How Being A "Creator" Went From Cringe To Aspirational (And Profitable)

Mike talks with Avi Gandhi - the Chair of Government Advocacy for the Creators Guild of America - and Tim Shey - founder and president of Next New Networks - about the recognition of content creators as small businesses by the Small Business Administration of the US, and the shifting sense of the word creator over the last 15 years.

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Creating Creators

Avi Gandhi

• https://creatorsguildofamerica.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/avigandhi

Tim Shey

• https://creatorama.substack.com/
• https://shey.net/

Sources

• Bishop, Sophie, and Brooke Erin Duffy. “The Feminization of Social Media Labor.” In The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology, 1st ed., edited by Deana A. Rohlinger and Sarah Sobieraj. Oxford University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197510636.013.35.
• Craig, David, and Tanner Mirrlees. “The Creator Function, Post-Structuralism, and the Perils of Terminological Dissonance.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 29, no. 1 (2026): 38–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779251380599.
• Duffy, Brooke Erin. “Gendering The Labor Of Social Media Production.” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 4 (2015): 710–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1053715.
• Ilan, Jonathan. “The Hustle Society: Mainstream Precarity, Voracious Entrepreneurialism, Grift and Exploitation in Contemporary Culture.” The British Journal of Criminology, April 16, 2026, azag033. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azag033.
• Jarrett, Kylie. “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media.” Television & New Media 15, no. 1 (2014): 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476413487607.
• McClanahan, Annie, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service
• Napoli et al., De Gruyter Handbook of Technology, Media, and Democracy.
• Paterson, Alex. Rendering the Whole World Blank: Precarity, Totalising Fear and Digital Scrolling. n.d.

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our contributing producer is Kurt White. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

but you find what you look for:

the shortest distance between two points

endless universes, a life of beautiful self-description

Excerpt of Reason, by Craig Watsonz

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and we have an historic show for you this week. I talk with Avi Gandhi, the chair of government advocacy for the Creator's Guild of America, and Tim Shea, founder and president of Next New Networks, YouTube Originals, and the former head of original content for Duolingo about the recognition of creators as... Oh, wow. There's some big thunder outside the studio right now.

The recognition of creators as small businesses by the Small Business Administration of America and the shifting sense of the word creator over the last fifteen years. And hey, also, two brief bits of show news. We have a t shirt for sale. The new design was unveiled back in August during our stream week with art by the incredible Nate Bear attempting to answer the question, what if computer but goo? You can find a link to the t shirt preorder in the show notes, and also, did you know we have a subreddit?

I was pausing for maybe another thunder crack there, but it didn't come. We do. We have a subreddit. It's r slash never post. Come hang out.

We would love to see you. Okay. On with the show, sorta. We're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed.

But when we return, me, Avi, Tim, and what exactly was a creator? I wanted to find out what actually a creator is. As in an Internet online digital content creator creating content for platforms. What does that word mean? And I wanted to know this for a specific reason which we're gonna get to soon.

So I called up some folks who would know because it's

kind of

their whole job to know.

Creators make content, distribute content, and monetize content. And you have to do all three in order to be a creator or a a digital content creator.

That's Avi Gandhi. He's an entrepreneur, creator partnership consultant, former head of creator partnerships at Patreon, and current chair of government advocacy for the Creator's Guild of America.

Yeah. So the Creator's Guild of America is a nonprofit organization that supports, protects, and advocates on behalf of creators. So we have a number of different activities. As you mentioned, I'm the chair of government advocacy. And so I lead our advocacy efforts with federal, state, local governments.

And we also have a number of other initiatives. We have 14,000 members and affiliates and growing very quickly. And we are proud to be part of this historic announcement with the US federal government through the US Small Business Administration recognizing creators as legitimate small businesses.

This is why I wanted to talk to Avi and why I wanna know what a creator is. Because it seems like a term of industry just on the cusp of becoming significant in a regulatory sense. So, yes, there was some big news for creators this last month. The SBA, the Small Business Administration in The US, released some guidance. They said that when applying for business loans, creators should use the six digit NAICS or NAICS code reserved for the motion picture and video production industries.

Let's briefly explain what all that means. The SBA is a government organization that supports small businesses, mostly through loans and education. SBA loans have favorable terms in comparison to banks and other commercial loan services, and they generally pay for real estate or equipment, like, say, a pizza oven or banner printing machinery or pickleball nets or a place to keep all of those things for either a run of the mill pickleball court or the world's most chaotic pizza place. Pizza. The SBA does not provide money directly.

