Issue #22: Everyone Gets a Seat 💎

Issue 22
March 5th, 2025

Here's a thought experiment: what if MrBeast was the last of his kind?

That's essentially the argument Reed Duchscher – the man who managed MrBeast for six years and helped turn a kid from North Carolina into the biggest creator on the planet – made this week. Duchscher, now running Night (the talent firm behind Kai Cenat and Hasan Piker), told Business Insider something that should make every creator sit up: "We won't see another MrBeast." Not because nobody's talented enough. Because the platforms won't let it happen.

His logic? Platforms have learned that concentrating audience around a single massive creator is a risk… to the platform, to advertisers, to the ecosystem. They'd rather have a thriving middle tier of creators with 5 to 10 million followers than one person who can hold the whole thing hostage. The algorithms are being tuned accordingly. Personalization is getting so granular that the days of one creator dominating everyone's feed are fading.

And then, almost on cue, Cami Tellez, the founder who built Parade into a $100 million underwear brand largely through creator marketing, launched a new company called Devotion that's essentially built on the same thesis: the future isn't ten mega-influencers. It's ten thousand micro-communities. And AI is the thing that finally makes that scalable.

Two very different people. Same conclusion. The creator economy isn't getting smaller. It's getting wider. Let's get into what that means.

The mega-influencer era is over. Welcome to the age of the micro-giant.

Let's start with Duchscher, because his perspective is uniquely credible. He didn't just manage MrBeast, he built the playbook. Night managed Jimmy Donaldson from relative obscurity to 300 million subscribers. They split in 2024, but Duchscher didn't slow down. Night just raised $70 million from Founders Fund, StepStone Group, and others to do something bigger: build, operate, and acquire businesses embedded in internet culture. Night now has more than 100 employees and increasingly resembles a hybrid of a production studio, startup incubator, and venture fund.

But here's what's most interesting about his interview this week. Duchscher isn't just bearish on the next MrBeast, he's bearish on the model that created MrBeast. His argument is threefold:

1. Platforms are diversifying risk. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have all learned that depending on a handful of massive creators is dangerous. One controversy, one platform switch, one contract dispute, and you lose a chunk of your audience. So the algorithms are being retuned to surface a wider range of creators. The era of one person dominating every feed is structurally ending.

2. Personalization kills universality. As recommendation algorithms get better at serving hyper-specific content (YouTube literally overhauled its Browse feed in February to cluster recommendations around individual viewing patterns rather than broad categories) fewer people see the same thing. That's great for niche creators. It's terrible for building the kind of universal reach that made MrBeast MrBeast.

3. The economics favor breadth. Duchscher argues that a roster of creators in the 5–10 million follower range is now more valuable than a single 300-million-subscriber channel, both for talent managers and for the platforms themselves. More creators means more content, more advertisers, and less concentration risk.

Now pair that with what Tellez is doing with Devotion. She built Parade into a cultural phenomenon by running massive creator programs… not a few big deals, but thousands of creators at once. The problem was always operational: managing that many relationships, vetting content, tracking performance, handling payments. It required entire teams working around the clock.

Devotion's bet is that AI solves the operations bottleneck. The platform uses AI to automate creator discovery, surface a "brand fit" score, analyze content for guideline compliance, recommend which posts to boost, and handle payments, all while keeping human oversight in the loop. Tellez and co-founder Jon Kroopf (a former TikTok executive) spent last year in beta and have already hit seven figures in revenue with more than 10 clients.

Here's the key insight – and it connects directly to what we talked about last week with the "slop economy." The role of AI in the creator economy isn't primarily about generating content. It's about matching. Connecting the right brand with the right creator in the right micro-community where trust already exists. That's the part that was always too expensive and too slow to do at scale. Now it isn't.

The bottom line: The creator economy is shifting from a winner-take-all tournament to something more like a franchise model. The biggest winners of the next era won't be the biggest creators. They'll be the ones who build the deepest relationships in the most specific communities, and the infrastructure that connects them to the brands willing to pay for that trust.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

Night's $70 million raise from Founders Fund, StepStone, House Capital, K5 Global, and PagsGroup isn't just a big number, it's a signal about where the smart money thinks the creator economy is headed. Night isn't using this to sign more talent. They're using it to build and acquire businesses in music, gaming, and commerce that sit around creators rather than depending on any single one. The talent agency model is dying. What's replacing it looks more like a holding company for internet culture. And with M&A deal volume in the creator economy up 17.4% year-over-year to 81 deals in 2025, expect this trend to accelerate.

