say about this, except that Hollywood is messed up. Does it get more complicated than that?
Rebecca: Yes, definitely. I mean, connecting this thing to creators, I think a lot of people are going to be using these tools to produce all kinds of content and we’re just going to be completely inundated. And this will be intense.
But when we talk about making movies or commercials or just content in general using AI video tools, I think there’s this tension between one, this will create very low effort versus two, it could also democratize access to a lot of people who don’t have money or budgets or teams to share a lot of the stories they want to tell.
And also, if you’re a small business and you want to do a little shampoo ad — to talk about it, because there’s a shampoo ad that’s going viral — or you sell coffee and you want to do a little ad for that, [this] could give you the tools to do that. Is this bad? Isn’t that bad? Do we need more content in the world? There are a few avenues to walk.
Kirsten: Is it bad, Antony?
Anthony: On the creator side, my general feeling is [that] the response to a lot of these kinds of misdeeds — frankly, a lot of them it is slop, and I think that will continue to be the case – it will be that appreciation of authenticity. And so there’s an opportunity for these great creators to be less about the idea of the guy, “I have a digital twin of myself,” but [instead,] “No, I’m the real Mr. Beast, not the wandering digital simulator.”
And I think it’s also indicative that – of course, every social network has its ups and downs, but that OpenAI’s Sora, from what I understand, really took off in the beginning and then struggled to keep users more recently, because there’s a void in the experience when you just feel like there’s not an authentic person on the other side.
But I think it will make the landscape much more difficult for both established creators to monetize […] and then I think it’s going to be especially difficult for new creators because there’s going to be a lot more stuff. Trying to really break out will become extremely difficult.
