The Creator Advantage

What if I told you there was a skill becoming more valuable than any computer science degree, any MBA, or any traditional credential you can think of? And what if this skill had nothing to do with the latest programming language or business framework, but instead was something humans have been doing since we first gathered around fires to tell stories?

I’ve been building audiences since 2004. Back then, when I founded Buzzmedia, we called it “digital media” and most people thought we were crazy. We ran 45 sites that reached 102 million people every month. We launched the Kardashians. We helped break Fallout Boy, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Adele. We did this before anyone called it “the creator economy,” but we understood something that most people are only now beginning to grasp: the people who can capture and hold human attention hold the real power.

Today, while everyone’s panicking about AI taking their jobs, there’s one group of people who seem completely unfazed. Not the TikTok dancers you’re probably thinking of, but people who’ve figured out how to build and keep an audience. The newsletter writer who explains chip shortages. The YouTuber who makes tax law interesting. The guy on LinkedIn who actually makes supply chain management sound compelling.

These people have learned something that’s becoming more valuable than any degree: they can capture attention and bring people back. If you’re worried about AI displacing you, here’s what you should do. Stop learning to code. Start learning to create audiences.

The timing of this realization isn’t coincidental. We’re witnessing what I think will be remembered as the great unbundling of traditional employment. For decades, companies provided three things in exchange for your labor: steady income, distribution for your work, and professional development. The internet has systematically disaggregated all of these. Freelance platforms handle income. Social media provides distribution. YouTube teaches skills faster than universities.

But here’s what most people miss: as these traditional structures crumble, a new form of security is emerging. Not the security of depending on one employer’s goodwill, but the security of having your own audience that trusts you and wants to hear from you.

This brings me to a crucial distinction that everyone gets wrong. When I say “creator,” most people think of young, attractive people selling products they don’t need. That’s not what I mean. A creator, in the sense that matters for your career security, is someone who’s learned to capture people’s attention and bring them back over and over. It could be a newsletter about semiconductor policy. A YouTube channel explaining Supreme Court decisions. A LinkedIn presence offering insights about industrial design. The format doesn’t matter. Your age doesn’t matter. Being conventionally attractive doesn’t matter.

What matters is this: Can you make something people want to consume regularly? Can you build trust? Can you develop a voice people recognize and seek out? If yes, you have something more secure than any corporate job.

But there’s another distinction that’s even more important: the difference between traffic and audience. Traffic is what you buy. Audience is what you earn. Traffic comes and goes—someone clicks your link, reads your content, leaves. You have to pay for traffic every time you want it. An audience is different. These are people who choose to follow your work because they trust you. They come back without you having to re-acquire them. They engage with your content and each other. They trust your perspective enough to act on your recommendations.

This distinction matters because building a brand is different than building an audience. You can build brand pages that scale to millions of followers, but if those followers don’t trust you or engage consistently, you just have expensive traffic, not a real audience.

The investors I meet understand this. Over the past year, I’ve been introduced to countless investors and VCs who typically would fund companies, but something has changed. Now they want to invest directly in creators—or at least they’re starting to think that way. When I raised Series A from our lead Redpoint, partner Geoff Yang zeroed in on this point right away. He used terms like “content programs,” but he knew what I was pitching was a coming shift. Well, it’s here in a big way. The thesis makes perfect sense: traditional business wisdom says build a product, find product-market fit, then figure out distribution. The creator economy inverts this: build distribution first, then create products for your audience.

A creator with a loyal audience can launch almost anything—software tools, information products, physical goods, services—all with built-in demand from day one. Compare that to the traditional startup path: spend years building something, then hope people want it. Most startups die from lack of distribution, not lack of product quality. But a creator starting a business already knows what their audience wants because they’ve been talking to them for months or years.

This shift is happening because we live in what people call the attention economy, but I think that phrase misses something important. It’s not just that attention is valuable—it’s that the old gatekeepers of attention are dying. Cable television is a wasteland of people half-asleep with their phones out. It’s lean-back, tune-out entertainment. Social media is the opposite—lean-forward, interactive attention. Real people making real things, telling stories, explaining complex subjects in ways that stick.

Smart brands know that creators hold the keys to the kingdom they’re trying to get into—your eyeballs, your attention. Twenty years ago, we were competing with traditional media for attention. Now traditional media is more or less dead, and everyone’s scrambling to figure out where audiences went. They went to creators.

This creates an opportunity, but also a challenge. Building an audience isn’t magic, but it does require a specific set of skills that most people haven’t developed. After doing this multiple times across different industries, I can see the pattern. First, there’s consistency—not posting every day, but showing up predictably so your audience knows when and where to find you. Then there’s voice—not just what you say, but how you say it, your unique perspective on whatever you cover. This can’t be automated because it’s inherently human.

