As social media becomes increasingly reliant on algorithmic feeds, creators are navigating a new normal: Just because you post something doesn’t mean your followers will see it.
“I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” LTK CEO Amber Venz Box told TechCrunch.
This isn’t news to creators – Patreon CEO Jack Conte has ardently banged this drum for years – but throughout the year, the industry at large has reacted to this phenomenon in different ways, from the influencers to the streamers.
According to the executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers – some acting as a salve to AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves.
Box’s company, LTK, connects creators with brands through affiliate marketing, where creators earn commissions on products they recommend. The business model depends entirely on audiences retaining trust in individual creators. Given concerns about fragmentation in the creator-audience relationship, this could pose an existential threat to the company.
But a study commissioned from Northwestern University found that trust in creators increased 21% year-over-year, which was a pleasant surprise to Box.
“If you asked me at the beginning of 2025, ‘Hey, is trust in creators going to go up or down?’ I would have probably said down, because people understand it’s an industry – they understand how it’s working,” she said. “But actually, AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.”
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By that, Box means that consumers are more likely to go out of their way to see content from the creators they know and trust. According to the study, 97% of chief marketing officers intend to grow influencer marketing budgets in the new year.
That doesn’t mean that owning these relationships is straightforward. LTK creators, who rely on affiliate income, are betting this AI-indu …