🔴 How people with power are defining “creator”

TIME released their second annual 100 Creators list earlier this month. Statements like these (the Webby Awards, etc.) always draw me as a temperature check on our industry.

Three items in today’s letter.

Your newsletter is here. Your website is there. Your podcast analytics are a mess. Your community is just a Facebook chat. And somehow, you’re the one stuck connecting it all.

beehiiv brings your content, audience, and business together on one platform. Create newsletters, publish podcasts, build your website, grow your community, and earn from subscriptions, ads, and digital products without duct-taping a dozen tools together.

If you're ready to stop jumping from platform to platform, here's your sign to connect your entire business on beehiiv. You'll spend less time managing your tech stack and more time building something people truly love.

Get started for free today.

This is an advertisement.

The one thing I wanted to know about TIME’s 100 Creators list: how similar was this year’s edition to last year’s?

11 creators appear on both editions of the list. The other 89 creators appear for the first time.

Who are the repeat honorees? And how were they categorized?

The TIME list is split into five categories: Titans, Phenoms, Catalysts, Leaders, and Entertainers. (TL;DR on how these categories seem to be defined: Titans are the biggest players, Phenoms are breakout stars, Catalysts are change-makers, Leaders are influential in their subject areas, Entertainers are self-explanatory.)

Of the repeat honorees, five were categorized as Titans both years. Four shifted from Phenoms or Leaders to Titans. One appears as an Entertainer both times, and one shifted from Phenom to Catalyst.

What interests me here is TIME’s maintenance of their Titan Mount Rushmore, so to speak. Notable Titan removals: MrBeast, Charli D’Amelio, Kai Cenat, Khaby Lame — some of the most-followed creators on the web.

Kai Cenat was even last year’s cover star. This year’s is Alix Earle.

I see these absences representing the death of the follower, a signal that those titans of a previous era are losing relevance in a new era. Alix Earle’s profile is all about her ability to build a business empire — her skincare brand and her Netflix deal. In other words, she’s transitioning from “creator” to more traditional celebrity.

I don’t want to read too much into this list. TIME is not some singular arbiter of power over the creator economy, but this is an ambitious editorial package with 37 people in the credits.

It represents the consensus of how this particular group of media professionals understands the creator landscape at this moment in time. I’m less interested in the list itself than I would be in a summary of meeting notes and communications from the whittling-down process; my analysis is really an attempt to understand that process. TIME, if you’re reading this, publish the behind-the-scenes!

One last thing on this Titans list — I wanted to know if that death-of-the-follower notion tracks in the following numbers. And it does! (To be clear: both rows reflect current, July 2026 follower counts — I'm comparing who's on each list, not tracking anyone's growth over time.):

Following totals are as of July 30, 2026. Social Blade is the source for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Facebook; where relevant, we added the most recent publicly available podcast and newsletter audience numbers from other sources. Totals include both a creator's "real-name" channels and, where applicable, their "show" channels. Because these are summed across accounts and platforms, they represent total reach, not unique audience — the same person may follow a creator in more than one place.

This decrease reflects the removal, again, of some of the biggest-by-following creators, including MrBeast and Khaby Lame.

One other detail worth noting — this year’s edition featured Whalar Group as marquee sponsor, where last year’s featured #paid.

Outside of the companies behind the platforms themselves, Whalar Group is among the most consequential infrastructure businesses in the industry.

*I should say — Whalar was a seven-arm business. The company, founded in 2016, recently sold off Whalar (the creator and social agency) to Accenture Song, for an undisclosed price (reported to be north of $500 million). The Group retains ownership of the other six arms.

Clearly, Whalar Group is putting that money to work with this TIME sponsorship. (Reader, let me know if you’ve intel on how this deal was priced.)

And where was the TIME100 Creators event held last night? At the Brooklyn location of Whalar Group’s Lighthouse campus, of course (full disclosure, I am a Lighthouse member).

It’s only fitting that a list featuring well-followed, influential creators would be sponsored by a company like Whalar Group. Big businesses on both the creator and service side define the present and future of the creator economy.

