The Audience Called. It Was Coming From Inside the House.

Two different ways to find out if something works

The traditional entertainment model works like this: develop a concept in a room, run it through a series of internal filters, test it against a focus group that may or may not resemble the eventual audience, then spend two hundred million dollars finding out if the bet was right. Sometimes it works. Sometimes a kid who made his movie on the internet pushes the franchise to third place.

The creator model runs the test continuously and in public. Make something, publish it, read the response, make it again. Over months and years, a creator develops a precise, almost intimate understanding of what a specific group of people care about: what makes them laugh, what makes them share, what makes them come back. By the time a creator is ready to do the big thing, they've already done thousands of small versions of it. The audience didn't just watch. They participated in the development.

This is why creator marketing works when it's done right. A brand partnering with the right creator isn't buying distribution. It's buying access to years of audience research no agency could replicate on a brief. The creator already knows what the audience will love, what they'll reject, and how they'll respond when the product shows up in the content. That knowledge doesn't transfer to a media buy. It lives in the relationship, which is exactly what makes it hard to shortcut and easy to underrate on a spreadsheet.

The pattern shows up outside video, too

Matt Dinniman didn't start with a book deal. He started with a chapter posted to Royal Road in 2019, writing in public, reading every comment, adjusting as he went. When the pandemic shut down the income he'd been relying on, he moved to Patreon and kept writing. Readers voted on story elements. They caught errors in his math. They told him, chapter by chapter, what was landing and what wasn't. By the time Dungeon Crawler Carl reached a traditional publisher, it had 15,000 paying subscribers, 6 million copies sold, and a Peacock deal in development.

Different platform, different format, same mechanism. The audience wasn't a target. It was a collaborator, whether the creator called it that or not.

This isn't new. It's just finally undeniable

Mike Monello, who co-created The Blair Witch Project and later co-founded Campfire, has been watching this shift longer than almost anyone in the industry:

“The Blair Witch Project showed me how the internet gave creators a direct line to their audiences, something that hadn't really existed before. What's changed since then isn't the principle, it's the scale and the economics. Now creators don't just build the audience, they can get paid directly by that audience while they do it, which flips the whole equation. When a creator shows up to a studio conversation today, they're not asking permission, they're deciding whether the studio is worth bringing in at all.”

The principle is decades old. What changed is that the audience relationship now comes with its own revenue, which means the creator negotiates from a position the old model never had to account for.

What this means for a brand's creator program

The brands winning in creator marketing right now aren't casting creators like actors in a brand film, handing them a script and hoping the audience follows along. They're finding the people who already know their audience and getting out of the way.

That has a practical shape. It means treating creator selection less like a media buy and more like due diligence on an existing relationship: how long has this creator's audience been responding to them, what have they already learned about what that audience wants, and how much of that knowledge is the brand actually getting to use versus overriding with brand-approved talking points.

It also means resisting the instinct to over-brief. A creator who has run a billion small test screenings on an audience knows things about that audience a strategy deck never will. The brands that get the most out of these partnerships are the ones willing to be told, not just to direct.

The audience didn't leave traditional gatekeepers behind so much as it reoriented around trust, built in public, over time. That happened years before any single weekend at the box office made it impossible to ignore. The brands paying attention now are the ones who'll have a real relationship with that audience by the time everyone else notices the pattern.

— Jeremiah Rosen, Sundae Collective