There was a time when someone who amassed half a billion followers would be called a celebrity, or perhaps a phenomenon, or possibly a cautionary tale about the effects of parasocial attachment. Now, apparently, he is called a chief executive's boss.

Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube performer known as MrBeast, recently became the first person to collect 500 million subscribers on that platform — a figure larger than the combined populations of the United States and Canada, for those keeping score at home. Inside his North Carolina headquarters hangs a plaque reading "YouTube first," which sounds like a statement of creative principle but functions more like a reminder of origin: the company Mr. Donaldson now oversees includes a chocolate brand, a toy manufacturer, a production studio, a competition program on Amazon's Prime Video, a financial services application, and, by year's end, a mobile telephone carrier.

(One imagines the plaque will need to be updated, or at least footnoted.)

This is not, it turns out, an isolated case of digital ambition. According to eMarketer, American brands will spend at least $21 billion on creators in 2026, nearly double what they spent in 2022. The revenue gap between traditional web publishers and creator earnings — which publishers led by 44 percent as recently as three years ago — has narrowed to roughly 26 percent today.

"Creators are not becoming the new media companies," said Jeff Housenbold, chief executive of Beast Industries. "They are media companies."

The mechanics, as Andrew Graham of CAA Creators noted, are by now familiar: build an audience on a platform you do not own, then erect businesses atop it that you do. Hank Green and Mythical Entertainment pioneered this approach years ago, though the commercial infrastructure — the personnel, the advertising budgets, the people willing to write the checks — needed time to catch up.

It has, evidently, caught up. Whether the advertising industry is prepared for a world in which its largest media partners are also its most unpredictable personalities is a question that answers itself, slowly, and then all at once.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Creators Are Quietly Becoming Media Conglomerates"