Value is what keeps people coming back. Every piece of content needs to give your audience something: information, insight, entertainment, or emotional connection. Understanding distribution is how you grow—knowing how platforms work, what formats perform well. This changes constantly, which is why it’s valuable. Finally, community building is your moat. An audience that talks to each other is infinitely more valuable than one that just listens to you.

None of these skills require youth or expensive equipment or technical expertise. They require something much rarer: the courage to share your ideas in public and the persistence to keep going when it feels like nobody’s listening.

And this is where most people fail. Not because they lack interesting things to say, but because saying them publicly feels terrifying. I know brilliant engineers who could explain complex systems perfectly but won’t start a blog because they’re worried they don’t know enough. I know marketing executives with decades of insight who won’t share their thoughts because someone might disagree. Meanwhile, their jobs are increasingly vulnerable to AI that can code and strategize faster than any human.

Here’s what I’ve realized: the cost of being wrong on the internet is embarrassment. The cost of not building an audience in the age of AI displacement is career extinction. The irony is that sharing your knowledge doesn’t diminish your value—it amplifies it. Teaching something forces you to understand it more deeply. Building an audience around your expertise makes you the go-to person in that space.

I keep hearing this myth that being a creator is only for young, attractive people. It’s complete nonsense. The creators I know who make real money and have real influence come in all ages and backgrounds. What they share is courage and consistency. The 45-year-old supply chain expert who started a newsletter explaining global logistics. The 55-year-old tax attorney making videos about legal precedents. The 38-year-old engineer blogging about database optimization. These people have something more valuable than youth: expertise, perspective, and the life experience to explain complex things clearly.

When you build an audience around your expertise, several things happen that completely change your career trajectory. Opportunities find you instead of you having to apply for jobs. Companies start reaching out instead of you pitching clients. Feedback loops accelerate because your audience tells you what they want more of, what problems they’re facing, what solutions they need. Everything compounds—each piece of content can work for you indefinitely. A blog post from 2020 might bring in clients in 2025. Leverage multiplies because when you have an audience, everything you do reaches more people with built-in trust.

This is different from traditional job security, which was always an illusion. You were safe as long as one company decided you were valuable, but if that company restructured, got acquired, or had budget cuts, your security evaporated overnight. Creator security is security through diversification. When you have an audience, you have multiple paths to monetization: sponsorships, products, services, speaking, consulting, courses, books, affiliate partnerships, direct subscriptions. If one revenue stream disappears, others remain.

More importantly, you’re not dependent on any single gatekeeper. No boss can fire you from your audience. No company can eliminate your distribution. No algorithm change can destroy years of relationship building.

But here’s what’s really interesting: as AI becomes more capable, it will eliminate many jobs, but it makes creator skills more valuable, not less. AI can write code, but it can’t build trust with an audience. AI can generate content, but it can’t develop a unique voice. AI can analyze data, but it can’t share insights from lived experience. The more automated our world becomes, the more valuable human connection becomes.

This leads to what I think will be the great division of the next twenty years. There will be two types of professionals: those who have audiences and those who don’t. Those with audiences will have options. They’ll be able to launch businesses, find opportunities, command premium rates, and adapt to whatever changes come next. Those without audiences will be at the mercy of systems they don’t control.

If you’re reading this thinking “I should become a creator,” you’re already behind. You should have started years ago. But the second best time is now. Pick one platform—not three, not five, just one. Master it before expanding. Choose a topic you could discuss for hours without getting bored because your enthusiasm will be evident and infectious. Commit to publishing regularly for at least a year, not when you feel like it but consistently. Focus on value, not virality, because one person who becomes a loyal follower is worth more than a thousand casual viewers. Engage with your audience—reply to comments, start conversations, build relationships rather than just follower counts.

We live in an attention economy, and if you want to reach your audience, you better do it through a creator. If you have concerns about job stability in the future because of AI, you should become a content creator. The question isn’t whether you should become a creator. The question is whether you can afford not to.

Twenty years from now, when we look back at this period, I think we’ll see it as the moment when the old employment compact finally broke down completely and something new emerged. The smart people will be the ones who saw it coming and built their own platforms while they still had the luxury of steady income from traditional jobs. The rest will be wondering why nobody warned them.

Nobody can take away what you build when you build an audience. That’s the real advantage, and it’s available to anyone with the courage to start.

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Special thanks to Kevin Kelly and his wise words.