As podcast consumption shifts to video, advertisers are treating the format as more premium than ever, drawn by opportunities across multiple channels — and are investing more marketing dollars accordingly.

In the first quarter of the year, ad revenues for podcast representation agency True Native Media jumped 40 percent year over year, according to founder Heather Osgood. “2025 has, so far, been a really strong year for us, and I don’t anticipate, if Trump doesn’t do anything too crazy, that we’re going to see a decrease in that,” said Osgood, who didn’t share exact numbers. “There definitely is an increase in interest in video.”

Other podcast production companies, such as Audacy, Wondery and Pave Studios, also confirmed to Digiday that their ad revenue had increased year over year between the first quarters of 2024 and 2025, though they declined to share specific figures.

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As virtual-world creators begin building large audiences — and real incomes — on platforms beyond Roblox and Fortnite, advertisers are starting to take notice.

A new kind of creator has emerged in the past two years: the user-generated content (UGC) creator, whose preferred medium is three-dimensional virtual items and worlds, rather than audio, video or text. Platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite have led this charge, with Roblox paying $280 million to UGC creators who published digital avatars or virtual worlds in the fourth quarter of 2024. Advertisers have also poured millions of dollars into these UGC gaming platforms in recent years, solidifying their evolution from video games into full-service creator platforms and marketing channels.

In 2025, UGC creators are starting to find success in smaller UGC platforms beyond the major players Roblox and Fortnite. UGC mini-game creator Soydade, who asked to keep his real name private, boasts a following of nearly 150,000 on the UGC platform Highrise, and has earned over $300,000 over the last two years by charging users to play poker games inside a virtual lounge on the platform.

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Artificial intelligence has become a standard part of many creators’ toolboxes in 2025.

As AI technology continues to improve, creators are starting to implement generative AI at every stage of the content production process. From script writing to AI-generated voices, creators have found that AI makes their jobs simpler and their lives easier — even if some advertisers remain averse to content made using AI.

On Wednesday, May 14, AI audio generation company Wondercraft is publishing a comprehensive report on creators’ use of AI tools in their daily or weekly workflows. The report, which drew from an online survey distributed between March and April 2025, featured responses from 514 creators distributed across North America, Europe and other regions, with the majority of respondents residing in North America. Subjects were split roughly evenly between genders and age groups. 

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As platforms increasingly compete for livestreaming creators and their audiences, Twitch’s discovery issues remain a sticking point for some streamers. 

It’s been just over a year since Twitch launched its Discovery Feed in April 2024. The feed, a TikTok-style endless scroll of vertical video clips and current livestreams, was Twitch’s first product explicitly intended to help viewers discover new streamers without having to leave the platform. 

Twitch claims the new feed has had a measurable impact on discovery and user growth, with more than half of new viewer video views now coming through the feed and roughly 38 million new creator follows being driven through Discovery-Feed-related video playback, according to Twitch chief monetization officer Mike Minton.

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Roblox is pushing its case to advertisers, releasing new data aimed at proving the value of ads on its platform.

At its NewFronts event on Thursday, Roblox unveiled the results of a MediaScience study that used eye tracking and other physiological data to measure users’ increase in attention and brand recall when participating in branded immersive experiences on Roblox.

Marketers have welcomed the additional transparency from the platform, but say Roblox will need to move beyond emotional response metrics if it wants to unlock deeper ad investment. 

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As generative artificial intelligence improves, creators are growing more confident using it to make audience-facing content.

For content creators of all types, generative AI use is on the rise. In March, a survey of content professionals by Kontent.AI found that 74 percent use AI tools on a weekly basis, with 39 percent using them daily. Now, digital creators across platforms such as YouTube and Spotify are joining this growing trend to further scale their content.

Here’s a look at how some creators are leveraging generative AI to create video, audio and written content — and whether or not that’s a turn-off for advertisers.

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Podcasts are no longer the territory of audiophiles. As connected TV becomes YouTube’s primary watch surface, podcasters are seeing a rise in viewership on the biggest screen in the house.

Amid the shift, many podcasters with audiences on YouTube are upping their game with visual content to capture and sustain attention as more fans tune in through connected TVs.

Podcaster Tara Suwinyattichaiporn is among them. Last year, 14 percent of Suwinyattichaiporn’s 46,000 YouTube subscribers tuned into her Luvbites Podcast via connected TVs, with 69.7 percent watching via mobile, 9 percent via personal computers and 6.7 percent through tablets. In April 2025, Suwinyattichaiporn’s TV viewership percentage jumped to 23.5 percent on YouTube’s CTV app — a nearly 10 percent year-over-year increase — while her mobile viewership percentage plummeted to 56 percent.

