Is the creator economy just a fad? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, i know it isn’t. Creators are here to stay and today I write about what this means for adtech and B2B brands.

For years, the debate about the creator economy was whether it was real. That debate is over — not because anyone won the argument, but because the money stopped arguing.

Look at what actually happened over the past year: a European software conglomerate took Vimeo private in a deal north of a billion dollars. Later spent a quarter of a billion on Mavely, an affiliate commerce platform built on everyday influencers. Publicis — a holding company, the most traditional buyer imaginable — acquired Captiv8 and wired a fifteen-million-creator network directly into its identity and outcomes stack. By one industry count¹, M&A activity in the space hit a record, up double digits year over year, with software platforms making up the largest share of what's being bought.

Sit with that last part, because it's the tell. The acquirers aren't buying influencers. They're buying infrastructure.

When you strip the deals down, three things are commanding real valuations:

Recurring revenue. The tools that power content production, monetization, analytics, and affiliate commerce are trading at software multiples — in some cases above traditional SaaS benchmarks. The creator economy stopped being a media story and became a software story.

Owned audience plus commerce. Platforms that connect a loyal audience directly to transactions are the prize. Distribution you own, attached to revenue you can measure — that's the whole thesis in one line.

IP that outlives the platform. The most underpriced asset in the category is creator-owned intellectual property: the format, the franchise, the community, the newsletter with loyal distribution. When a creator owns those things, they're not building a following. They're building equity — and in an acquisition, owned IP is what separates a talent deal from a strategic one.

If those three bullets sound familiar, they should. Recurring relationships, owned audience, durable IP — it's the ownership thesis I keep coming back to, except now it's being validated with term sheets instead of blog posts.

Here's the part my corner of the industry shouldn't skim past: when a holding company buys creator marketing software and plugs it into an identity graph, creators stop being a campaign tactic and become a media channel — plannable, measurable, and increasingly programmatic.

That has consequences. Attribution and affiliate tracking are turning creator activity into performance media. Non-endemic buyers — CPG, retail, food — are entering the space treating creators as distribution engines, not spokespeople. And the infrastructure being acquired (payments, analytics, fulfillment, measurement) looks a lot like the plumbing ad tech spent two decades building for display and video. The creator channel is getting its own stack, and the companies that connect it to the rest of the ecosystem will own a growing share of budgets.

If you sell into brands or agencies, "what's your creator strategy" is about to sit in the same sentence as "what's your CTV strategy." Plan for it.

The detail from the deal data that deserves more attention: the buyers entering the space aren't just media and tech companies anymore. CPG, retail, and food brands are acquiring and investing in creator businesses directly — and their logic is different. They're not buying reach. They're buying distribution they don't have to rent.

Think about what that means from the brand side. A retailer that owns a creator commerce platform doesn't pay a toll to reach that audience ever again. A CPG company with equity in a creator-founded brand gets product feedback, launch velocity, and a warm audience in one package. The creator stops being a marketing expense and becomes an owned channel on the balance sheet — which is exactly how these companies already think about their retail media networks.

For ad tech, that's both the opportunity and the warning. The opportunity: every one of those relationships needs measurement, attribution, brand safety, and payment rails, and most of it doesn't exist yet at the standard the buyers will demand. The warning: when distribution gets bought instead of rented, the intermediaries who only ever sold rented reach have less to sell.

The deeper lesson isn't about the deals. It's about why these businesses became acquirable in the first place — and it's a playbook any B2B company can copy without raising a dollar.

The creators who built real enterprise value did three things: they picked a specific audience and went deep instead of wide; they moved that audience onto channels they own — the newsletter, the podcast, the community — instead of renting reach forever; and they showed up with such consistency that the audience became the moat. Diversified revenue came after the owned relationship, never before it.

That is, almost point for point, the operating model I've been describing for B2B brands: a focused set of channels feeding each other until the market feels like it knows you. The creator economy just proved the model has a balance sheet. Companies like a16z and Workweek already run marketing as a media operation — creators becoming media companies, and media companies becoming the marketing department, are the same trend viewed from opposite ends.

If you're a B2B operator reading this and wondering what to do with it, the sequence matters more than the ambition. The creator businesses that became acquirable didn't start with six revenue streams — they started with one owned relationship and earned the right to expand. Translated to a B2B brand:

Start with one owned channel and treat it like a product. A newsletter or a podcast — not both, not five. Give it a name, a cadence, and a reason to exist beyond "content marketing." The asset being valued in every one of these acquisitions is a loyal, reachable audience; you can't build that across six channels at once.

Put a person on it, not a logo. The creator economy's entire premium exists because people trust people. The B2B version is an executive or founder whose voice fronts the media property. The company still collects the upside — it just stops pretending an anonymous brand account can build a relationship.

Instrument it like media, because it is media. Subscriber growth, engagement depth, replies, attributable pipeline. The moment you can show what the owned audience produces, the budget conversation changes — you're no longer defending a marketing expense, you're reporting on an asset.

Expand only after the audience asks you to. Events, premium content, community, product — every diversified creator business added those after the core relationship was strong. B2B brands that launch the community before the audience exists are building rooms nobody asked to enter.

None of this requires believing your company will be acquired for its newsletter. It requires noticing what buyers with real money now consider durable — and building the same thing at whatever scale your market allows.

A round of honesty before the takeaway, because every asset-class story eventually overheats.

Not every creator business is durable — plenty of the audience in this space is rented from algorithms, and an audience that lives entirely on a platform's feed is an asset the platform can reprice overnight. The businesses commanding real multiples are the ones that moved their relationship off rented land, which is precisely why the software and infrastructure layer — not the follower counts — is what's being acquired. And valuation ranges this wide are a reminder that buyers are still figuring out what these assets are worth; some of these deals will look brilliant in five years and some will look like tuition.

But the direction is not ambiguous. Capital is a lagging indicator — by the time acquirers agree a category is investable, the operating lesson has been true for years. The lesson here has been true for at least a decade: owned, focused, consistent beats rented, broad, and sporadic.

The old question was whether any of this was durable. The new question — the one investors are now asking — is which assets in the space compound long-term value. Audience you own. Trust you've earned. IP that travels. Those are the answers showing up in the deal data, and they're the same answers whether you're a creator with a podcast or a B2B brand with a newsletter.

If you're looking for guidance on building owned audience, content strategy, or brand equity that compounds, you can contact me here.

¹ Deal volume and valuation figures via the Quartermast Advisors 2026 Creator Economy M&A Report.