They guarantee money provided by other lenders. So if a lendee can't repay their loan by say reselling all of those brand new pickleball paddles, the SBA will cover up to 85% of it, thus making it less risky to underwrite unproven businesses. A NAICS code is a classification under the North American Industry Classification System. In this scenario, specifically, NAICS codes give lenders a sense of where the applicant fits into the broader economy of The US and the financial reality of their industry because a ball bearing factory makes money differently from a pickleball pizza restaurant, from a plumber, and so on. And so the SBA has now said creators should be using the NAICS code for the motion picture and video production industries when applying for business loans.

And that goes for all creators, YouTubers, live streamers, even podcasters. Thanks, Pivot to Video. This clears up a lot of confusion, as Avi explains.

Without without that kind of guidance, banks were sort of... It was very difficult for creators to get loans. Only a few banks around the country were willing to, like, work with creators to figure it out. And so SBA basically said banking system, creators are small businesses, they should be receiving SBA loans, and in order to receive those loans, they should apply under this NAICS code family. The code family is 5121.

That is the motion picture and video industries.

Creators always had access to SBA resources, but it was unclear to them and to lenders where they fit. This guidance gives creators a home and is a vote of confidence. It is recognition that to be a creator is to be a business and acknowledgment that creators should access federal financial infrastructure as other businesses in the motion picture and video production industries do. By some measures, this is gonna have an impact on nearly 30,000,000 people in The United States, which is, I wanna be very clear upfront here, great news. About which I have some questions because I'm a podcaster mostly.

So am I really a creator in the motion picture and video production industries sense? In one specific way, I guess I must be, but that doesn't feel right in my bones, in my in my podcaster bones, which I imagine are somewhat like bird bones. Of course, my existential concerns are of no matter to the US federal government specifically nor the concept of bureaucracy generally, And so I have been forced since learning about this news to simply reflect on the label creator, both as I've understood, and I guess lived it for the last twenty years, and how I might understand it for the next twenty years with respect to its growing significance to The US economy. That's what this episode of Never Post is about. The shifting sense of the label creator and the changing position of the people who have been called that since its coinage around 2011.

But, yeah, it was it was very much a a group thing that we used that term. I I wouldn't wanna take the credit that it was... That I was the first to do it.

That's Tim Shey. In 2019, Taylor Lorenz in The Atlantic quoted him as having coined the term creator during his time at Next New Networks, a media company purchased by YouTube in 2011. Tim wanted to set the record straight. It might have been him. It might have been someone else at Next New, but it was definitely a word that they were all using in those early days of online video and YouTube.

Tim is a producer, startup founder, and media executive. He was the founder and president of Next New Networks, and after it was acquired by Google, was instrumental in the transformation of YouTube's partner program into its Creator Program, which he launched alongside other initiatives that you've probably heard of, like YouTube Spaces. He was one of the founding executives of YouTube Originals, and he was the head of original content for Duolingo for a little while. Right now, he's the board chair at Electrify, a London based media company that invests in and operates Creator founded brands, and he's also a partner at TMV, which is an early stage venture fund that backs founders working in maritime health care and automation. Full disclosure, I've known Tim for a long time, and I even did a little bit of work for him and his team when he was at Duolingo.

Tim is aligned with Avi in one sense about what a creator is. I asked him why back in the early twenty tens, they thought they needed a new word for someone who made videos. He said...

We just started inviting lots of, you know, lots of different independent producers to be part of this program and to to roll their channels under ours. And we needed a name for the program. You know, we needed a name for this program where we were working with lots of outside producers and nothing felt right. You know, YouTube at the time would call them the YouTube stars, which felt like sometimes kind of a back ended compliment. But we had a, you know, we had come from the world of TV, you know, the...

And so you think people like Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pen Ward, the creator of Adventure Time. That word creator was around, you know, was bouncing around in our in our office. And creator can be someone that first came up with the concept of the show. They might not even be the head writer anymore or the person show running the show anymore, but creator was a title that had a certain kind of currency in the TV business. And we thought, although, you know, I think we're all just sitting around one day and we're like, well, that could be a good term.

Right? Because these people are all... They're They're producers, they're writers, they're often editors, they're often in front of the camera. But it's it's a really cool term, and it feels really aspirational. And one of the things we realized early on was it kinda worked for anybody.

