AI slop, creators take Hollywood & the TikTok ban that wasn’t: 2025 Creator Economy Year in Review

0:00Jasmine Enberg: Hi, everyone. This is Scalable, a weekly show about the business of the creator economy. I'm Kaya Yurieff. And I'm Jasmine Enberg. Every Thursday, we take you beyond the headlines to tell you what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. Here's what happened in the creator economy in 2025 in less than a minute. TikTok's 14-hour shutdown. The White House welcomes podcasters and creators. Trump's first tariffs go into effect. Instagram launches edits. The Golden Globes announces its first best podcast category. Meta says it will automate all ads by 2026. The astronomer CEO video goes viral across social media.

0:35Taylor Swift goes on Travis Kelsey's podcast and breaks a YouTube record.

0:39Jasmine Enberg: OpenAI launches Zora 2. Stephen Bartlett nabs a$425 million valuation. Meta wins its antitrust trial. And Australia bans most social media apps for teens.

0:56Jasmine Enberg: Hi, Jasmine. Hey, Kaya. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. It's that time of year when everyone is releasing their predictions. We are releasing ours next week. But first, we thought it would be fun to recap the year because it has been a wild one. Yeah, it definitely has. There have been so many highs and just as many lows. And we put together a timeline of all the big moments of 2025 in our newsletter. And it was such a fun exercise, but it also just showed how tumultuous this year has really been. As we were doing it, we also found that some really big themes emerged this year. The first one was the major convergence of Hollywood with creators, which was one of my predictions for 2025.

1:38Jasmine Enberg: I don't think I anticipated just how big of a breakout year this would be. To just kind of run through a few examples. I mean, obviously Golden Globes, right? Announcing first ever best podcast category. This was the year that Netflix and other streamers really went hard on creator deals and attracting creators, right? You had Netflix going after podcasters, YouTubers, they signed deals with Miss Rachel and Mark Rober. HBO Max did the show about the Paul brothers, so many different examples of streaming shows. We also saw a huge uptick in fast channels from creators. Samsung signed a deal with Darkman.

2:13Jasmine Enberg: Tubi went really hard after creators and is still expanding those efforts. So it felt like the fast channel creator year. And then YouTube, of course, to really made a push for the Emmys this year, you know, creators are increasingly seeking Emmy consideration. The YouTube CEO Neil Mohan penned an op ed for the Hollywood Reporter about this topic, they held a four year consideration event. And then most recently, Prime Video released its trailer for the second season of Beast Games, which is premiering in early January. And the pinnacle example of this is there will be a special edition crossover episode of Beast Games with Survivor.

2:50Jasmine Enberg: So you have like, you know, one of the longest standing franchises on TV with now Mr. Beast's new reality competition show. So that was the perfect end to this year of kind of showing that crossover. So on a somewhat related front, it wasn't a big year for sports overall, but it was still a pretty big year for creators in sports. So YouTube hosted its very first NFL game. And I can tell you that this is one of the first times I have tuned into football outside of the Super Bowl and also when Taylor Swift is there. I was also one of 16.2 million viewers in the US. So this was a really big hit. Mr.

3:26Beast, of course, made an appearance during the halftime show. There were also quite a few Super Bowl ads that featured creators, though it felt like it wasn't as big of a moment in the Super Bowl as it was just last year. One good example was the Poppy ad with Alex Earle, Jake Shane and Love Island's Rob Rauch. So pretty big year for sports and creators too. On a more serious note, regulation was also a major theme in 2025, starting, of course, with the TikTok ban that wasn't. I am sure all of you can remember when TikTok shut down for about 14 hours in the US in January. When it came back online, users got a pop-up notification that actually thanked President Donald Trump, which is kind of ironic given that he was the one that kicked all of this off back in 2020 when he tried to ban TikTok with an executive order, which of course failed.

4:17About a year later, TikTok's future in the US is still in limbo, although it feels much less likely that it will be fully banned. This was a huge topic with a lot of starts and stops throughout the year. I remember one time I was on Bloomberg doing a hit about meta earnings and there was some big TikTok ban related news and we had to pivot immediately. So that just goes to show how much attention there was on this story. And I know, Kaya, you were deep in the trenches on all of this.

4:44Jasmine Enberg: So I started my January freezing outside of the Supreme Court to hear the TikTok versus Merrick Garland case, which was, of course, TikTok trying to challenge a law requiring the app to find a U.S. buyer or face a ban. And it was my first time inside the Supreme Court. I had a terrible seat. I had like a column blocking my view. And it was such an interesting reporting experience because it was very old school. When you're inside the Supreme Court, you cannot bring your cell phone. You cannot bring any recording devices. So I was there pen and paper listening to their arguments. But it was very clear to me being in that room that TikTok would lose that case, which they did.

