The evolution of influencer marketing from 2015 vs 2025 - Ep 81

Hi everyone, welcome to Create and Consume. I'm your host Austin Tasson. On this podcast, you can expect real talk about creativity, what's trending, and navigating life in the era of digital content, from episodes like getting out of a style rut and ranking every Taylor Swift album, to stories from my magazine Editor Days in New York City and the true behind the scenes of the influencer industry. This podcast is your weekly inspo for creating your dream life both on and offline. I'm here to keep you company and provide entertainment, whether you're commuting to work, cleaning your home, or my personal favorite, going on a long walk around your neighborhood with your favorite caffeinated beverage in hand. Wherever you're listening from, I'm so happy you're here. Let's dive in. So I don't pretend to know what your TikTok algorithm looks like, but for me, I feel like every other video lately has been all about 2015, 2016 nostalgia. I came across one girl's beauty video and it said POV, you're getting ready for Thanksgiving Eve in 2015, and I think at the time 2015 may have felt like a bit of a hot mess to me, but sitting here now in 2025, I can see why we are leaning into the nostalgia and why there is so much to miss about that time. I started thinking more and more about not just how everything has changed in the last 10 years, but specifically how influencer marketing and the creator economy has really evolved in the last decade. Today we're going to talk about what influencer marketing looked like 10 years ago versus what it's become today from curated feeds and install worthy pictures to UGC content and a more off the cuff aesthetic. I have been a creator since 2012, so I have also personally lived through this last decade as a creator and can speak to my experience from that perspective. And even what I call myself over the years has changed so much, it started out as blogger, then maybe it was Instagram or then YouTuber, and now it is multi-hyphenic creator who also does a bunch of other stuff. Even if you weren't creating content back then, understanding how we got here will help you make smart decisions about what to do today and where we might be headed next. I'm ready to do a little compare and contrast and answer the question, is the industry better today than it was 10 years ago? Before we dive into the topic of today's episode, let's do a little create and consume. This is a segment that we do in every episode of the Create and Consume podcast, shockingly. As for what I've been creating this week, has this season for a gift guide and not just a single gift guide. I think I've created at least 10 at this point with potentially more on the way. So whoever you're shopping for this time of year, I've got you covered. What can I say? I love a good gift guide, and you know what? I have never not looked at a gift guide and at least gotten some little inspiration or small takeaway from it, even if I didn't find the exact gift that I was looking for. So far, I've created 10 different gift guides, probably more on the way. So I'm going to leave a link to the holiday hub on my blog in the show notes, and that's where you can find gift guides and also outfit ideas, other quick little holiday inspiration hacks, hosting tips, picture ideas, things like that. So it can really be like your one stop shop for all things holiday. And a couple of the gift guides that I've done so far are price points. I've done under 25 and under 50. I've done four year bestie for the New Yorker, for the fitness gal, for the traveler. So we've really got lots of different personality types and ideas in all of my gift guides. So again, I will link that in the show notes just in case you need any help shopping. And as far as what I'm consuming this week, I just finished a book that was on my 2025 TBR. I just have two more books left to read this year to hit my goal of reading 25 books in 2025. I love when the goals align like that. So the book that I read was first time caller by BK Borison. I had this on my radar as a new release for 2025. It actually came out back in February and I wanted to read it, but I just had other things on my agenda between book club and my own reading. So I decided to save it for fall. And I loved that this book was kind of inspired by sleepless and Seattle. So in the book, our protagonist Lucy, her daughter Maya calls into Baltimore's romance hotline, which is a radio show hosted by a guy named Aiden Valentine. That's his, you know, radio stage name, but pretty good radio stage name for someone who hosts the romance hotline. And he's kind of fallen out of love with love. And her daughter is trying to help her get back out there and start dating. So it becomes kind of an interesting collaboration between the two of them, their conversation on the radio ends up later going viral on social media. And it's basically about Lucy's journey to find love and also Aiden's journey to figure out why he has fallen out of love. This was a quick, fun, happy read. I gave it three stars on good reads, which for me is like, I really liked this one. I would recommend it. I had a good time here. Usually for like four or five star reads, there just has to be like a little something extra there. I think for me, one of the things that was not my favorite in this book was one of the like secondary characters dialogue every single line that came out of their mouth just felt very like off for some reason. So not my favorite. But overall, like a super, super cute story, I inhaled this book. I read it very quickly. And I would definitely try more from this author. And if you want to let me know what you are creating and consuming as well, you can do so by leaving a comment if you're watching on YouTube. Leave a comment on Spotify and all the other ways to get in touch are always in the show notes. Now that we've covered that, let's get in a little time machine and go back 10 years in time to 2015. And at this point, I had had my blog for three years. I was a junior in college living in New York City. And I kind of felt like we had just scratched the surface in some ways about what was going