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Creators are flocking to LinkedIn — and brands’ dollars are right behind them.

As LinkedIn positions itself more firmly as a home for creators, influencer marketers who operate within the platform’s ecosystem say that their business is booming.

B2B influencer marketing agency Creator Match, which launched in early 2024, has made 80 percent of its lifetime revenue in the “past few months,” paying out over $1 million to LinkedIn creators during that period, per CEO AJ Eckstein.

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Roblox partner Super League, a metaverse production company, today has acquired fellow Roblox specialist Supersocial, for an undisclosed sum, as it seeks to scale up brand world-building for advertisers.

As Roblox and its ecosystem of studios continue to grapple with proving its advertising potential to brands, analysts and observers believe the deal could signal a coming wave of consolidation among these types of companies.

Super League and Supersocial are members of the Roblox Partner Program, essentially serving as influencer marketing agencies for the Roblox ecosystem. Both companies build custom-branded Roblox worlds and manage brands’ integrations into popular pre-existing experiences on the metaverse platform. 

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TikTok is aggressively courting creators and agencies to showcase the revenue potential of its livestreaming tools.

TikTok says its creators are now collectively generating $10 million in revenue daily through livestreaming — a figure the company shared during an in-person mixer for creators, agencies and press at its New York City headquarters on April 24.

The event was part of an ongoing series of in-person mixers TikTok plans to host at its NYC headquarters, to encourage creators to further embrace its livestreaming services. The platform has been steadily building its services and tools for Live creators, launching a dedicated Discord server for TikTok Live creators and creator networks on April 9, as well as providing access to webinars and virtual training Zoom calls, which also kicked off in early April. The platform now wants to build on that momentum.

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With TikTok’s future hanging in the balance, music promoters are widening their focus from TikTok to creators on other short-form video platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.

Although President Donald Trump extended the deadline for the government-mandated U.S. TikTok ban on April 5, marketers of all kinds — including music promoters — remain uncertain about whether the platform will stick around in the long run. That’s why music promoters have spent 2025 investing in alternative platforms.

It has long been a standard practice for music labels and promoters to pay TikTok creators to use their songs in their videos, but three individuals with knowledge of this practice — two music promoters and a creator — told Digiday that the music industry has ramped up its spending on similar creator promotions across Instagram and YouTube, although they declined to share specific numbers. Creators charge different rates for music promotions based on their reach, with mid-tier influencers typically charging between $200 and $300 and top creators commanding rates in the thousands.

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Livestreaming is having a moment in 2025 — and it’s bringing some growing pains.

Creator platforms’ push into livestreaming is exposing a deep cultural divide between Twitch’s dedicated streaming community and creators going live on newer platforms.

The format is breaking out of its niche roots, with platforms from Substack to Patreon launching new tools and total livestreaming hours watched rising by 8.9 percent year-over-year, according to Stream Hatchet’s Q1 2025 livestreaming trends report. But as streaming moves beyond its Twitch-native roots, creators are discovering the format means very different things on different platforms, and the result is growing friction.

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Brands looking to reach Roblox users in 2025 are finding themselves inundated with competing pitches from Roblox over how to best advertise on the platform — and some are deciding to spend their marketing dollars elsewhere — or temporarily pause spend — as a result of the confusion.

Three executives at Roblox studios — the metaverse platform’s version of influencer marketing agencies, which help design branded experiences or integrate brands into pre-existing experiences — told Digiday that confusion over the platform’s competing ad visions in 2025 had caused a brand they were negotiating with to decide not to enter Roblox, though all three declined to name the specific brands to avoid damaging potential deals, and two requested anonymity to preserve business relationships.

At the moment, Roblox’s advertising ecosystem contains a multitude of stakeholders with differing priorities and ideal outcomes. There are the creators, who simply want to make as much money as they can by working with brands — which often means convincing an advertiser to focus its marketing budget on integrating into a single, popular experience. Then there are the studios, which want advertisers to pay them to manage more widely distributed campaigns that integrate brands across multiple experiences. And then there’s Roblox itself, which wants to funnel brands’ marketing budgets into its own ad products, such as Portals and video ads.

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As content creators across the web get swept up into discussions of tariffs and a potential recession, some are adjusting their approach to avoid possible blowback from affected fans.

With Donald Trump’s currently-paused tariffs (save China) threatening to send the global economy into a recession, content creators of all kinds are chiming in, regardless of their usual lane. In addition to the usual suspects in the worlds of investing and personal finance, there are comedians making humor videos about markets crashing, lifestyle influencers posting about recession indicators and political creators making the economy their primary focus in 2025.

