We spent years making fun of influencers.
The ring lights. The affiliate codes. The “link in bio.” The smoothie ads. The Revolve trips. The perfectly casual mirror selfie that was, of course, not casual at all.
For a long time, it was easy to act like the whole thing was unserious. Girls who “just posted online.” Girls who made money taking pictures of their outfits. Girls who somehow turned getting ready, going to dinner, opening PR packages, and filming their coffee order into a job.
And I get why people laughed. There was something easy to dismiss about it. Something that looked too feminine, too aesthetic, too online, too obsessed with taste to be treated like real business.
But maybe that is exactly why it mattered.
While everyone was laughing, creators were quietly learning something most companies spend millions trying to figure out: what people want.
In real time. Every day. Through every post, comment section, failed launch, sold-out product, weird trend, and oddly specific audience reaction. They were testing language, products, aesthetics, price points, aspiration, desire, and cringe before a strategy team could put any of it into a deck.
For years, people acted like influencers were just posting.
But they were really building taste, trust, and leverage.
And now the business world wants in.
I think about this more now because I have lived on both sides of it. I’ve spent years making content, working with brands, watching certain products explode because the right girl posted about them, and still somehow feeling the need to downplay it. “I just post online” became the easy thing to say because it sounded less embarrassing than admitting the internet had become a real part of my work.
Then I got to business school and realized companies were spending entire meetings trying to reverse-engineer the exact thing creators understood intuitively: how to make people care.
That is when the whole thing started to feel different.
A sponsored post was never just a sponsored post. What brands were really paying for was not content. It was borrowed trust.
Trust that had been built slowly, recommendation by recommendation, story by story, until an audience felt like they knew the person on the other side of the screen. And once people feel like they know you, they are much more likely to care about what you like.
That was the first real unlock. Influencers were not valuable because they had attention. They were valuable because they could move attention.
And for a while, brands got an incredible deal. They paid once, borrowed a creator’s credibility, and kept most of the upside. A creator could make a product sell out, make a brand feel relevant, introduce a company to an entirely new audience, and then walk away with a flat fee while the brand kept compounding off the association.
At some point, creators started realizing the obvious.
Why am I making everyone else rich?
So they became the brand.
Rhode. Skims. O.piccola. Parke. The list keeps growing, but the point is not just that influencers started launching products. The point is that some of them understood the customer better than the people in the boardroom.
For years, brands paid creators to borrow their taste. Then creators realized they could stop being the ad and become the business.
And when it works, it really works. A creator-led brand is not powerful just because a famous person puts her name on something. The better version happens when the product feels like a natural extension of the world the creator has already built. The audience already understands the taste. The product just gives them a way to buy into it.
That can sound shallow until you remember how much of consumer business is about desire. People do not just buy the most useful thing. They buy the thing that feels right. The thing that feels like them, or like the version of themselves they are trying to become.
But I also think the “every creator should launch a brand” advice is too simple. Building a company is not just moodboards and launch parties. It is inventory, margins, packaging delays, customer service, cash flow, and realizing the font you loved on the deck looks terrible on the actual box.
Not every creator wants to become an operator. Not every creator should.
Which is why the next shift is more interesting to me.
Creators do not always need to become the company. Sometimes, they need to own a piece of the companies their taste helps make valuable.
That is the real power shift.
A brand deal says: we will pay you to talk about us.
Equity says: we believe your influence can help build the value of this company.
One treats the creator like media. The other treats the creator like capital.
This is also why AI makes the whole thing more interesting, not less. AI is going to make content faster, cheaper, and more endless. The internet is about to have more reviews, more recommendations, more “honest thoughts,” and more perfect captions that sound human but somehow feel like they were assembled in a lab.
In that world, the rarest thing will not be content.
It will be taste.
Not taste as in liking pretty things. Taste as in judgment. Knowing what is actually good. Knowing what is over. Knowing what is about to matter. Knowing the difference between something with real cultural momentum and something that just has expensive packaging.
AI can mimic a format. It can write a caption. It can generate a campaign. But it cannot replicate the slow accumulation of trust between a creator and an audience. It cannot manufacture the tiny, irrational, deeply human instinct that makes people say, “Wait, I need that.”
That is where creators become harder to replace, not easier.
The best creators are not just content machines. They are filters. They tell people what is worth noticing.
For years, creators were told they were lucky to be paid. Lucky to get the brand deal. Lucky to be invited into the room.
But maybe that was backwards.
Maybe the brands were lucky creators let them rent what they had built: the trust, the taste, the attention, the instinct, the cultural read, and the ability to make people care.
Because that is the real business.
And the smartest creators are starting to understand that they should not just be paid to post about the next big thing.
They should own a piece of it.
loved this!!