There was a time not too long ago when “I want to be a YouTuber” was something grown-ups would coyly say to teenagers – as catchy as wanting to be an astronaut, but not serious. The media industry treated online creators as an inferior form of content production: faster, cheaper, less serious, vaguely questionable. He wrote the joke himself. These were the people filming in the bedroom.
A Morning Consult survey cited by CNBC 53% of Gen Zers believe being an influencer or content creator is a prestigious career choice, and 57% said they would pursue it if given the chance. Three out of ten would pay for the opportunity. A 2021 YouGov survey found it ranked as the top two dream jobs among 13-17-year-olds of both sexes – after professional athlete for boys and doctor for girls, but ahead of musician and actor worldwide.
These numbers did not appear out of nowhere. They reflect something the entertainment and media industry is now forced to reckon with: the creative economy is not a phase. It’s an established labor market, and institutions that treated it as a novelty for a decade are now trying to integrate, monetize, and in some cases, absorb it.
What “paying attention” actually looks like
The most obvious example is Hollywood’s evolving relationship with creators. Recently SAG-AFTRA discussed his final contract with major studiosone of the main pressures for both sides was the lesson of the 2023 holiday: the six-month shutdown of traditional Hollywood production allowed the creative economy to grow even more while the studios were dark. The creators did not stop production. They sped up. The strike’s most lasting effect may be to demonstrate, empirically, that the traditional gatekeeping power of the entertainment industry has its limits.
Studios and streaming platforms have moved towards creative content over the years rather than away from it. Roku has expanded licensing agreements with YouTube creators for FAST channels. Netflix and Amazon have both tested the surface of creator-owned IP. The logic isn’t generous—audiences built by a creator are already established, already loyal, and significantly cheaper to acquire than audiences built through traditional development pipelines.
The change is more pronounced on the brand side. Morning Consult data shows that between 2019 and 2023, consumer trust in social media influencers increased, while trust in other sources of information decreased, with celebrities and athletes one of the only categories moving in that direction. It’s a surprising reversal of what most media executives expected to happen as the influence market matured and controversy piled up.
Why Generation Z’s Reading Is More Accurate Than the Industry
The frame in which Gen Z “thinks” about their creative careers, as if it’s a generational delusion worth correcting, underestimates how much evidence they’re working on. The generation that watched MrBeast build a media operation that now rivals traditional television production, that watched individual Substack writers surpass legacy magazine brands in terms of engagement per reader, that saw podcast hosts command advertising rates competitive with drive-time radio — this generation is not making a naive bet. It extrapolates from the data it receives in real time.
Economic drivers are structurally stable. As Morning Consult analyst Ellyn Briggs noted on CNBC, TikTok’s no-frills content format has dramatically lowered the production threshold for creative participation. The monetization infrastructure has matured: brand deals, platform revenue shares, subscription products, merchandise, live events. What was once a dangerous hustle for a small minority has morphed into something more reminiscent of the labor market, with different entry points and a wider range of outcomes.
“No-nonsense, direct-to-camera and low-edit content works well on TikTok, so it’s accessible to a growing number of influential people.” – Ellyn Briggs, Morning Consult
None of this means that most aspiring creatives will build sustainable careers. The same goes for most screenwriters, musicians or journalists. The question was never whether the odds were good—it was whether the career path was realistic.
The gap between recognition and adaptation
Acknowledging that the creative economy is real and adapting institutional structures to reflect that reality is different things and industry comes first rather than second.
Traditional media companies still lack frameworks to compensate or collaborate with creators in ways that reflect how value actually flows in creator-led content. Talent agencies have moved faster than studios—WME, CAA, and UTA all created creative representation in ways that would have seemed redundant five years ago. But the underlying production, IP ownership and revenue sharing models did not capture the scale that the creative economy now represents.
The companies that stand out the most are the platforms themselves—YouTube, Spotify, and TikTok—with direct financial incentives to understand and serve the creative economy. What the traditional media industry is still working on is whether its interest in creators is true integration or just a new form of extraction: grab the audience, grab the distribution, keep the old power structure in place.
Gen Z, the cohort that grew up watching this play out, probably won’t put up with a slower version of this calculation. 53% who call it a prestigious career do not expect institutional approval. They already have it—it came from their peers and the market, not the industry that used to define what reputation looked like.