Amid the frenzy, some creators are wary of making videos about the potential recession — particularly those who saw what happened to other creators during the most recent financial crash in 2022. Back then, an entire cottage industry of personal finance influencers arose largely to promote and discuss cryptocurrency investing, only to face backlash and a reputation hit from hordes of angry fans after their advice didn’t pan out. 

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Streaming platform Kick is on a mission to onboard as many creators as possible in 2025. So far, the push appears to be succeeding — but the platform’s edgy reputation represents a challenge as it looks to scale up further.

March 2025 was Kick’s biggest month ever. The platform reached over 317 million hours watched during the month, according to numbers shared by a Kick representative, and achieved its highest-ever average concurrent viewership of 443,559 viewers.

At the moment, Kick boasts over 57 million total users, according to the representative, and is rapidly gaining market share against rival platforms such as Twitch. Although Twitch does not publicly share its total user count, the platform averaged over 2.5 million active users at any given time in 2023, according to a blog post by Twitch CTO Christine Weber. Third-party estimates put Twitch’s monthly user count at roughly 240 million.

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With a potential economic recession on the horizon, content creators are adjusting their monetization strategies to rely less on individual fans and more on advertisers.

As President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs — paused, as they are — threaten to upend the global economy, a recession is appearing increasingly likely. In anticipation of people spending less across the board, creators are reducing their reliance on revenue streams that require individual fans to open their wallets, such as subscriptions and donations. Instead, they are looking to use brand deals to fill the gap, viewing advertisers as more consistent spenders than individuals during challenging economic times. 

Of course, ad budgets may also get squeezed amid the economic uncertainty, but buyers remain confident creator spending will hold steady. Calum Macdonald-Ball, the head of social media at Dentsu Creative UK, said that brands have started to prioritize creators more in their media mixes, with marketers realizing the power of creators to increase brand trust and awareness within communities that might otherwise be hard to reach.

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A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

Broderick, for example, estimated that revenue for his newsletter Garbage Day had increased by roughly 20 to 25 percent year over year since he left Substack in January 2024, though he didn’t provide exact figures. 

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Professional basketball team the Atlanta Hawks have launched the NBA’s first formalized, team-level creator collective.

The Atlanta Hawks Creator Collective is a group of 25 content creators that the NBA team has granted special access to home games and events such as training facility tours. The team soft-launched the program last year, with Atlanta-based creators including Dayna Bolden and Roxanne Kaiser attending — and posting about — Hawks events throughout the 2024-2025 basketball season.

The collective spans across both platforms and genres, and includes non-sports creators such as Kaiser and Julio Angel Muñoz. Members of the collective are paid a fee to create content about the games they attend, in addition to a mixture of other paid and unpaid opportunities. The past year represented a beta test of sorts for the program. Pleased with its performance, Hawks executives plan to officially announce the collective tomorrow, at Atlanta’s State of Creators of Color summit.

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On March 31, YouTube changed how it counts views for short-form videos. So far, brands and agencies are celebrating — but creators’ reactions range from indifferent to openly skeptical. 

The update — which means YouTube now counts every time a Short starts to play or replay as a view, with no minimum time requirement — has caused some cheer among creators, like Dkdynamite and The Rich Nobody, who have seen their view counts spike as a result. But for the most part, creators see the change as having little to no impact on their earnings or daily workflows — and some are concerned it might sacrifice engagement quality in favor of higher numbers. 

Following the update, there has been no change to the way creators’ actual revenue is calculated; the only change is to the way the view counts displayed beneath Shorts are calculated. Creators’ revenue share payouts are still determined by YouTube’s “engaged views” metric — which uses the same view definition previously used for normal Shorts views. In fact, as a result of the change, creators anticipate that their revenue per thousand views (RPMs) will decrease somewhat as their overall view counts rise.

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January’s TikTok outage has served as a wake-up call for brands, reinforcing the need to diversify their spending across multiple platforms to avoid over-reliance on a single channel.

That’s meant marketers have spent more on other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, both of which outpaced TikTok’s spend in the month following the platform’s Jan. 18 outage, representatives of influencer marketing companies Later, Collabstr, BENlabs and BrandCycle told Digiday.

Although major advertisers such as Unilever are upping their spending on influencer marketing — and some brands are continuing to increase their spending on TikTok — influencer marketers see this trend as evidence that brands are still hedging their bets around TikTok marketing amid the uncertainty surrounding the platform’s potential U.S. ban.

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