to be a head for people who had blogs, people who had Instagram accounts, people who had YouTube channels. And that was also the year that I did my first ever digital internship. If you guys didn't listen a few episodes back, I did my New York City intern diaries where I talked through all six of the internships that I did in college in both fashion and publishing. So I will leave a link to that in the show notes. I went like pretty in depth in that episode about what each of my internships entailed. And in 2015 was when I interned for Cosmo for the digital side of the publications. So that was really like fashion and beauty, writing articles, assisting on shoots, all for an online media brand, which up until that point, I'd really only interned for print magazines. And in many ways, 2015 marked this shift, this beginning of a shift away from more traditional media and more towards content creators, influencers, and even more like digital first publications or independent publishers. And in 2015, I felt like blogging was a really tight-knit community. It was a really great way to start to build an online portfolio, get yourself writing samples. That's one of the reasons that I started a blog was so I would have writing samples when I went to apply to work at magazines or apply for magazine internships. A lot of the creators that you would see on Instagram back in 2015, most of them had either blogs or YouTube channels, I would say, as their main platform. And then Instagram was kind of a secondary platform or a way to promote their primary platform. Long form content mattered. People were still reading a lot more. They still had as much of an attention span as you could have with a smartphone. Also for blogs, Pinterest was a traffic powerhouse. I think this is one of the reasons I didn't really learn much about SEO until later on in my blogging journey is because for a long time, Pinterest was my primary source of how I would actually get traffic to my blog. And as I kind of alluded to already, in addition to blogs that were run by a single person, these digital first publications were really starting to rise up in popularity. And I'm talking about publications like Man Repeller, Coverture, Refinery29, Birdie, Into the Gloss, all of those that were kind of in that era and some of which focus more on fashion, like Man Repeller or Coverture and others like Birdie and Into the Gloss focused more on Beauty. And even in my first year working at Nylon in 2016, I remember that I would be allowed to take over the Instagram stories if I was going to an interesting event. So one year I got invited to the preview of the exhibition for That Year's Met Gala. So I got to go in the morning and walk around the exhibition before it even opened to the public and before it was seen by all of the Gala attendees that evening. And I remember I got to take over the Instagram stories for that. And I thought that would have been a great way to also, you know, put a face to a name as far as me being an editor, maybe people who read my byline in the print magazine would then recognize me on Instagram and want to follow me. And I also specifically remember getting like scolded by the digital team for tagging my own handle. But I saw publications like Refinery 29 where Alyssa in the city, Alyssa Cosgrole who was a fashion editor there. And for a long time, I would argue like one of the faces of their brand. They would tag her and stuff all the time. And she would get a lot of followers from that. And I always thought that that was a good thing to have editors who felt like people to understand that you were reading articles written by real humans. And I think actually that matters a lot more now in 2025. And I remember like literally getting scolded for including my username on the nylon account, even though I did get like a couple hundred followers from doing it that day. And speaking of Instagram too, this was still the very curated era of Instagram. And for what it's worth, I like to say that I still have a very curated Instagram today. I, one of the things that I always pitch myself on when it comes to working with brands is the fact that I do have editorial experience that I do have an editor I that I like to kind of plan things out and make sure everything looks cool and like have my own aesthetic and vibe that goes along with my content. So in many ways, yes, it was curated, but in a kind of different way. Obviously at the time, we were just starting to get a very light introduction to video on the platform. IGTV was like in its nascent days, I believe at the time. And really at the end of the day, it was still photo one slide posts that were the bread and butter of Instagram. And I also feel like this was the time where bloggers like Teza and Song of Style were really coming up on Instagram because they would always have these beautifully curated and thought through images that other smaller creators like myself might even go out of their way to try to like recreate or figure out how to do something similar. This was the era where like I could post a flat lay picture from a coffee shop of my latte art and my sunglasses just on like a marble table and get 600 likes. Think of the flat lays, think of the visco filters, even the built-in Instagram filters. I feel like I was using those for at least the first few years that I was on the platform. Back then, you did not get punished for not posting every single day, but I did pretty much try to post every single day anyway. And at the time, it was mostly outfit of the day photos because I was always directing people back to my fashion blog and really trying to grow my account from that perspective. That is like what my account first started out as on Instagram. And it really was all about the aesthetic also living in New York City at that time with all of the food Instagram opportunities. I'm talking rainbow bagels. I'm talking ube ice cream. I'm talking all of the many random things that I waited in line for over the years. It was a time to be alive. And I also think that for the bloggers who were posting on Instagram starting in like 2012 through 2015, we were taking DSLR camera photos for our blogs. And