Urban Outfitters launched ME@UO on last week. It’s an always-on, gamified creator program exclusively for people with under 10,000 followers. Members earn affiliate revenue and brand experiences by responding to weekly content prompts, with the top 100 creators winning a trip to Joshua Tree. Nearly 4,000 people applied in the first 24 days. They're not alone: American Eagle, Sephora, Home Depot, and Lowe's are all building similar programs. The message from major brands is clear: they'd rather have a thousand authentic voices than one expensive one.

TikTok dropped its sixth annual Discover List on February 25, spotlighting 50 creators across five categories: Educators, Foodies, Icons, Innovators, and Originators. What's notable isn't the list itself — it's the composition. Creators span 22 countries and range from 50,000 to 12 million followers. TikTok used a combination of platform data (creation volume, views, growth rate, engagement) and team nominations. The subtext? TikTok is publicly championing geographic and audience diversity over raw scale. The platform isn't looking for the next Charli D'Amelio. It's betting on a wider, deeper bench.

What the platforms shipped this week and why you should care.

This is a big one. In February, YouTube rolled out a major update to how its Browse feed (your homepage) recommends videos. Previously, the algorithm grouped content into broad topic buckets: gaming, cooking, tech. Now it clusters recommendations based on your individual watch history, identifying micro-niches within your interests and serving content accordingly. YouTube is also testing a "Custom Feed" option that lets viewers explicitly choose topic priorities. On top of that, A/B testing for titles is now available, and a new collaboration feature lets you add up to five co-authors to a single video or Short.

Why this matters for creators: The Browse feed is where most long-form discovery happens. Deeper personalization means your content is more likely to find the right audience, but less likely to go randomly viral to everyone. For niche creators, this is a gift. For creators who relied on broad appeal, it's a wake-up call. The algorithm is rewarding specificity over generality, which maps perfectly onto the "micro-giant" thesis: being the best in a defined lane now beats being pretty good at everything.

TikTok fully rolled out its new Creator Health Rating system in late January, replacing the old Violation Points model. Creators start with 200 points and earn or lose them based on content quality and guideline compliance. The platform also launched AI Outline, a creation tool that helps jumpstart your content process, and added support for audio messages and video attachments in DMs, making direct creator-fan communication richer.

Why this matters for creators: TikTok is continuing to systematize quality signals. The Creator Health Rating gives you a single, visible metric for how the platform views your account health, which directly affects distribution. Creators who are strategic about guideline compliance and consistent posting will see compounding benefits. The AI Outline tool is worth experimenting with, but remember: the outline should be the starting point for your voice, not a replacement for it.

Stop thinking about your "audience size." Start thinking about your "trust radius."

This week's news paints a clear picture: brands are moving spend from big creators to micro-communities. Algorithms are personalizing feeds to surface niche content. Even the biggest talent managers in the industry are saying the era of universal reach is ending.

So what's the play?

It's a concept I'm calling your trust radius — the number of people who don't just follow you, but who would act on your recommendation. Buy something because you said to. Show up because you asked. Defend you in the comments because they feel like they know you.

That number is always smaller than your follower count. But it's the number that actually matters — to you, to brands, and increasingly to the algorithms that decide who sees your content.

Here's how to expand it:

1. Respond like a human, not a brand. The Influencer Marketing Factory report from last week showed that the creators earning the most are investing heavily in community. That means DMs, comments, polls, Q&As — the unglamorous work of actually talking to people. Urban Outfitters built its entire ME@UO program around weekly prompts and participation, not polished campaigns. Take the hint.

2. Let brands find you through your niche, not your numbers. Platforms like Devotion are building AI that scores creators on "brand fit" — alignment between your content, your audience, and the brand's goals. That score has nothing to do with follower count and everything to do with specificity. The more clearly defined your lane, the more discoverable you become to the tools brands are actually using.

3. Treat every piece of content like a trust transaction. Every recommendation you make either builds or depletes trust. The creators who will thrive in the micro-giant era are the ones who treat their audience's trust like a bank account — making deposits (honest reviews, genuine takes, useful content) far more often than withdrawals (paid posts that feel off-brand). In a world where AI can generate infinite content and brands can find infinite creators, your trust balance is the only real competitive advantage.

The mega-influencer playbook was: grow as big as possible, then monetize. The micro-giant playbook is the opposite: go as deep as possible, and the monetization follows.

That's all for this week. If you found this valuable, forward it to a creator friend who needs to hear that smaller might actually be bigger. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.