🔴 "You" is a creator

TIME has been selecting and publishing a list of the 100 most influential people in America since 1999. This week, they published the first version of the list dedicated entirely to creators.

Lists like this give us a temperature check on the industry. To better understand the meaning of this list, I went back to the 2006 TIME Person of the Year: “You.”

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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In 2006, TIME named “You” their Person of the Year — a nod to the thriving user-generated internet. This week, 19 years later, they released their inaugural TIME100 Creators list. In Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs’ explanation of how his team chose their list, I looked for a reference to that iconic “You” and found none.

In 2006, the web was made by “you.” MySpace was the primary social media platform, and it was deeply customizable; today’s social media platforms are rigid containers. It was also deeply social; social media was social, was peer-to-peer. The web was also a place we visited; the iPhone wouldn’t be released until the following year, pushing us always-online.

I revisited that 2006 piece explaining the magazine’s choice of cover star as a way to understand the new list and our current creator economy more broadly.

In the two decades since “You” became TIME’s Person of the Year, we have seen “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” Wikipedia has only become more reliable. People do help each other for nothing (but also, sometimes, for the price of an e-book). YouTube hosts over 100 million active channels. MySpace has fallen, but Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and more have surged in its place.

As much as Grossman’s optimism has held true, the promise of a one-for-all and all-for-one web has also calcified; this is the creator economy. The peer-to-peer spirit of that earlier era has given way to a more competitive and financially motivated mode.

In 2025, this sentiment feels quaint. Who has that time, that energy, that passion? Millions of people are working hard to make a living monetizing that passion. What’s the point of posting if you haven’t included a monetization layer?

The TIME100 Creators list is divided into five categories, listed on the page in the following order: Titans, Entertainers, Leaders, Phenoms, and Catalysts.

I’m sure the TIME editorial staff hotly debated the specific category placement of at least a few of these creators. I was drawn to their so-called “Catalysts,” who seem to best illustrate that idealism described in the magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year writeup: “the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing.”

These are people for whom the monetization layer is there, but seems secondary to pro-social purposes. Take Hannah Williams of Salary Transparent Street, a former Creator Spotlight guest. She has built a thriving business alongside her husband, but it all started with the goal of promoting salary transparency, so workers could advocate for their true worth. To quote TIME: “Her advocacy has also helped catalyze real-world change: Williams has been invited to testify in support of multiple pay transparency bills, including in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.”

Or Mychal Threets, “the internet’s librarian.” He is, to quote TIME’s writeup, “a joyful advocate for literacy and inclusivity, reminding audiences that libraries are for everyone, library cards are cool, and what happens in the stacks makes for great stories.” He’s no longer a librarian — he is a podcaster and the author of a forthcoming picture book.

Again, per TIME: “Many see Threets as a cultural descendant of LeVar Burton, nurturing audiences’ passion for books like Burton did with Reading Rainbow.”

It’s less that the creator economy has been “about the many wresting power from the few” and more that some of the channels by which people come to power have changed. LeVar Burton became an actor while studying at a university in the Los Angeles area. You don’t need to move to Hollywood to get discovered; just start a TikTok account.

"Creator" is simply another term for a media business centered around an individual. In 2010, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in the Citizens United case, solidifying the notion that, in the context of free speech, corporations are people. The following year, YouTube started using the word “creator” instead of “YouTuber.”

In practice, these two events are barely related, but looking back, the timing is suggestive. Corporations are people; people are corporations; creators are corporations.

There were no venture funds investing in YouTubers in 2006, though there were people spending money on YouTube-first experiments (if the name lonelygirl15 doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a history lesson).

In 2025, investors are ready to invest millions of dollars in high-potential creator businesses. Slow Ventures, a venture capital firm active since 2011, launched a $60 million dedicated creator fund in February. They’ve been writing about the thinking driving the project in a newsletter, Slow Upload.

In summary, they’re looking for creators who are actively entrepreneurial, have built more of a values-driven community than a passive audience, are a leader in a specific content niche, and have a proven but unfulfilled capacity to monetize.

As Megan Lightcap, a partner on the fund, wrote in a recent newsletter, “In many ways, creator investing is a natural extension of our seed practice, where we often invest when it’s just a person and an idea.”

A creator is a business. A creator is the seed of a corporation — MrBeast started as a kid in his bedroom counting to 1 million into a camera; now it’s a company with hundreds of employees and nearly 30 open roles at the time of writing, including one for a VP, Financial Planning & Analysis.

Return to Grossman’s writeup about “You” in 2006:

The proverbial “You” has absolutely changed the world and “the way the world changes.” Last year’s so-called “podcast election” and politicians communicating with the public on social media platforms are just two examples of countless.

But I see little evidence that the many have wrested “power from the few.” The creator economy has provided many opportunities and life-changing financial windfalls to many thousands of people who would otherwise be earning closer to the median American income of $39,982 (2023) … but wealth inequality in this country has only worsened in the last two decades.

Power laws apply in the creator economy as in any other; “You” become 100. Attention is a limited resource. The attention economy is a zero-sum game, but the good news is that it essentially starts fresh each day.

There’s only ever room for so many attention-seekers to succeed — what the creator economy has done is increase the pace of cycling.

That, to Grossman’s credit, is a form of democracy. In 2006, TIME celebrated “You,” the passion-driven amateur. This week, they celebrate creators — business-driven professionals. This is not to detract from the genuine passion we see in the work of those on the TIME100 list; it is to mark the maturation of the user-generated web into the creator economy. In 2006, internet users were people. Today, they’re corporations.