we would often put those over on Instagram too, using, you know, our nice bigger cameras, our iPhone cameras at the time. What did I even have back then? Maybe like an iPhone four or an iPhone six at most? The cameras just were not as sophisticated. And some people liked the relatability of iPhone photos. But as far as blogging, like if you wanted to be taken seriously, you would use a DSLR camera. You would figure out how to use lightroom filters. You needed 10,000 followers back then to even post swipe up links, which we don't even now. We tapped to swap or tapped to shop, whatever it's called on our stories. And all of those things, all of those kind of guardrails, whether they were meant to be or not, created a bit of a barrier to entry. For blogging in the first place, right? Like you needed to be willing to learn how to take nice photos or bother to post enough to grow to 10,000 followers if that meant something to you. And for that reason, there were so many fewer creators in the space. This idea of influencer wasn't particularly mainstream yet. And I remember like my friends and I in college, I would ask them to take pictures for me of like my outfits and stuff in between classes, for my blog and everything. But we would do photo shoots for each other too. So people still were interested in posting on Instagram, even if they weren't interested in anything coming from that. In fact, if anything, I would say that most of my friends from high school and college who did not go on to pursue content creation, pretty much barely even post on Instagram anymore, instead of creating. They have mostly just become consumers, you know, save for a big life event, like getting engaged, moving somewhere, getting a new job, growing organically back then was just so much more attainable. Like I specifically remember exactly where I was when I hit a thousand followers on Instagram. I was on my friend Kat's couch at her parent's apartment in New York City. And I was just liking other people's photos and people would see that I like to their photo, click on my username and follow me. Like it was literally that simple. And this was also back when my handle was Jane underscore a US 10 for those in the know that's a play on Jane Austin, my original username. Another interesting component of being a blogger in 2015 was back then the influencer platforms like the brand deal platforms were actually useful. And I feel like they were actually the primary way that I was landing brand deals in the years of like 2016 through 2019. I want to say and if you're a content creator, you've probably heard some of these names before, like for a spire, collectively, obviously, those were places where you could go and apply for brand deals. So if your profile fit what a brand was looking for for a campaign, you could send in an application right then in there. And these platforms essentially served as the middleman connecting companies that were looking for content creators with content creators who wanted to work with brands. It was a very easy entry point for micro content creators. And I remember like in the early days of blogging and stuff, once I first started working with places like ASOS and the New York Times and Garnier, like those were pretty big brands for a micro creator to be working with. But A, at the time, there was way less competition. And then B, I had access to these platforms where I could let them know I was interested. And they probably didn't have as many profiles to sift through. And therefore, I would get chosen more often than not for some of these campaigns. You know, the rates were probably lower at the time than what I would ever really agree to now. But so were the expectations. I don't remember receiving any like 20 page briefs back then with specific messaging and talking points and brand aesthetic. And I appreciate the direction of a brief, but I also feel like the best brand collaborations. And I still believe this is true today in 2025 are the ones where it doesn't even really feel like it's sponsored content. It feels like organic to what the creator typically does. But maybe with a bit more elevation to it because there's budget behind it. And in an ideal world, if a content creator is paid a rate for their work that not only like covers the cost of their work and their labor that they're doing, but also can mean that you can purchase props or hire a photographer or go on location somewhere, all of that stuff is going to elevate the content that you're creating for that brand. So we're most of those brand deals since they paid, you know, maybe like a couple hundred bucks. If I was lucky ones that were shot in my apartment with my own camera edited by myself where I did 90% of the work. Yeah, they were. But also it was just like a fun creative challenge and to get paid anything back then, especially like before I had full-time jobs. At this time, like I said, I would have been a junior in college going into senior year of college. I mostly saw them as fun collaborative projects and ways to build my portfolio, which I think is how probably a lot of creators who are just starting out approach brand deals as well. And also back then the platforms did not have such stringent non-negotiable terms. I remember that I used to be able to ask more questions or negotiate more or sometimes there wasn't even that much to negotiate. Whereas now you can even see that some specific platforms themselves separate from the brand deal have usage clauses and other clauses that you want to look out for. So it's just a lot more strict in terms of what you're actually agreeing to when you partner with a brand through a third-party platform now. Not to mention there's so much more competition for who's applying for all of these things. And again, overall, I just felt like it was a lot more natural when you would collaborate. I remember coming up with my own ideas a lot of the time versus being given a list of like here's three concepts we have for this campaign. Would you choose option A, a day in the life campaign? Would you like to choose option B? My favorites for the month or would you like to choose option C? Like it just feels a little bit more