They said it was a fad. Thirty years later, it’s the infrastructure.
By: Maria A. Rodriguez, VP, Comms and Marketing, Open Influence
There was a question that circulated through every brand marketing meeting, every media panel, every industry conference from roughly 2013 to 2019. It was asked with a raised eyebrow, the way people ask about things they want to dismiss but can’t quite: Is this influencer thing just a fad?
The people asking it weren’t wrong to be skeptical. What they were watching — someone with a camera and a following convincing brands to hand over budget — did look, from certain angles, like a bubble. A novelty. A moment that would pass when audiences got wise to the performance of authenticity, when platforms changed their algorithms, when the next thing arrived.
They were wrong about the conclusion. But they were right that something was ending. What they couldn’t see was that it wasn’t the creator who was ending — it was the old order of attention and commerce that was ending around them.
What you’re looking at on this spread is thirty years of that ending — documented in the scraps and artifacts that each era left behind. A GeoCities page counter. An AdSense check. A rate card. A creator fund dashboard showing $420 on 8 million views. A burger chain doing nine figures in year one.
Each era looked like a ceiling until the next one made it look like a floor. The hobbyist became the accidental professional. The accidental professional became the influencer. The influencer became a business unit. The business unit became the holding company. At no point did anyone stop and announce that the transition had happened. It just kept moving.
The title — The Long Game — is deliberate. This was never a sprint to relevance. It was a thirty-year restructuring of who controls attention, who profits from it, and what that means for everyone else in the room.
Why it matters now:
The creator isn’t competing with brands anymore. The creator IS the brand. The question for every agency, platform, and marketing team in this room isn’t “should we work with creators?” It’s “what role do we play in an ecosystem the creator now owns?”
5 Eras · 30 Years · $528B by 2027
Era 1 — The Hobbyist Era (1994–2004) GeoCities, early blogs, Flash animations. Nobody was getting paid. Attention was the whole prize. Power sat entirely with platforms (AOL, Yahoo). The creator didn’t exist as a category.
Era 2 — The Upload Era (2005–2011) YouTube launches. MySpace gives way to Facebook. The smartphone arrives and changes the camera forever. First AdSense checks. The accidental professional is born.
Era 3 — The Influencer Era (2012–2016) Instagram reshapes aesthetics. The follower count becomes currency. Brands discover that renting someone’s audience is cheaper than building one. “Influencer” becomes a job title and an insult simultaneously.
Era 4 — The Creator Economy Era (2017–2021) TikTok rewires discovery. Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans shift money directly to creators. Platforms fight for creator loyalty with funds they mostly underpay. The creator is now a business unit with a cap table.
Era 5 — The Creator as Infrastructure (2022–present) AI tools compress production. Creator-founded brands outperform creator-endorsed ones. MrBeast opens a burger chain. The creator is no longer just a channel — they’re a holding company.