5:23Jasmine Enberg: So many twists and turns with that story. It dominated my Q1 and most of the first half of the year. And it's really dragged on without a real resolution. Of course, you know, I think TikTok's not in the same danger of going offline again, but it really caused so much uncertainty for creators and brands and TikTok employees. It's hard to kind of think about that now because it feels like, oh, that's so in the past. But it really was a tumultuous time for everyone involved and users as well. I have to ask before we move on, did they assign seats or is that just the seat that you got? They assign seats based on the news outlet.

6:00Jasmine Enberg: So like the information is not, you know, doing a ton of reporting in D.C., although my former colleague Sylvia is doing increasingly more reporting on the intersection of politics and tech. So they, you know, they put some of the, you know, the big name outlets in the front and I got. But you know what? I was happy to have a seat and I was happy to be there. So, yeah, I mean, I remember you texting me afterwards and part of me felt for you being out there in the freezing cold in D.C. But the other part of me was like, I kind of want to be there and see it all firsthand because it was I mean, it was such a huge story.

6:31And you did so much reporting on it, I think, broke a lot of the big news stories at the time, too.

6:36Jasmine Enberg: Thank you. I know. I remember, you know, feeling like, oh, wow, it's over. I broke the news on the Trump administration's resolution for saving TikTok. They had called it TikTok America. So TBD, if that same framework will ultimately be the one that prevails. But the story is far from over. So TikTok is definitely here to stay, at least for now in the US. But for Australian teens, their access was cut off in December. So on December 10th, Australia's social media ban for under 16 year olds finally went into effect. There were a lot of hiccups right from the get go, including malfunctions with age verification systems.

7:15There was also people supposedly or reportedly using VPNs to connect. Not surprising. Teens are notorious for finding workarounds. Of course, you know, the big issue here is that this ban could have a ripple effect on other markets. We're already seeing places like Denmark and the broader EU start to consider some kind of teen social media ban of their own. In another piece of regulation-related news, Meta, of course, won its big antitrust trial. A federal judge ruled that it gets to keep Instagram and WhatsApp. That is a massive win for the company. Instagram is such an important moneymaker for Meta.

7:51In its third quarter earnings this year, it says that Reels now has an annual revenue run rate of about$50 billion. WhatsApp also released ads in Stories for the first time earlier this year. It is not as important of a revenue stream for Meta, but it does have a massive user base. And it's basically the way that people text in other parts of the world outside the U.S.

8:13Jasmine Enberg: And a lot else happened this year in politics. It's hard to believe that the second Trump administration started in January. So Joe Biden was still president at the beginning of this year. This year has felt so long. And a lot of people were wondering how, you know, this White House would interact with creators given that the Biden administration was so active. You know, they held the first creator conference at the White House. So we got some answers. The White House welcomed alternative media, including conservative podcasters, into the press briefing room for the first time. And of course, this year was really dominated by tariffs, which had a huge impact on the economy, sparked a lot of uncertainty for consumers and businesses of all kinds, including advertisers.

8:53Jasmine Enberg: And then, of course, in September, there was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one of the most powerful right wing influencers and activists. So it's probably not going to come as a surprise to anybody that AI was a huge theme once again this year. I think the big moment for social media and the creator economy, at least, was the launch of OpenAI's Sora app, which lets users turn text prompts into videos. As we talked about on our podcast a couple of weeks ago, excitement has already faded around the app. I think, you know, that was to be expected. And the other part of this is that OpenAI isn't really expecting Sora to become a social app that competes the likes of Instagram or TikTok, at least, you know, that isn't the number one goal.

9:36In other AI news, though, Meta also said that the company planned to automate all advertising by 2026. A lot of advertisers, obviously, and with good reason, freaked out about this. I was actually at Cannes Lions just a few weeks after this announcement was made. And it was one of the topics that pretty much came up in every single conversation that I had. I also went to a meta press briefing where they tried really hard to quell some of the concerns around these comments. They had brought in an executive from an agency and really were trying to position themselves as advertiser and agency friendly.

10:14Obviously, behind the scenes, they continued building a lot of these AI tools and it's already become a really important revenue driver for them. meta said that it has about 4 million advertisers this year already using its generative AI ad tools. Then we also had the AI Wimbledon influencer Mia Zellew. Of course, she's not the first AI influencer, but she did manage to amass a following of about 200 ,000 followers when I last checked. I also spent a lot of time kind of reading through the comments because I found it so interesting. And what really stood out to me is that a lot of people either didn't realize that she was AI or didn't really care about it.

10:55And I think overall, what that said to me is that even people who say that they dislike or distrust or hate AI, they're still engaging with it.

11:04Jasmine Enberg: Podcasting, of course, continued to dominate this year, riding the coattails of a breakout podcast election year in 2024. You know, earlier mentioned Netflix's deal with Spotify. And also, I would add to that, convincing these shows to take long form episodes off of YouTube as part of that deal was a really big deal. And further highlights, you know, how large of a threat YouTube is posing to Netflix. Spotify launched ad revenue sharing and expanded into video this year. It's so interesting how at the beginning of the year, there was so much skepticism in the industry from some of the top podcasters who are big on YouTube and were, you know, a little nervous about moving video to Spotify and cannibalizing that that revenue.