clinical or like staged now, which again is fine. Like I understand that advertising has pivoted in this direction and creators are essentially like their own micro ad agencies. But back in the day, I feel like you would have a fun idea and you would just run with it. Like I did a campaign for a razor called Joy, which I believe was owned by Gillette. And the campaign images that I made for that were so much fun. Like I literally filled my whole bathtub with balloons. I'm gonna see if I can find a picture and insert this on YouTube of this campaign. Because I just specifically remember from that brief, the brief said like we are not a spa like razor. Like we understand that you just want to like shave and get on with your day. Okay, you're not gonna have like an angelic magical experience in the bathroom while you're shaving your legs. Because who actually does that? And I saw that brief and I was like, all right. And I just like bought a bunch like no one told me to do that. That was definitely not in the brief. It was just something that I came up with. And I submitted the content. No edits. They loved it. So that's a little glimpse at least from my POV of what the blogging creator barely even influencer world looked like back in 2015. Let's do a time jump to the present influencer marketing in 2025. The absolute biggest difference hands down bar none of then and now is short form video. If you're a frequent user of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, even in 2025, it is hard to think about at time when you would open these apps and not even see one video in the time that you were scrolling through them. It's almost hard to remember a time before Instagram reels launched, which I believe was in September 2020. I think around the same for YouTube shorts, TikTok, I personally signed up for TikTok in late 2019. Obviously, COVID and the pandemic accelerated time spent on that platform. People who signed up for the platform and the sheer number of creators in general because of how easy it was to create and edit and share all within TikTok. A few weeks back, I also did an episode about the TikTok ban in the US and what the update is on that. And in that episode, I also gave a brief history of TikTok where I talked about how TikTok democratized the content creation process. All of the barriers to entry that I was just mentioning about 2015 DSLR camera, 10,000 followers for swipe up links, late room filters, all of that type of stuff that used to mean that people would need to spend time or money to become content creators got thrown out the window when you could just make a video on your phone and upload it with no filters, barely any editing or TikTok at edit it for you. And because of the algorithm, it could be instantly distributed to way more people than just your followers would see over on Instagram. So more on that in that episode. But essentially, and even back when Instagram first switched, if you guys remember this too, from a chronological feed to an algorithm controlled feed, that was really where I think major turning points were coming about and things truly started to shift as we know it with content creation. Even when you look at what the chronological feed turning into the algorithmic feed did over on Instagram, we used to post, or I'm saying we as in me, the fellow bloggers and creators of 2017 and before that used to be able to post on Instagram and know exactly what time our followers would be online so that when we posted, we knew they would see it. So that was kind of a great way to make sure you were really getting in front of people when you have the opportunity to. Once the algorithm was introduced, it was just a little harder to get in touch with those people because even if you were posting at the usual time, there was no guarantee that your photo or video was going to be the first thing shown to them. Also, once Instagram hijacked stories from Snapchat and that got added, the distribution of where people were spending their time on Instagram changed. So to come back to the 2025 of it all, it was less about a perfect or aesthetically pleasing photo and more about like what's going to stop someone from scrolling, what's going to stop them from swiping away to the next video or clicking on the next story because the next thing is only ever a single tap away. Instagram in 2025 is less about artistry and more about attention. If you are not keeping someone's attention, Instagram can tell and will downrank your content in the algorithm because of that. So then in order to stay relevant, in order to stop the scroll, you have to start doing more of these like outlandish and out of the box things. Everything is a video, everything is flashy, everything is trying to get you to stop scrolling and watch. And when everything is doing that all the time, it either becomes something that someone can get sucked into or something where you're swiping past every single thing, even when it is outlandish, even when it would normally stop you from scrolling because you're just seeing so much of the same thing. These days there are very few campaigns that I do that do not request short form video. Like that is still one of the top requests and probably part of 90% of the brand partnerships that I do today in 2025. Second biggest difference from 2015 to 2025 is saturation. We have more people who identify as content creators than ever before. I'm going to link to an article in Time magazine. I haven't read the article yet, but I was just looking for a stat here as we were recording and the article is called we're all working for the algorithm now. So I definitely want to give this a read. I will link it in the show notes in this article. It says the influencer industry is projected to be worth 480 billion by 2027 more than 200 million people around the world now call themselves creators with about 27 million in the US alone. 