The Definitive Guide to the Creators EcoSphere

There are 4.6 million active YouTube channels. There are approximately 1.6 billion active TikTokers. Instagram crossed the 3 billion active user mark this year. More Americans now get their news from social media than from any other source. Typically, all this fragmentation and disruption are lumped together into the over-used, yet under-understood term, the creator economy. 

This year, we — me, FilmHub and What’s Trending’s Shira Lazar — decided to map it. The creator economy has changed quite dramatically since the Paul brothers made Vines. Today, the creator system is the most important marketing platform on earth. Creators are now companies, and companies are now creators. Everything important in our culture — including mainstream media like Wicked, Barbie, Sinners — starts and ends on creator platforms. 

Yet there is no one reliable place to go, for the most important comparative information about the creator economy. That’s the problem we wanted to solve with this map of The Creator Ecosphere.

We strived to make a creator ecosphere map comprehensive, and a fresh thirty-thousand-foot view of the creator economy. While we do include vanity metrics from the last era of social media (MAU), we dove deeper to include engagement quality, or EQ, with data that proves the demonstrable difference between followers and fans. 

As you can see from the YouTube segment of our map, MrBeast is not only the biggest YouTuber, he also has great EQ. Beast doesn’t just have more followers than Eminem, he has ten times Marshall’s engagement. And that’s how Jimmy Donaldson became a billionaire.

The YouTube slice of the Ecosphere is about ten percent of the whole map, which has more comparable metrics for the biggest platforms and the biggest creators on each platform, as well as a rich listing of the agencies, studios, distributors and tools that are the backbone of the creator economy. 

We hope this Creator Ecosphere map will spark a conversation, and launch a collaboration between the creator and the traditional media community that is Hollywood.