11:46Jasmine Enberg: But it seems like, you know, video has really expanded on Spotify, definitely will be a focus for them next year. You know, Joe Rogan, to no surprise, continued to dominate. He was the top podcast across the charts, but we had others break through as well, like Mel Robbins. And YouTube also hit 1 billion podcast viewers. So lots of highlights on the podcasting side. 2025 was also YouTube's 20th anniversary. So happy birthday to YouTube. It was also the year that YouTube finally got serious about influencer marketing. It started rolling out a bunch of new updates, which include things like Open Call that we've talked about at length on this podcast.

12:24It rolled out a creator marketplace, as well as new ad placements for shorts creators and creator ads, just to name a couple of examples. Some of these things are long overdue, but it really does show that the platform is finally serious about its creators and helping them make money outside of ad revenue sharing. YouTube wasn't the only app to make big moves in the influencer marketing space, though. Meta started really pushing its partnership ads. It also launched a CapCut competitor called Edits. We also saw Snap revamp its creator monetization program, which now lets creators earn money off of Spotlight instead of just stories.

13:01And LinkedIn, it added more creators to its brand link program. And this is one thing that I kind of wish that I had predicted would happen in 2025 because 2024 was such a big year for LinkedIn and creators. It was kind of inevitable that this would happen.

13:16Jasmine Enberg: Yeah. And then on the agency kind of brand side, Omnicom, of course, completed its acquisition of IPG. We dove much deeper into that into a newsletter and podcast episode, but that created the largest holding company by revenue. So huge, huge deal. Publicis extended its M &A streak by acquiring influencer marketing firm Captivate. And more companies expanded their influencer marketing efforts. So we had Lowe's and Home Depot both launch creator programs this year for DIY creators. So it's really touching every aspect of the industry, every niche, every Fortune 1000 brand, even smaller brands from like cybersecurity brands to everyone in between has some sort of strategy.

13:56It was also a really big year for creator businesses. Alex Cooper kicked things off in January with her unwell drink coming to Target. The kiwi pineapple flavor is my favorite. She is also launching an unwell energy drink in Target next January. Mr. Beast made a ton of news on Dealbook. He said he was building a mobile phone company. He also said he wants to create a matchmaking platform for brands and advertisers. Earlier this year, he also opened a temporary theme park in Saudi Arabia. And he's also confirmed his$5 billion valuation for Beast Enterprises, which has been floating around in the news.

14:31Over in Europe, Stephen Bartlett made history when he raised funding for Stephen.com at a$425 million valuation. He's using some of that money to invest in another podcast, Hot, Smart, Rich. And we think this could be the start of a really fun trend of seeing creators invest in other creators.

14:49Jasmine Enberg: It was also a big year for traditional media and the creator economy. So not just Hollywood converging with creators. We saw Barry Weiss, who left The New York Times and started The Free Press. She took over CBS. Substack raised a huge round of$100 million after not being able to raise in previous years. And they really rode the momentum of, you know, post-Trump's election and a new wave of reporters and writers going independent. The Washington Post announced plans for its own creator network. Fast Co experimented with the space with publishing essays from independent newsletter writers. CNN launched a special CNN creators show.

15:29Jasmine Enberg: We did a whole chart kind of laying all of this out. So big, big year as well for traditional media and trying to figure out what's their place in the creator economy as well. And we launched Scalable and joined that trend. I mean, Kaya, it's only been a month and a half-ish so far, but what have been sort of your favorite moments? I think the launch was so exciting because we had been working on it for several weeks and we weren't telling anyone what we were doing. And I think the response was just really validating and feeling the support in the industry. And then I think seeing that support in person when we did the fireside chat at the lighthouse opening in Brooklyn and just having people show up in the afternoon on a random weekday and kind of show up to show their support and be so excited about what we're building.

16:15Jasmine Enberg: So I think those were some of the highlights. And it's just been fun to build something new and also do it with you and be able to riff on things together. And I mean, all of it has been a highlight. So much has happened in the past few weeks. What about you? There's so many. I think I would start with what was the most challenging part for me. And I think that was just keeping everything a secret. Right. And so there was also this sense of relief as well as excitement when we were finally able to tell people after we launched, like, remember when we were at MIPCOM and just had to pretend like we weren't plotting something behind the scenes.

16:48And I think, you know, right now feels like a really good moment in terms of the stage that we're at. We're starting to get into a rhythm with things. You know, we've sort of figured out our day to day and it's just exciting to keep building. I'm also very excited that we are going to have an event next year. So that's definitely something to look forward to.

17:10Jasmine Enberg: Yes. 2025, I think, was such a big year for the creator economy. So much happened. I think 2026 is going to be equally busy and exciting. We obviously have so many plans. And next week's episode, we're going to dive into kind of more of what we expect from the big themes of next year and our predictions. So be sure to tune into that.