Anyone could be a creator. And along these lines, creator always, I thought, signaled two almost opposing positions that this was a person who could do it all. Write the video, shoot it, edit it, distribute it, figure out how to monetize it, get a brand deal off it, negotiate the brand deal, and so on and so on. But a creator has also been someone who's not really anything in particular, someone who doesn't or can't, for some reason, interface with the media or entertainment world in a traditional and traditionally focused way. They are neither a screenwriter nor an actor nor an editor nor a showrunner, but somehow, as with a television series creator, they're always in charge of something.

The work is theirs. These tensions led, historically at least, to some confusion about what creators actually are amongst the general populace, and on the part of creators themselves, a little bit of embarrassment.

There's a certain stigma or has been a certain stigma for content creators where, you know, you tell your family or your friends like, oh, I'm a creator or I'm an influencer and they kind of look at you sideways and they're like, well, you're gonna get a real job at some point. And they wouldn't do that if you said, oh, I own a coffee shop. I am a plumber. I'm a contractor. Even saying I'm a freelance consultant, a freelance artist, whatever it is, those words are seen as legitimate jobs, businesses, industries.

And for whatever reason, content creation has not been, even though it is one of the fastest growing industries in America.

When we did this, this was not a foregone conclusion. Know, when we did this, YouTube was the underdog. Most people with a career or anything to lose did not want to put their did not want to put their videos on YouTube or or be associated with the the site. It was not considered an aspirational thing to have a YouTube channel. People that were successful on YouTube were not really being taken seriously by anyone in Hollywood or being considered as something that was worthy of putting brand...

Branded advertising on.

I felt this for sure. In the 20, I would tell people I work in video and when they pressed to eventually find out that I made YouTube videos, it was sometimes a little awkward, especially at a border crossing. A man in a thick Austrian accent asking, so you are a YouTuber was not not mortifying and with apologies to all of our Austrian listeners. The multi hyphenate nature of this label may have sparked the confusion, but other biases came to sustain it once it became clear what creator meant roughly. The ultimate source of this baggage is complicated, but it speaks volumes to how much the cultural position of creators has changed.

As was the case with the aspiration to succeed in any artistic endeavor, it was a bit uncool to try in those early days while still in the blast radius of Gen X and its preoccupations around both caring and selling out. There was also a low level anxiety around posting generally and posting to become famous specifically of making something on your own time in the hopes that someone will like it, though you're not really sure who. Today, there's a much better understanding and a greater appreciation for the process of finding a community and building an audience. Two decades ago, such an undertaking might be viewed as lonely at best and desperate at worst. This is one reason it took traditional media a long time to get online.

They thought it was embarrassing to have to build an audience they felt they already had. Many scholars have pointed out also that the individual tasks which comprise the work of creators are coded as feminine, as quote unquote women's work, which is historically unpaid and unappreciated. In a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology, Sophie Bishop and Brooke Aaron Duffy enumerate four ways the labor of social media appears to overlap with the hallmarks of feminized labor. They are, they write, one, the demand for emotional and effective expressions. Two, the discipline of aesthetics through the fraught ideal of visibility.

Three, mandates for flexibility and an always on stance. And four, a deep imbrication with consumer capitalism. In a 2014 paper for television and new media, Kylie Jarrett points out how much of the secondary labor of online work largely around communication and community management resembles domestic work, coordinating, scheduling, disciplining, and so on. Jarrett writes that this socially generative work is a feature of women's work and also the labor of digital consumers. We most readily see the denigration of these efforts in, thankfully, decreasingly persistent jokes about interns running the social media accounts of major brands.

It is work which though it may reach millions and move markets is paradoxically handed off to whoever happens to be around. As the pursuit of posting professionalized, some of these anxieties waned. Early creators acclimated to the expenditure of effort, worries about quality and whether or not something could look too good evaporated as the dollar per pixel cost of digital cameras tanked. On a broad societal level, to post, to aspire to post well, to aspire to post well professionally, and to make money from doing that all became normalized pursuits. The idea that corporations would take posting seriously as a branch of both marketing and comms done by professionals is now so unremarkable, it feels weird to be speaking this sentence aloud.

