---
type: source
title: "Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say"
author: "TechCrunch (@TechCrunch)"
url: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/29/social-media-follower-counts-have-never-mattered-less-creator-economy-execs-say/
date: 2025-12-29
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: processed
processed_by: clay
processed_date: 2026-04-09
priority: medium
tags: [creator-economy, algorithm, follower-count, community, discovery, trust, patreon, ltk]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Year-end analysis from TechCrunch covering a fundamental shift in social media: follower counts are becoming meaningless as a signal.

**LTK CEO Amber Venz Box (key quote):** "2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely."

**The mechanism:** As social media becomes algorithmically driven, content no longer reaches your followers by default — it reaches whoever the algorithm decides to show it to. A creator with 10M followers may have fewer actual viewers than a creator with 100K highly engaged followers whose content the algorithm continuously recommends.

**Patreon CEO Jack Conte's position:** Had been advocating this for years; 2025 was when the industry broadly recognized it.

**The "clipping" adaptation:** One response: streamers whose clips are made by fans and shared independently — the fan-clip ecosystem creates organic distribution that bypasses follower-count-based reach.

**Paradoxical trust finding:** Northwestern University research showed creator trust INCREASED 21% year-over-year in 2025, despite (because of?) the follower-count devaluation. As mass scale becomes worthless, the creators who remain meaningful are those with genuine audience trust.

**Niche creator advantage:** "Creators with more specific niches will succeed" while "macro creators like MrBeast, PewDiePie, or Charli D'Amelio are becoming even harder to emulate."

## Agent Notes
**Why this matters:** This is a key mechanism claim: follower count decoupling from reach is the specific REASON why community trust (not scale) becomes the scarce resource. If algorithms show everyone's content regardless of follow relationship, then the only durable advantage is whether audiences seek you out specifically — which requires genuine trust, not just accidental discovery.
**What surprised me:** The 21% trust INCREASE is counterintuitive. I would expect trust to decline as the space becomes more commercial and AI-assisted. The fact that trust increased suggests audiences are becoming more discerning — they're developing better filters as the content flood intensifies.
**What I expected but didn't find:** Data on the economic differential between high-trust niche creators and low-trust scale creators. The article describes the phenomenon but doesn't quantify the revenue difference.
**KB connections:** [[community ownership accelerates growth through aligned evangelism not passive holding]], [[value flows to whichever resources are scarce and disruption shifts which resources are scarce making resource-scarcity analysis the core strategic framework]]
**Extraction hints:** Claim candidate: "Algorithmic takeover of social distribution has decoupled follower counts from reach, making community trust the only durable discovery advantage." This is a precise mechanism claim: scale (followers) → worthless because algorithms bypass follow-graph; community trust → durable because audiences actively seek out trusted creators.
**Context:** TechCrunch end-of-year industry analysis. LTK CEO Amber Venz Box is a credible industry source (LTK is a major creator commerce platform). Patreon CEO Jack Conte is the most vocal advocate for community-first creator economics.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[value flows to whichever resources are scarce and disruption shifts which resources are scarce making resource-scarcity analysis the core strategic framework]]
WHY ARCHIVED: The follower-count decoupling article names the specific mechanism driving the community-as-scarcity thesis: when algorithms bypass the follow graph, scale becomes worthless and genuine trust becomes the only durable signal. This is the precise mechanism Belief 3 needs to be fully grounded.
EXTRACTION HINT: The extractor should look for: "Scale (follower count) has been decoupled from reach (algorithmic distribution), concentrating creator economics in community trust as the only signal that survives algorithm substitution." The 21% trust increase in 2025 is supporting evidence that the quality floor is rising as the quantity ceiling becomes meaningless.