27 million creators in the US alone. In 2015, I was one of just a handful of content creators that I knew. I was part of a couple of blogging Facebook groups, but I was always kind of looking for other creators and bloggers to connect with. Now today it's almost like easier to be like who is not a content creator of some sort because even if you don't consider yourself an influencer as your primary job or even like how you identify yourself online and so many of us end up in content creation, whether we intended to or not, simply because it's part of how we stay connected in the world now. I used to know a lot more like small business owners, you know freelance graphic designers and writers and things like that who barely ever posted on their Instagrams and some can still get away with it, but it is so much easier now to show off your work to build clients to build your network if you are active on social media and the same could be true for if you own a coffee shop, if you are a fitness instructor like a personal trainer, maybe you just like baking and sharing your recipes as a fun project on the side. Like it is really easy to get sucked in and just become a content creator without ever having intended to because in many ways this is the way we connect with each other now. This is the way we communicate and share information and you know in 2015 in my real life quote unquote my real life, my offline life, I was the only content creator I knew, whereas like today my neighbor's a content creator, my sister loves a content creator. I have no shortage of creator friends which is definitely great, but when you look at how many creators there are now, you can see easily how saturated it's become and therefore how much more competitive it's become and how much harder it is to grow now than it ever was before. And when you think about it, people are producing so much short form video content and then they're taking that single piece of content and they're putting it on every platform and now we have almost no differentiation between any of our platforms anymore either. They all start to look the same. You could open Instagram and see a video that you just watched on TikTok from the same creator and when I think back to even 2018 or 19 call it, we used to be able to differentiate all of the platforms. Instagram had still photos as it's bread and butter. YouTube had long form video, TikTok at the time had short form video, but even Twitter back then was short text posts. Now all of these platforms all feel so similar because they all have these short form video feeds, whether it's the Reels tab, the 4u page, the short cell algorithm, whatever you want to call it. It used to be really, really hard to build an audience online and to get discovered as a new creator. So when TikTok changed that, we even got blur ear lines when you think about influencers, UGC creators and even just everyday users who go viral without meaning to. That's what has exploded this new whole generation of content creators and they're not going anywhere anytime soon. Even if some of them like blew up during COVID and quit their jobs to be content creators and have gone back to nine to five jobs or have found some other kind of job to sustain themselves after the kind of boom of the full time content creator wore off in a sense. Most people are still posting no one really ever like fully quits with a few exceptions. And because we've learned more about algorithms over the years, because we've learned more about creator behavior and follower behavior, we also have gotten to a point where follower count does not matter as much. And I say as much with little asterix on either side of it, because I do think that it matters somewhat. I think that if I had four followers, I probably wouldn't be, you know, a full time content creator, but I also can acknowledge that there are certain tiers of things. So brands might be looking to work with creators with 20,000 followers or more on Instagram. And that means that I just missed the mark because I have 16,000. But brands are getting smarter and they're not just hiring users with big follower counts. They're hiring users with people who follow them and also people who engage with them. So they are looking for healthy engagement metrics across platforms. Once we learned how to spot fake followers a couple of years back, I mean, that also is something that brands avoid at all costs and make sure that they are working with content creators. Again, where the engagement is there and where they know they're going to get a return on their investment, it has never been a harder time to prove to a brand that they will get a return on their investment. And that is something that brands are even though they're continuing to pour more and more money into the creator economy and pay more and more content creators, which is great. There's also a much higher expectation for the content to perform, for the brand to get some of that money back. If not all of that money back and make more sales on top of that. And so brands are really monitoring sales clicks, conversion percentages more than they ever have. And again, the engagement quality is going to trump the follower quality because now we're not even really able to create much for our followers anymore. In some ways, it's like every single post is trying to reach a whole new audience and trying to grow an account and trying to get out there. And that kind of sucks because I think the thing that I loved most about Instagram in 2015 and 2016 was the community aspect of it. And how engaged people were and how many people I could reach all at once and talk to every single day, whereas now, I mean, the comments are still lovely. The ones that I do get, but I feel like the dip has definitely dipped in a sense where there are fewer comments. There are even fewer likes. The like counts today, you guys are embarrassing. Okay. I am struggling to get like 100 likes on some stuff, which sounds stupid, right? That sounds like I don't know what I'm doing. But people just don't like things anymore. And I say that as someone who scrolls through and sometimes just doesn't like stuff that I see. And it's because I'm exhausted consuming all this content. I am usually scrolling through these platforms, wondering how much longer I'm going to be scrolling when I'm going to get off and go do something productive with my time. It can turn into a whole spiral. And not only are people not liking and