I am frustrated by the rampant misuse of the term “creator.” Though I’ve long since landed on a definition, it’s not the definition most people use. But, over my last few years running Creator Spotlight, I have become less and less frustrated. A definition is crystallizing.

One problem with the term is it’s almost always used with an invisible modifier.

For our definition, here at the Spotlight, that modifier is “working” — as in, a working creator is somebody producing digital media for distribution on digital platforms, building an audience for this media in earnest, and somehow monetizing the relationship between said media and audience.

For the representatives of a given platform, the invisible modifier is usually the name of that platform; when an Instagram representative uses the word “creator,” they’re typically talking about Instagram creators commanding high view counts on Instagram Reels.

The meaning of this word to those with relevant power — executives at media companies and creator platforms especially — bears consequence. I’ve seen three such definitions recently, from folks at TIME, FOX, and Patreon.

What does TIME mean? What is their modifier? Let’s look at the letter from their Editor-in-Chief contextualizing the list.

Here we have an implied definition that I agree with — creators, by definition, publish digital media through digital platforms.

And here’s the stated definition:

So: creators are individuals with their own audiences who can collaborate with organizations, but do not need to, and can stand on their own following.

FOX Entertainment announced a creator studio initiative earlier this year, bringing on former Spotlight guest Billy Parks (I interviewed him last summer when he was working on the Slow Ventures Creator Fund) to lead the program. They’re viewing creators in much the same way as TIME:

TIME has at least one creator practicing this model on their 100 list — Kyla Scanlon, who makes much of her living from paid newsletter subscriptions, and joined CNN last month as a contributor.

Creator, for traditional media organizations, seems to mean contractor with their own audience — a freelancer with power.

Why do we care how TIME and FOX executives define this term? Because it describes the type of creator they recognize they need to work with to thrive in this era; the type of creator they need to pay.

One more note from a figure whose concept of “creator” is studied and has consequence. Jackson Dahl, host of the Dialectic podcast, published an interview with Patreon CEO Jack Conte last week. In his recap of 22 lessons from the conversation, one stuck out to me:

This isn’t a definition, as such, rather a taxonomy. For Conte, there’s that invisible modifier, Patreon creator. Which is to say, a creator whose business relies (at least in part) on subscription revenue. And these are the three types of Patreon creator.

Note that definitions above focus on the business more than the content creation. That much is a given; is table-stakes. The maturing definition recognizes this and focuses on business: a creator is a media company, whether of one or of many.

As TIME’s Jacobs put it elsewhere in his letter from the editor: “individuals who function as media companies unto themselves.” Or return to Parks’ recent press release: “the most exciting entertainment businesses today are being built directly around audience relationships.”

One more reference from this week — Scalable’s Kaya Yurieff spoke with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, for this week’s edition of their podcast. He mentioned wanting to build a creator network on YouTube, which “could include creators who share The Atlantic’s standards and values, but who aren’t yet making a sustainable living on YouTube.”

These creators would need to have their own audiences, ideally with little overlap to The Atlantic’s existing audience; less a content than an acquisition expenditure.

If you ask somebody who doesn’t work in the creator economy, you might not get definitions like these. But it’s a common definition is crystallizing. The field is professionalizing.

Where and why the money flows is clearer than ever.

How are traditional media companies working with creators right now? What models are crystallizing alongside the creator as a category of businessperson? More to the point, how is money flowing from media companies to creators?

Over at The Atlantic, they’ve tried at least one model to date:

They’ll certainly try other models. What might they be?

Well, Justin Banks, friend of the Spotlight and a two-decade journalism and audience development veteran, recently published an excellent taxonomy of publisher-creator relationships. It’s typically well-considered.

The below models and definitions are quoted directly from Justin’s post:

Justin is a great LinkedIn follow. I’d also recommend checking out The Independent Journalism Atlas, his project (alongside former Spotlight guest Liz Kelly Nelson and friend of the newsletter Ryan Kellett) tracking the creator-journalist landscape.