Content Creators: A New Breed Of Entrepreneur

Forbes

5 hours ago

If you want to feel popular, place yourself, as I did, at the center of a gathering of people who make money building worlds around themselves. The setting: Forbes' inaugural Creator Upfronts in Los Angeles last October. The audience: media buyers for the world's top brands. The dynamic: a pitching frenzy, including lobbying of Forbes, which has emerged as the ultimate validator in this nascent, surging industry.
Steven Bertoni with TikTok star Khaby Lame
Jamel Toppin for Forbes
This cohort goes by many names: influencer is the most popular, creators the most respectful, streamers or vloggers the most dated and narrow. Here's the most accurate term: entrepreneurs. Creators succeed based on their own talents and hard work, with little given to them. They build audiences, hire staff, cut equity deals. In doing so, they've ended the era of studio bosses and super-agents as the gatekeepers of fame and fortune. Self-destiny now rules: Anyone can be a star if their product is good enough, and they'll own the content, too.
That's why Forbes, as the voice of entrepreneurship, covers this group so urgently. 'This is more than selling other people's products,' says Steven Bertoni, who has overseen our coverage since we published our first Top Creators ranking in 2022. 'They are tilting elections, setting cultural trends and building brands unto themselves.'
Those brands can create extraordinary fortunes. Jimmy Donaldson, known to all as MrBeast, is well on his way to becoming a billionaire, and Goldman Sachs predicts the creator economy will double to a cool half-trillion within two years. Last year, The 50 honorees on our Top Creators list turned their collective 2.7 billion followers into $720 million in earnings. Let the traditional set roll their eyes. These are the media moguls of the mobile phone era, the exact types of innovators that Forbes has chronicled for a century.