commenting as much as they used to, if anything, most of their interactions are happening passively or they're happening privately. Sure, there's a chance that you may tag a friend in the comments of a video if you want them to see it. But there's a greater chance that you will DM them, that you'll send them that video privately and say whatever you want to say without everyone else looking at your comment. So that's just one of the many ways that Instagram has changed over the years. Let's also talk about the shift on the rise of UGCE content. If I see one more person on threads saying DM me to learn how to be a UGCE creator and like I made $5,000 last month being a UGCE creator and it turns out they made like 50 videos. My real issue with the UGCE creator rise is twofold. Number one, user generated content. It's a totally misleading name. What user generated content used to be was you a regular person or a small creator would make something, a brand would see it. And then they would come to you and ask to use that content on their pages. That is true user generated content. UGCE, the way that it's being pitched by a lot of people online these days is basically like doing brand deals but for way less money than if you were calling it a brand deal. And I don't understand why it's turned into that. Now when brands reach out about UGCE content, typically what they mean by that at least in my experience is they want me to create an ad essentially for them that will be on their channels that's not going on my pages at all that's going to go on their channels and that then they're going to put money behind and boost in the algorithm. As far as I'm concerned, they're the only things that really change are my audience is being taken out of it, right? So I'm not charging based on my follower count. And typically these brands have a much higher follower count than I do. So if anything, that's the audience that we're reaching. That's a much bigger audience anyway. And then the other thing is if you're not going to give me any creative freedom or flexibility and you want me to say what is in a script, but use my image and likeness to do it. That is where I don't really see the difference between why I would charge so much less to do that for a brand if that makes sense. I've done UGCE deals for brands where I've created the content just for them. And I'll tell you something, I'm not doing them for $200. That is way too low. I'm sorry, it's way too low, especially in 2025. So that is just my message of warning for all of these UGCE gurus and things out there who are like, oh my god, I just make a couple of videos. It's so easy. If you look into how they're using the videos, if you look into paid usage and all of the things that they should really be compensating you for, especially if your image and likeness is in it, I feel like you deserve to be compensated. Basically the same that you would if it was going on your page. I just don't like seeing content creators especially newer ones take an advantage of, so that's my monologue on that. At the end of the day, the brand wants a plug-and-play asset that they can boost, that they can whitelist and use to make more money. So just think about that the next time a UGCE email shows up in your inbox. In some ways also paid usage and whitelisting are also becoming more and more important to brands. And I think that the right way to do UGCE content is to do the original UGCE content, which is I organically create a video about a product or service that I love. It catches the brand's attention and they want to put money behind it. In fact, that just happened to me last week. And guess what? It was from a video that I made over two years ago, if you can believe it. And the brand reached out to me about licensing, so we're in negotiations for that right now. So you can create brand specific content in that way and see if it gets discovered by the brand, or you can also create brand specific content and just reach out to the brands and say, "Would you like to whitelist this? Would you like to boost this?" Or you can create that organic content and then send it to the brand and say, "If you're interested in licensing, let me know." I feel like that is a less stressful way to do deals with brands because it requires a lot less back and forth than approvals of content. And it's more like, "Hey, I made this if you like it, we should talk." If you don't, no worries. I made a great piece of content that I'm happy with anyway. Now let's talk a little positive because I feel like I've been a bit of a Debbie Downer for the last few minutes. But now that content creation is so much more widespread, there are also more opportunities and more ways to monetize. And for anyone who's interested in doing this as a job, that is really important. And the fact that we do have a lot more resources or ways to make money or ideas for how to sell things or create things that people pay to see, there's just so much more there there now because a lot more people are creating softwares for content creators. They're creating tools that we can use. They're creating even systems for us like banking and keeping track of our to-do lists and setting goals for ourselves and all of those things. I definitely think there are more paths and more ways to monetize today than we ever had previously. When I was probably, whenever I recorded my very first income for the blog, which was maybe in 2015, I was making money through brand deals and affiliates. And affiliates was probably like $10 a year. Okay, I was signed up for LTK, but I had no idea what I was doing. Now creators can have multiple income streams, so they also don't have to worry about the all eggs, one basket mentality where it's like, oh no, I've only been making money working with brands. I have nothing else going for me. So if the brand deals stop all my income is gone, that's not a way to build a sustainable business as a content creator in 2025. It's just unfortunately not going to fly because that's something that you're not really in control of is whether or not brands want to work with you or have the budget this month or interested in the type of content you create. And