We’ve hit a turning point in the creator economy. Creators aren’t just monetising content, they’re building businesses with real strategy: diversified revenue, owned audiences, and increasingly, owned products. Meanwhile, a lot of brands still approach them like digital billboards for rent. The gap is widening. And the most in-demand creators are simply becoming more selective.
The simplest way to see the shift is to look at how creator income is evolving. Across recent creator earnings surveys, brand deals still sit at the top, but the direction of travel is clear: more creators are leaning into ads, affiliate, and self-owned businesses to reduce reliance on one-off sponsorship cycles.
A lot of creators still earn the bulk of their money from partnerships: that’s the reality of the market today. For example, Influencer Marketing Hub’s Creator Earnings Report 2025 found just under half of surveyed creators earn most of their revenue from brand deals, while noting a shift toward ad revenue and self-owned businesses. But here’s the change that matters for brands: creators aren’t organising their business around you anymore. They’re organising around stability, leverage, and ownership.
Linktree’s Creator Commerce Report 2024 is blunt about where many creators see consistent income: affiliate revenue streams were cited as a top income driver, while larger brand partnerships were described as harder to rely on consistently.
So when a brand slides into the inbox with “sponsored post opportunity,” it’s no longer the obvious priority. It’s being evaluated against a creator’s own pipeline: affiliate conversion, direct-to-fan revenue, product margin, membership retention.
This is why the “creator as entrepreneur” framing isn’t a buzzword, it’s a business response to volatility. Ad revenue fluctuates. Algorithms move. Budgets shift. Even high-performing creators can’t build a long-term plan on unstable inputs. So the smartest ones build revenue they can own: subscriptions, products, services, memberships, education. And the more they build that infrastructure, the less they need to take misaligned sponsorships.
That’s the uncomfortable truth for brands: the best creators increasingly have leverage, and they use it. They don’t take deals out of necessity; they take deals that compound their brand.
Here’s the next layer most brands are not priced into yet: creators are starting to generate IP value, not just media value.
Entertainment has always rewarded formats that travel. The biggest production fortunes were built on repeatable IP, shows that can be adapted across markets and mediums (reality, entertainment, scripted). Creators are now proving they can do something similar: build formats, worlds, characters, and fandoms with incredible speed, because they’re natively trained in audience retention and iteration.
And legacy media has clearly clocked it.
In January 2026, the BBC announced a landmark partnership with YouTube to produce bespoke, YouTube-first content, alongside an “unprecedented training programme” aimed at upskilling creators and producers.
Separate from that, the BBC has also been running BBC Creator Lab, positioned as a talent initiative to spotlight and support young social/digital creators in the UK.
This isn’t “brands learning TikTok.” This is traditional broadcasters building a pipeline between creator-native storytelling and TV-grade development because they can see the value in creator-born formats that can scale into franchises.
That’s creator IP: not just content, but repeatable entertainment properties with licensing, adaptation, distribution, and long-tail value.
The old model book creator, approve script, run campaign, move on, will still exist but it will increasingly be the least interesting option to the creators who matter most.
The new model is partnership, not rental. And partnership doesn’t have to mean “big budget.” It means different deal logic:
Creators don’t want exposure. They want growth and status. They don’t need validation but alignment. They don’t optimise for one post. They optimise for compounding value.
So the brands that win in 2026 will start behaving differently:
- bringing creators in earlier (before the “brief” becomes a box)
- building longer arcs instead of isolated deliverables
- experimenting with performance-based structures where it fits
- exploring co-creation that taps into shared equity: product, experiences, recurring formats
- and increasingly, treating creators as potential IP partners, not just campaign talent
Because the best creators aren’t influencers anymore. They’re operators and the smartest brands will learn how to work with them like they are.
