Brands Treat Creators as Must-Buy Channel While Creators Own Nothing
Brands call creators "must-buy" and invest $37 billion proving it. Retail commits $12.3 billion. CPG spends $5.5 billion. The money validates that creator content works. What it doesn't validate is the infrastructure forcing creators to build on platforms with zero equity capture.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy report tracks how advertising dollars flow through the creator ecosystem. U.S. creator ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year-over-year. That growth rate runs nearly 4x faster than the broader media industry.
Forty-eight percent of advertisers now classify creators as "must-buy," ranking just behind paid search and social media advertising. Creator-led advertising more than doubled in three years, rising from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024. Brands aren't treating creator content as experimental anymore. They're building it into core media planning as a persistent channel that drives measurable performance.
Where Money Flows vs. Where Value Accumulates
The spending surge reveals two separate economic systems operating simultaneously. Brands invest billions in creator-generated content. Creators generate that content on platforms controlling distribution, data, and monetization terms.
According to IAB research, brands prioritize creator content for building brand awareness (43%), reaching new audiences (41%), enhancing brand reputation and trust (35%), and driving online sales and conversions (32%). Forty percent of marketers rank overall ROI as their primary KPI for creator campaigns.
Creators deliver the outcomes brands measure. But platform infrastructure determines how value gets captured.
Run the economics on identical revenue scenarios:
Creator with 500K TikTok followers: Generates $200,000 annually through brand deals. Platform takes 30% cut = $140,000 net revenue. Zero exit value. Can't export audience data. Algorithm change cuts reach 70% overnight with no recourse. Three years of work builds $0 sellable equity.
WordPress owner with 10K email subscribers: Generates $200,000 through $97/month memberships. Zero platform fees beyond payment processing = $200,000 net revenue. Sells for $600,000 to $1.2 million at 3-6x ARR multiples. Owns complete subscriber list. Controls infrastructure. Portable business equity.
The Professionalization Economics
IAB's report documents how creator content consistently outperforms brand-produced creative across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels, and paid amplification. Creators beat brand assets in engagement, click-through rates, watch time, and return on ad spend.
The data confirms what media buyers already knew: creators shape culture and audiences trust them more than corporate marketing. But success metrics focus on campaign performance, not business infrastructure. Brands measure reach, engagement, and conversion. Creators chase the same metrics while building on platforms that extract 30-50% revenue splits and provide zero ownership.
Chris Bruderle, IAB's Vice President of Industry Insights, noted: "Creators are unmatched when it comes to storytelling and cultural relevance. However, brands are also seeing them as performance drivers when integrated strategically. Creator marketing isn't just about awareness, it's proving its value across the full funnel."
Brands measure that full-funnel performance and invest accordingly. Creators produce the content. Platforms own distribution. Brands pay for access. Creators get revenue splits but build no equity.
Run the Numbers on Your Setup
Pull up your analytics. How much did you generate last year? Where does that revenue live?
IAB's research shows 58% of marketers cite choosing creators with proper reputation as their biggest challenge. Fifty-six percent prioritize audience alignment. Both concerns reflect the same underlying issue: authenticity and precision matter more than raw reach.
Infrastructure ownership determines whether creators can actually negotiate from leverage. Creators with owned infrastructure demonstrate subscriber demographics, export engagement data, and prove conversion metrics. Platform-dependent creators share whatever analytics the platform provides and hope brands trust the numbers.
Search visibility now forms before keyword demand appears in Google — Discovery happens across social feeds and AI-generated answers before search volume registers in SEO tools. By the time keywords appear in search data, narratives are already defined by early movers. Exploding Topics surfaces emerging concepts while they're forming. Social search validates whether audiences care. The shift: building authority before demand peaks rather than chasing established keywords after competitors claimed territory.
AI agents filter purchase options before humans engage, requiring dual journey design — When AI agents filter 200 options to three, visibility gets won or lost before customers see anything. Humans decide emotionally and get distracted. Agents parse structured data without cognitive load. Marketing now requires two paths: emotional copy for people, machine-readable attributes for agents. The constraint: optimize only for humans and agents remove you from consideration. Optimize only for agents and humans never connect.
Conversational search, video commerce, and retail media networks reshape 2026 marketing — Zero-click searches jumped from 56% to 69%. Video-commerce integrates purchase triggers directly into content. Retail media networks hit $62 billion, representing 17.9% of digital spend. Privacy-first data becomes competitive advantage as third-party cookies disappear. The pattern: platforms control discovery, transaction, and measurement simultaneously. Single-channel optimization no longer sufficient across fragmented landscape.
Media companies prioritize audience ownership and trust over traffic scale — Industry executives expect continued volatility but see opportunity in owning direct audience relationships. Axios focuses on expertise over anonymous pageviews. The Guardian's digital reader revenue increased 20% year-over-year despite instability. Hyve reports events pulling away from competitors during uncertainty as buyers prioritize trusted, high-ROI experiences. The shift: from scale metrics to audience value and relationship depth as core business model.
Agentic AI delivers 66% productivity gains but requires human oversight for publishing — Companies report 66% productivity increases and 57% cost savings from agentic AI, but humans review every output before publishing. Content turnaround accelerates from days to hours. Brand style guides, legal compliance, and image sourcing still require human verification. The reality: AI promises autonomy but delivers speed with maintained control requirements.
Redirection for Contact Form 7 plugin contained unauthenticated vulnerability allowing arbitrary file uploads. The flaw affected all versions up to 3.2.7, installed on over 300,000 WordPress sites. Site owners updated to version 3.2.8 to patch the vulnerability within hours of disclosure.
The infrastructure difference: WordPress owners control when they patch security flaws. Platform-dependent creators wait for platforms to fix vulnerabilities affecting millions simultaneously. Owned infrastructure requires active management. Platform dependency means zero control when security breaks.
Michael
Operator @WP Folio - now WP Defense Lab. Same Plugins. Different Name.