there's so much more education about the business side of content creation. I have a whole YouTube playlist called creator tips. I haven't really been making those sit-down creator tips videos on YouTube in a hot minute, but I think there's 150 videos on there. If you have a question about something, I guarantee I've answered it on there in the past, so I will leave a link to that playlist in the show notes. I've done episodes on there, anything from starting an LLC to what to look out for in contract to how to start a membership and then also how to close a membership, which is also something that I did also now because of the legitimization of content creation. Because we now have the creator economy, capital C, capital E, we didn't have that in 2015. That wasn't like a thing yet. It's great that we have that and content creation is now being taken more seriously as a real job. Most successful creators, like I said, have multiple income streams. Some of them even work with teams to grow and expand their reach and do more with the time that they have. I think these days it is important to remember that you need more than just good content. You need good systems and you need to have a business that actually makes sense if you're interested in doing content creation as a full-time job or if you're interested in making a substantial amount of income from content creation as a side hustle. I may be the biggest thing that we did not have in 2015 or at least not on the level that we have it now. I bet you're shocked that I've waited this long to even say it is AI and all of the various AI tools that are available to content creators now. My how times have changed and I personally have been trying to embrace AI as much as I can. I feel like I'm using it in a way that makes sense for me and I think I've threatened this probably five or six times on this podcast, but I would actually love to sit down and do an entire AI episode to talk more about how I'm using AI as a content creator, where the lines are in terms of like integrity and all of the things labeling content using AI if it's drawing from other sources and of course what the potential issues threats and drawbacks are to having AI. One thing I will say about it not completely unrelated note. So lucky I didn't have AI in college. I'm so so lucky that I that I did college without that like and actually made it through. I think about that once a day maybe but anyway there's just so much to cover with AI. There's all of the tools and softwares. There are all of the AI assistants. There are even AI creators now. People who are creating completely fictional people, avatars if you will, whatever they're called online and monetizing through that. I mean Lilma Kayla is the first one that I really remember. I want to say we profiled her. That's maybe not right. We profiled her creator. I want to say for interview magazine like years ago when was I that would have been 2017 or 2018 when I was at interview. That was like the first one I really remember, but now I feel like the speed at which you can create an AI influencer and update content and have them do all these different things. The the quality is a lot better and the speed at which you can do it is a lot faster. So I do think we are going to see more AI influencers. I think there's again some things that don't quite make sense about that that I can talk about in a different episode. If you want the AI episode by the way though like send me a message and let me know and also if you have anything specific you want me to talk about in relation to content creation specifically for that definitely also let me know. Now to recap what we've talked about let's let's review some of the biggest shifts I would say. First is platform behavior from curated images to quick scroll stopping hooks and exciting videos and flashy things. Definitely also the change in creators from hobbyists to full-fledged businesses some of which are single person businesses some of which now are built out with a whole team if possible to expectations from brands when working with content creators has been a big shift going from vibe and fun ideas and like feature our product and we'll pay you a little bit of money to how is this performing what else can we be doing here is the hook catchy enough is the product placement obvious enough all of the different little things that typically go into a brief that you're given at the start of a campaign also content style don't get me wrong there are still curated creators there are still people who used yes all our cameras who create really high quality content but there is also a new space for quick video hooks for off the cuff videos for no makeup talking to camera videos like we're on FaceTime with a friend also the value of a follower and how much it really means when someone follows you versus the amount of impact and influence even a single piece of content can have outside of the scope of the rest of your work and again follower behavior you know people who used to leave comments or publicly like your post to now we'll just send it to a friend with a comment in DMs or even just save the post for a later time and also the evolution of technology of all the different softwares that we can use now I used to just use like a single google doc to record my income because it was very straightforward whereas now like I have a whole excel spreadsheet built out it's google sheets technically I should say and they're obviously like accounting softwares you can use if you want to use that and of course like the individuality of content creation versus the AIification of content creation and how easy it is now to create an image in an instant to create a whole other persona if you want now this begs the question are we better off today in 2025 than we were in 2015 when we think about content creation as a whole I think the answer is yes and no and I think that in many ways we're better off because now when I tell people I'm a content creator they know what that is it's not like something I need to be ashamed of or something I need to over explain I think our industry has been legitimized in so many ways to the point where it's now