What hasn't diminished for creators though is the precarity, a defining feature of feminized labor online and off. Labor undertaken with no promise of eventual return and often the promise of great cost either monetary or opportunity. This is work which may be, Duffy writes, conceptualized as hope labor carried out in the present often for experience or exposure in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow. Hopeful precarity defines the relationship many of us have to economic gain online. It also sort of describes just the whole shebang from tip to tail, really.

The AdSense money, the brand deal, and the crowdfunding may or may not hit big, but there's also the mercurial nature of the platforms themselves, which are in a sense your workplace. The base assumptions that guide you one day could evaporate the next. Payout ranges change and some income sources go offline while others appear overnight. Access to audience is always shifting and adjusting, growing and shrinking. Features are constantly updating, being deprecated, being redesigned.

The algorithm represents a significant, powerful, and ultimately unknowable force shaping and reshaping the topology of any meaningfully monetized online environment. And if you have questions, concerns, or issues, there's no boss, no HR, and barely even coworkers in such an individualized atomized environment. There's just the cold gray oval, three dots pulsing of the AI chat assistant. Happy to help. This constant dizzying reconfiguration and impeded access to answers are part of the setup.

The premise of social media parent company search for the most efficient intake of distributable content for the least galling redistribution of their capital. They play and play with the numbers. So brazenly, in fact, one such instance, Facebook's pivot to video and the subsequent admission of view count inflation is arguably the canon event of the modern media landscape. Its impacts are so far reaching, they're tough to even put into words.

We... We've gotten to a point where you were starting to see some creators that had very predictable regular revenue and and income and to the point where I thought that traditional money might start to might start to invest or or loan money to creators. Probably didn't help that around that time when creators were really getting legit, there was a phenomenon of Facebook changing the rules on media companies and seeing how many businesses that were built on Facebook traffic, saw their, you know, a lot of media businesses, you know, that's well documented. Everyone knows what happened when Facebook changed the rules there. But that created a lingering thing of years and years of, well, YouTube could change the rules at any time too.

This, all of this is the forge in which creators, all of them are formed. It's not unlike working inside some combination of cube to hypercube and that one Jamiroquai music video. Everything constantly rearranging around you. Accordingly, if it can be said that every creator across platforms, age, even the political spectrum share one positionality at this point, one stance within the world, I reckon it may have shifted from embarrassment to vigilance. Creators know they must always keep a close watch on the platforms which shape their work environment and really culture as a whole at this moment.

This vigilance may not always be well intentioned, well informed, or focused. It may be opportunistic. It may be pluralistic, but with each reconfiguration of their livelihood, its purpose is renewed. View count retabulations, the YouTube adpocalypse, categorical shadow bans, the TikTok ban and sale, political censorship, whatever meta happens to have its fingers in this week, establishing ing what it means to be a creator and defending the utility of being one is work that has been done on and through and with various online platforms, but often also in spite of them. The cultural position of the creator has elevated, solidified, and bifurcated over the last decade.

Creator has become something to aspire to and something at which one can make a living and a good living doing. If you work hard and are perceptive and more than a little lucky or already famous. This more than anything accounts for the bifurcation. Like every other corner of the media and entertainment industries, the creator sphere has its celebrities and its aspiring middle class. For sure, it always has, but the distance between those two has only grown As creator has come to mean almost naively someone who posts like it's their job without a sense of if they do or do not otherwise have access to the machinery of Hollywood or Madison Avenue.

A creator can be someone who makes videos online in their bedroom, but it may also be someone who makes streaming specials, TV shows, and movies. A creator may own a video game publishing company or write a New York Times bestseller or release a hit record. Anyone, as Tim told us, can be a creator, and that really has come to pass. The recent SBA guidance can be read, in part at least, as an intention to address this gap and maybe even by degrees, the precarity endemic to so much of the space below the beasts, senats, robers, and rays. The United States government and its celebrants love to talk up our small businesses who collectively occupy a political bullet point right in line with farmers, factory workers, and vets.

So it feels significant to bring that focus even by implication to posting of all things. Though, frankly, it sounds like the numbers are hard to ignore.

Estimates range from one to 12,000,000 people are actually full time making an income through content creation. And, you know, the the... How that works varies. Right? Some people, the content is the product.

Some people, content is marketing for a product. But either way, the creator economy is becoming the economy. It is driving the small business economy.

