When fans get fans aka content is king

I saw my first content creator in the wild a few weeks ago. I was walking the dog when she ran past me with her phone held aloft, talking animatedly. She could’ve been face-timing a loved one I suppose, but I had this sense that she was performing. It was like looking through a window into the future. I’m insulated from the creator revolution in my suburban pocket of a small town at the bottom of the world, but I would love to visit New York, London or Seoul one day just to see TikTok dance videos being filmed in real life. 

A 2025 report from Harvard and the IAB showed the number of full time content creators in the US grew from 200k to 1.5 million from 2020-2024. Most reports put the number at more than 200 million globally, with about 40% of them classifying themselves as full time.

Over the next decade, as AI automates most knowledge work, it stands to reason that jobs leveraging the skills and traits that make us human – by which I mean personality and creativity – will provide the most stable income prospects. We’re not far away from a baseline assumption that most of the content we’re served is AI-generated, so I fully expect the attention exodus towards messy, unpolished and real content creators to become even more undeniable. 

In our present and our future, originality is the signpost for authenticity, and the latter will very soon become the last bastion of cultural influence. Authenticity has one currency: trust. And what’s the distribution engine for trust? The human network. Peer-to-peer sharing. In a post-covid, post truth reality, this is the reason why celebrities seem to have more power than elected officials. Soft power has become hard power. I mean, the current American president uses social media to crash the stock market, start wars, and get late night talk show hosts fired. 

There’s a recurring concept in Buddhism that your thoughts shape your reality, like the the cultural equivalent of ‘you are what you eat’. The entire premise of my favourite book of 2025 (and maybe of all time), Question 7, took that concept one step further and posited that it’s stories that have the power to influence reality. E.g. H.G. Wells imagined the atomic bomb in his 1914 novel, The World Set Free, which influenced the physicist Leó Szilárd and set in motion the chain reaction of events that led to the weapon’s actual creation 20 years later. I really do believe this to be true, which is probably why I liked the book so much. With that in mind, it’s no wonder collective reality feels fractured when millions of narratives are being consumed every second. 

But authenticity is not inviolable. It can be subverted, particularly within a capitalist system where it becomes a commodity that’s repackaged until its power and value fade. That’s what I feel we’re seeing happen with Taylor Swift in real time. Her ability to tell an authentic, relatable and deeply human story through her music and channels was the foundation of her success, but now she exists within a public persona of such inconceivable scale and reach that her essential humanness almost can’t withstand it. Her public, media-generated and replicated self is more visible than her real one. It’s got to a point, for me, where creators within the Swiftie fandom have more perceived authenticity than the artist herself. 

And so we reach the actual point of this post — my fascination with the fact that it’s becoming increasingly normal for fans to have fans. 

I’m an avid listener of the Formula 1 podcast, P1 with Matt and Tommy. The duo did a live tour of Australia in May this year and just prior to that, Tommy and his family travelled to New Zealand for a holiday. They went to Rotorua, Hobbiton, Taupō, and even a couple of beaches in my own neighbourhood. I witnessed all this through instragram stories and was taken aback by my own excitement. It was almost as if Lando Norris himself had shown up in Auckland. Tommy is a lifelong fan of F1 who started a blog that became a media platform called WTF1, he sold that in 2023 and started the P1 podcast with long-time collaborator Matt Gallagher. They now have one of the biggest F1 podcasts globally with more than 2 million followers across platforms. They even shared a stage with world champion Norris at the Autosport awards earlier this year when they won Creator of the Year. 

One of the biggest and most polarising Swiftie creators, the Swiftologist aka Zachary, has also recently toured a live show to Australia. He has 300k followers on TikTok and regularly has the artists themselves in his comments (usually mad at his blunt and often critical reviews). Bonny and Emily aka Chats and Reacts, who made their names as Swiftie reactors during the Folklore era, have released a jewellery line inspired by themselves being inspired by Taylor Swift. That’s not just fans with fans, that’s fans with fans who will buy meta merch. Wild.

As you’d expect, the BTS fandom is filled with talented and funny creators. One of my favourites, Crispy_Shooky has almost 400k followers who love the way she loses her mind whenever one of the members exposes an elbow, forehead or midriff. Danadoingherbest is the host of her own daily update, The Bangtan News, which her 50,000 followers never miss (including me). About 18 months ago, 3 lads in Australia started reacting to BTS content on their YouTube reaction channel, TripleTakeReacts. They now have 180,000 subscribers and their content has been liked and shared by RM and Jung Kook themselves (to be fair, those two are extremely online). There’s one viral trend on BTS TikTok right now known as “Namjoon juseyo” - I won’t even bother explaining it because there’s too much lore. Just watch the video, and then watch j-hope singing the trend on stage during their Arirang tour a few weeks ago.

My theory on why this is happening is pretty simple — human brains are drawn to stories, big or small, and the pairing of intensely creative fandom communities with modern social platforms opens windows into other worlds that are all too easy to dive into. Technology enables us to experience a multiverse of sorts.

I do wonder what the future of art, fandom and commerce will look like as the creator economy continues to explode. 

Will human creators become the code in a world of AI noise? Or will the sheer amount of human and AI content render all digital platforms meaningless, and lead to a shift back towards analogue reality? Perhaps the most powerful digital platforms of tomorrow will be the ones that help us build a shared narrative again.