one of the number one jobs that like generation alpha wants to do when they're older which that is saying something I think we also have such great access to tools at our disposal and things that can make us look and feel really professional and amazing online there's a lot more competition but that also means that our field is growing that we can demand higher prices that maybe in the future we can even unionize or find like health insurance and benefits and things like that can that can work for independent creators the same way that other types of freelancers are self-employed people have probably figured out in the past and yeah it's competitive and yet changes a lot but if you love this industry that is in many ways what you signed up for and it's one of the things that keeps it interesting and keeps it exciting and if you ultimately decide that it's no longer interesting or exciting then you can always pivot into some other creative field there are so many transferable skills that content creators learn from video editing to marketing to copywriting to just general community building there's really a lot of there there so in many ways I do think that we're better off but I am nostalgic for the day is where I would post my latte art and get 600 likes you know so I will leave you with some tips for creators who are navigating the industry now and also leading into 2026 first think about what brands want if working with brands is important to you so learning how to produce exceptional short form video is going to go far with brands as far as I can tell it's not going anywhere for the next few years at least track your performance metrics consistently I genuinely feel like when you have the data in front of you it also makes it a lot easier to pitch yourself to brands to articulate your worth and to feel confident when you're negotiating because you have the facts to back it up also if you guys are interested if you do a lot of brand deals I have my campaign wrap up template on Canva that you can plug and play like take your screenshots and put it into a nice really beautiful template every time I send this to a brand they say no other creators do this and it's one of the most helpful things that they get at the end of a campaign and to leave on a high note and have that be the last thing a brand remembers about you I think speaks volumes so I can link that in the show notes if you want to check out also as I talked about already diversify your income streams I assume if you're a creator in 2025 you have more than one income stream but if you don't think about ads affiliates digital products memberships all of the different things that you can do to build up your income pie chart in a sense so that you're not heavily relying on just one income component I'm sure I have a youtube video about those types of passive income streams too so I can link that in the show notes as well think about building long-term relationships not just with brand partners but also with your community I know it's kind of harder to reach them than it has been in the past which is odd because they're the ones who are following you but anytime you can make the extra effort to connect with your community ask a question in the question box on your stories reply to comments DM people send voice notes to answer questions so that people remember there's a real human on the other end I think that that goes a long way with the people who follow you and the chances of them recommending you to their friends as a creator who they love following also protect your creativity and point of view I think this is also so important as information becomes a commodity and AI becomes a part of our daily routines if there's something in a brief that doesn't feel right to you or just feels like not true to who you are creatively don't be afraid to speak up and say something to the brands and know where your line is if you're willing to lose deals over creative choices or things that brands want you to say or want you to do that doesn't feel right to you then that'll be one of those things that you can always look back on and say I feel like I had a lot of integrity about this because I say no to partnerships all the time that don't make any sense or where I feel really restrictive creatively and I'm at a point now where I feel a lot more comfortable doing that I know it's not as easy to do early on and it's also not easy to do when you feel like you really could use the money but every time I've said no to something that didn't feel right it's always been I think the right decision and also just continue to stay adaptable like I said this industry changes quite a lot I think this industry also rewards people who pivot I think it rewards early adopters people who try new things and continue to experiment and you know what it rewards most of all is people who don't give up the persistence to continue to show up even when the likes are low even when the view counts are down even when it feels like you're creating something and just throwing it out into the void continuing to show up is what separates the creators who end up on the other side of that little valley of disappointment and the creators who don't end up continuing to follow through on it I would love to hear from you guys if you have any specific core memories of what it was like to be a blogger or content creator in 2015 please reach out all the ways to get in touch are in the show notes also don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on apple podcasts give us a rating five stars on Spotify apple give this video a like if you're watching on YouTube thank you guys for chatting with me and I'll talk to you all next week thank you so much for listening to today's episode as a reminder you can support create and consume for free by doing any of the following you can leave us apple and Spotify ratings and reviews you can like subscribe and hit the notification bell over on youtube you can follow along at create and consume pod on instagram and tiktok you can send this episode to a friend who may enjoy it and as always don't forget to check out create and consume podcast.com for episode recaps and more [MUSIC]