Anyone can be a creator, but, well, sometime or another, everyone must be a creator. If you're not posting TikToks of your podcast about your bookstore, your indie game, or your pickleball pizza place, why did you even bother in the first place? Participating in the creator economy has become like Charlie's search for the golden ticket. Permitting passage into some strange otherworldly place on the other end of which all one's problems are hopefully solved. Many creators ascent to the precarity in the hopes of banishing it finally.

Avi connects this to much broader economic circumstances.

I think we all know that wages have largely stagnated while costs are through the roof. But what we don't really recognize is how widespread functional unemployment is. So what do I mean by functional unemployment?

Avi here is talking about a nonstandard measure of unemployment that counts people who are working for below poverty wage or who would work more but don't have the opportunity to in addition to people who cannot find work. While unemployment in The US is reported at 4%, functional unemployment is reported at around a staggering 25%. That's 90,000,000 people trying to figure out how to make ends meet, And I'd bet most of them have a smartphone.

A lot of people that have become content creators until like the last couple of years, we're actually really doing it for fun. Right? You started a podcast, you started making YouTube videos or TikTok videos just because you had some creative idea or you wanted to express yourself or whatever it was, and then an audience found you and then you started thinking, hey, maybe I can make some money from this or maybe money started coming to you, like brands are sending you offers or whatever it is, then you sort of fell into the business side. Over the last few years, what we've started to see is more and more people purposefully becoming creators as a way of building their business. So that's what happened to me.

I got laid off for the second time. And I was creating content on LinkedIn about my expertise in the creator economy and working with creators. And companies would reject to me and ask for my help with creator strategy, creator partnerships, whatever it is. And so I leaned into that. And I said, all right, well, I'm going to start really creating content consistently because clearly the more content I create, the more people I reach.

The more people I reach in my industry, the more of them reach out to me and say, hey, can we pay you to help us? And I think a lot more people are leaving jobs in order to start creating content as a way to sell their expertise or sell new products or whatever it is. And then with the rise of AI, the shrinking of companies and employment more broadly, wage stagnation combined with inflation, you know, like this is all part of a larger macro trend.

In a way, it all makes sense. As the creator economy suffuses through the broader economy, so too does its precarity and the arrangements which produce it. Platforms and increasingly it feels all employers draw from the same bag of tricks, Inconsistent wages, ever shifting and sometimes secret KPIs, unclear or nonexistent management structure, and worker contractor statuses which enable the sidestepping of a good chunk of labor law. What Annie McClanahan writes about tip workers in her book Beneath the Wage is just as true, I think, of creators. They experience, quote, the precarity of being excluded from the political, legal, economic, and cultural forms that have often defined working class, end quote.

Though by so many measures, they quite clearly belong to its ranks. Maybe we can look past this exclusion if posting is your side hustle, not your main gig. But what if it feels like the only option for a growing number of people? The good news, I suppose, is this. Perhaps we also read the recent SBA guidance as an invitation to creators to join the middle class.

It is, of course, not sufficient for such an outcome, but maybe it's a start and maybe signals an intended focus by the federal government on platforms, social media creators, and the place of all of those within the broader economy. Calls to regulate this increasingly large distributed workplace have only grown in the past years and maybe this is a tipping point and indicates what creator will come to mean, Middle class professional poster. I take it. And I think creators have earned it.

I just feel like I'm still I'm still having the thing happen to me that happened to me fifteen years ago, which is I'm still discovering creators every day who I'm absolutely floored by how talented they are and how much craft they have. The the fun still of being being here is there... There's the things that go viral, and there's the things that that are just a a wonderful, beautiful, you know, accident, but the amount of people that are actually creating accounts or channels with a lot of intention, with a lot of creativity, and and people that keep finding new ways to break out from the crowd. It's still really inspiring.

Thanks so much to Tim and Avi for coming on the show. You can find Avi's work at the creatorsguildofamerica.org and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/avigandhi. You can find more of Tim's thoughts on creators and the creator economy at his newsletter, creatorama.substack.com, and his website shey.net. Links to all of these things in the show notes. That is the show we have for you this week.

We're gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday, November 19. Help us continue to make this show by becoming a member at four, eight, or hey, if you're nasty, twelve dollars a month. Your support makes Never Post possible. Become a member at neverpo.st today. Never Post producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and The Mysterious.

Doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rigneto. But you find what you look for, the shortest distance between two points, endless universes, a life of beautiful self description. Excerpt of Reason by Craig Watson.

Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure, and hey, would you look at that? It's distributed by Radiotopia.