For the last podcast issue of the year, it's just us.
No external guest — just myself, our editor Francis Zierer, and our producer Tom McCloud — the three people who've spent more time thinking about, writing about, and listening to those guests in 2025 than anyone else.
Since we’re on holiday week, we kept this episode short. Just some quick highlights from 2025, and themes we hope to see continue into the new year!
What we covered in this episode:
🎯 How to think of influence as a spectrum
🎬 Why serialized content needs an off-ramp
🤝 Brands and creators are still figuring each other out
🏠 The in-person future of the creator economy
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
00:00 Introducing Tom and Natalia
01:30 How to use serialized content in 2026
10:10 Changing our perspective on the creator economy
11:50 Our best piece of 2025
15:13 Francis: In-person is the future
20:28 Tom: Podcasts are dying
27:30 Natalia: Short-term creator partnerships
29:10 Building strong parasocial connections
🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.
The Creator Spotlight team talks 2025
Work is a social endeavor. This is something our editor, Francis Zierer, often tells me, and it’s one of my favorite things he says. Creating and building are inherently social, and our work is richer and more textured when we collaborate directly.
This newsletter and podcast are a consistent work of trust, collaboration, and co-creation between myself and Francis, our producer Tom McCloud, and our designer, Laura Calle Puerta. For the last podcast issue of the year, three of us went on the record together for the first time to talk through what we learned.
Tom has edited every single episode of this podcast. His foray into the creator economy began in 2007, when he was 13, making Call of Duty videos with his friends in the UK.
"My first knowledge of the creator economy was gaming YouTubers. These guys were making a living off it. Most of them were anonymous. You didn't know their real name. You'd only know them by their gamertag."
That shaped how he thinks about the relationship between creators and audiences. You may not need to show your face or share your name, but you do need to give people something to hold onto.
I asked him what he felt kept viewers coming back without that hyper-personal connection.
"Sometimes there'd be someone so sick at the game you'd watch them even if their personality was boring. But there were people with interesting personalities too — on the mic, giving commentary, talking about current events. It was essentially like a podcast, really early. Two people talking about the game for twenty minutes. They called it a dual commentary.
We saw this dynamic play out in some of our best-performing episodes this year: Sydney Graham, a sewing creator who grew her YouTube channel from 16,000 to 118,000 subscribers in twelve months, built loyalty through competence — teaching real skills, filling gaps her audience was actively searching for. Eighty-five percent of her revenue comes from digital sewing patterns, not brand deals. Her audience follows her because she's genuinely good at something they care about.
As published in our July 2025 edition on influence.
This is what I call the tier of expert influence — trust built on craft rather than personality.
It's distinct from the macro-influencer model (creators who built massive audiences by mastering the algorithm) and the micro-influencer model (local, relationship-based reach).
Expert influence is competence-based. And it can produce one of the most durable forms of audience loyalty we’ve encountered this year (prediction: we’ll continue to see this trend upward in 2026).
Francis has asked nearly every one of our 51 guests this year the same question: What is a creator? It often prompts interesting, very different answers. And I think, as we step into 2026, our conversations will explore an extension of that question: Who are you creating with?
Francis wrote about this for Nieman Lab's annual predictions package — his bet is that the future of the creator economy is in-person.
"Whether it's a monthly meetup, parties bringing like-minded people together, a workshop, a conference — this is a business line more creators are developing. It wasn't really a theme in our first year. It multiplied this year. That tells me it's going to keep multiplying."
After years of creators optimizing for algorithms and chasing viral reach, some of the most durable businesses we covered this year were built on connection — between creators and audiences, between creators and each other, between online presence and real-world community.
Thanks for being part of ours this year.
Haven’t tried these tactics yet? Q1 is your moment to audit your business growth
Throughout more than 50 interviews this year, we documented key patterns in creator business fundamentals — primarily, the infrastructure that distinguishes a side project from a sustainable business.
The start of the new year is an excellent time for an audit, so consider this your checklist: three quick tactics from 2025 you can implement in the next few weeks to set yourself up for 2026.
Are you studying the right creators?
From Adam Biddlecombe, co-founder of Mindstream
When Adam started building his AI-focused newsletter through LinkedIn, he didn't study the biggest accounts. He studied creators with 2,000 to 5,000 followers — people just a few steps ahead of him.
"One thing people do, which I think is a mistake, is when they have 500 followers, they'll emulate what someone who has a million followers does and then go, 'Well, why doesn't that work for me?'"
Audit yourself:
Can you name five creators in your niche who are one or two steps ahead of you?
Do you know what's working for them right now — not six months or a year ago?
Are you copying tactics that match your current audience size?
Are you making content people are already looking for?
From Sydney Graham, founder of Syd Graham Patterns
Sydney grew her YouTube channel from 16,000 to 118,000 subscribers in one year. The strategy: make videos that answered questions people were already typing into the search bar.
Her first major growth spike came from a tutorial on how to make a dupe of a trending $200+ designer top. The video now has over 95,000 views because people were actively searching for it.
Audit yourself:
Before publishing, do you check if there's existing search demand for your topic?
Have you typed your topic into YouTube or Google to see what auto-complete suggestions appear?
Are you relying entirely on the algorithm, or meeting people where they're already looking?
Is your newsletter welcome flow actually working for you?
From Matt McGarry, newsletter growth expert
Matt audits newsletters for a living, and this is where he consistently finds problems: The thank-you page says "Thanks for subscribing!" and nothing else. The welcome email is generic. Both are missed opportunities.
Audit yourself:
Does your thank-you page reinforce the reasons they signed up?
Does it offer a product, lead magnet, or next step?
Does your welcome email ask people to reply, click a link, and move you to primary?
"That's half the battle when it comes to newsletter engagement," Matt said. "Just being in the primary inbox."
