The Year Creators Took Over

In early October, the No. 5 most popular podcast on Spotify, above the Times’ “The Daily” and just behind “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was a month-old show called “Talk Tuah.” Prior to this past summer, its host was an utterly anonymous Gen Z woman named Haliey Welch, a factory worker from Belfast, Tennessee. Welch achieved nearly instantaneous fame after she was captured, in June, in a street interview by the YouTubers Tim & Dee TV describing a sex tip with the memorable phrase “hawk tuah,” onomatopoeically evoking expectoration. The clip blew up on TikTok, and Welch, who took on the nickname Hawk Tuah Girl, became unavoidable online as a meme, a loop of her signature phrase on repeat. Real-life fame followed: she threw the first pitch at a Mets game, hosted parties at night clubs, signed with a management agency, and developed her podcast, which was released by a company co-founded by the YouTuber Jake Paul. The path from total obscurity to mainstream broadcast personality had been traversed in a matter of months.

In the past, we may have labelled Welch an influencer, a word that described, basically, someone who had accrued a lot of followers on social media. Welch did that, of course (she now has nearly two million TikTok followers), but she is not quite the same as the champion selfie-posters of a decade ago. These days, the favored term for an Internet powerhouse is “creator,” and in the course of this year a threshold of creatordom was passed. We don’t talk so much about podcasters, musicians, authors, or pundits anymore; they are simply creators, a catchall for people who are famous for making stuff across any number of platforms. What do creators create, exactly? Above all, they create digital content, and it doesn’t much matter where or which kind. They create the YouTube and TikTok videos we watch; they create the newsletters we read and the podcasts we listen to; and they create bits of text we consume on X, Threads, or Bluesky. Most likely they do all of the above at the same time. The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life–or had such direct access to the levers of power.

Even before Donald Trump rallied his supporters with appearances in the online manosphere, creators and their followings had become a coveted force in politics. In August, a crew of creators was invited into Joe Biden’s White House; “You are the new breakthrough in how we communicate,” the President told them. Later, at the Democratic National Convention that celebrated Kamala Harris’s nomination, Democrats cordoned creators in an area close to the stage, in front of journalists, and provided them with access to multimedia studios. In perhaps the most surreal creator moment this year, Bernie Sanders joined a Zoom politics panel with a “vtuber,” a streaming personality who uses a live-animated cartoon avatar instead of showing their face. Compared with “influencer,” the term “creator” has the advantage of at least implying a productive act, a turning of nothing into something. Whereas influencers were known for peddling aspirational life-style content, creators are presumed to have some kind of message to get across. It takes work to record and film yourself having an hours-long conversation for a video podcast; those who do so must have something to say. By this logic, creators have attained an air of authority as digital-age news anchors and cultural arbiters. Beyond Rogan, the dominant figures of the Presidential election included Alex Cooper of “Call Her Daddy,” who interviewed Kamala Harris and highlighted abortion-rights issues; Lex Fridman, a video-podcasting computer scientist who interviewed Elon Musk for more than eight hours straight; and Theo Von, a comedian whose on-camera conversation with Trump featured the former President inquiring about the psychological effects of cocaine. Particularly for their young core audiences, creators are the emotional centers of the new information ecosystem. What they have in common is a strong degree of parasociality—their followers feel like they know creators intimately through the screen. In the previous decade, Hollywood celebrities piggybacked on social media to increase their fame using personal accounts; now creators are digital-native celebrities whose cultivation of intimacy and parasocial friendship has been baked in from the beginning.

In the creator era, who you are is more important than what, precisely, you do or make, in part because what you make is always changing, as digital platforms evolve. Today’s podcast is tomorrow’s 24/7 Twitch livestream. Cultivating a personal brand is more requisite than ever, and there is more pressure for a creator to define her identity in one or two clear adjectives in order to stand out. Nara Smith was one such creator who thrived in 2024. A model who moved from Germany to the U.S. at the age of eighteen, she gained millions of followers on TikTok for her “tradwife” videos glamorizing the duties of the (highly stylized) stay-at-home mom. In the house she shares with her husband, Lucky Blue Smith, also a model, and their three children, Smith wears elaborate luxury outfits while performing arcane D.I.Y. tasks such as making bubble gum from scratch, narrating her days in a narcotized murmur. Smith’s videos are too intentionally designed to be described as mere “influencing”; they verge on video art, or at least long-term, living fashion ads. Smith’s project demonstrates an irony of influencing that is far more pronounced in the high-production-value world of creatordom: any veneer of authenticity is undercut by increasing pressure to commodify, professionalize, and look just like glossy traditional media.

Embracing the role of creator, paradoxically, is emerging as an exit strategy from sudden fame or infamy. The person targeted by mass-media exposure can recalibrate—and monetize—a persona for a smaller group of fans (or hate-followers). One prominent figure who recently deployed this approach was Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who withdrew himself as Trump’s pick for U.S. Attorney General amid scrutiny on allegations of sex trafficking. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, is now a creator of a sort: on Cameo, a platform where buyers can commission videos from celebrities of various tiers, he will record a message of your choice for a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee. (As of this writing, Gaetz was offering an added Christmas discount of eleven per cent.) Cameo used to be the domain of the famous or semi-famous, but Steven Galanis, the company’s C.E.O., recently announced the launch of CameoX, a version of the platform in which any ordinary person can enroll and get paid for making videos. “The amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing,” Galanis said. A version of this idea could serve as the creator motto: whoever you are, whatever you do, it’s now possible to accrue a devoted audience on your own.

The creator model offers a strategy for success in any arena of today’s Internet, which is to say, in any sphere of life. In September, a chubby pygmy hippo in Thailand became an online celebrity, and her home zoo became its own kind of creator, producing Moo Deng videos and selling merchandise. (Pesto, a large fuzzy king penguin, had similar success in Australia.) In October, the prominent Internet journalist Taylor Lorenz left her job as a columnist at the Washington Post to focus on her own career as a solo creator, producing newsletters, a podcast, and a YouTube channel. In November, Jake Paul, the YouTuber and sometime boxer, staged a live boxing match with Mike Tyson, a media spectacle that drew more than a hundred million viewers and tested Netflix’s capacity for live streaming. In each case, creators exerted their newly appreciated superpower to reach their audiences directly, without the approval of traditional media gatekeepers. Whether hippopotamus or tradwife, they are self-contained celebrity machines, merging recognizability with online-distribution capacity.

Meanwhile, the saga of Hawk Tuah Girl continues. The investor Mark Cuban and the musician Jojo Siwa have appeared on her podcast. In November, she launched an artificial-intelligence-driven dating-advice app. This month, she helped create a meme coin, called HAWK, a cryptocurrency whose value is tied to her online fame. The market value of HAWK reached five hundred million dollars before collapsing more than ninety per cent; some buyers complained of losing their savings, and law firms jumped in on social media to tell them to get in touch. (Welch has blamed the crash on hair-trigger traders.) For Welch, the project makes all the sense in the world: as a creator, she can spit out a podcast, a T-shirt, or a club night, and monetize it. Once you have established yourself in the creator ecosystem, a lack of expertise or experience is no matter; the audience simply wants more of you. The trick is either to create something of enduring interest outside yourself—a creation that surpasses its creator—or to be self-aware enough to cash out, through as many channels as possible, before your audience tires of you. ♦