Why YouTube Still Dominates the Creator Economy — Simon Owens

Simon Owens has been covering the business of independent media since before the term “creator economy” existed. As a media journalist, newsletter writer, and host of The Business of Content, he has spent years interviewing the world’s most successful media entrepreneurs — pulling apart the mechanics of how they actually built sustainable businesses. His vantage point sits at the intersection of old-school journalism discipline and the new independent media landscape, which makes his read on where things stand unusually clear-eyed.

What follows is a breakdown of the most substantive arguments from our conversation with Simon: why YouTube structurally beats every rival platform, what the creator-media merger actually looks like in practice, and what patterns separate operators who last from those who quit.

YouTube Won Because of One Decision Every Other Platform Refuses to Copy

Simon traces the modern creator economy to a single pivot: YouTube’s decision to share 50% of its ad revenue with creators. That one structural choice created a flywheel that every other platform has either ignored or failed to replicate in any meaningful way.

“By YouTube sharing 50% of its revenue, it creates a feedback loop where content creators start creating content, they’re rewarded with revenue, then they double down, they take that revenue, they reinvest it in the business — and then it becomes like a flywheel effect where they’re able to take the revenue that’s being fed back to them and reinvest it in the business and grow and grow and grow.”

The downstream effect is visible in creator behavior across every other platform. TikTokers who blow up eventually launch YouTube channels. Instagrammers do the same. The pattern is consistent because the economics point in one direction: YouTube is where the money is for long-form video, and everyone knows it.

When asked directly whether Instagram could ever compete with YouTube in long-form without meaningful revenue sharing, Simon’s answer was flat: “I don’t think so.” His reasoning is straightforward — long-form video costs significantly more to produce than short-form. Creators are not going to absorb that cost differential for a platform that treats them as a marketing channel rather than a revenue partner. Most creators already use Instagram and TikTok as top-of-funnel brand builders that funnel audiences back to YouTube, not as destinations in their own right.

Simon’s critique of Meta is particularly pointed. He believes the platform is locked into a short-term stock-price mentality that prevents it from making the revenue-share commitment that would actually attract serious long-form creators. Whether or not that’s the full explanation, the behavioral evidence backs him up: the talent flows toward YouTube, not away from it.

Traditional Media Didn’t Lose — It Just Refused to Look

Simon started tracking independent creators in 2005 and 2006, when early bloggers like Perez Hilton, Talking Points Memo, and Daily Kos were figuring out how to build full-time income from their own platforms. The infrastructure barely existed — no mature payment platforms, no accessible ad networks for smaller publishers — but the trend was already visible to anyone paying attention.

Traditional media reporters, by contrast, treated the creator economy as a sideshow. They covered it only when someone hit 10 million subscribers, missing an entire stratum of creators building healthy six-figure businesses with 20,000 subscribers. Simon is direct about why: mainstream media didn’t classify it as media at all. They thought of it as something categorically different — a hobby economy, maybe, but not competition.

“For some reason the mainstream media didn’t realize that they were actually in competition with these creators — at least until relatively recently, when a lot of their own journalists started basically quitting their jobs and launching their own YouTube channels and Substack newsletters and Beehive newsletters and podcasts. That was kind of the ‘oh’ moment.”

That “oh” moment has produced a visible response. Major media outlets are now launching creator divisions and looking for partnership structures with independent creators. The direction of that shift matters: they’re no longer dismissing the creator economy — they’re trying to absorb it.

Simon’s broader framing here is the bundling-and-unbundling thesis applied to media. Creators represented the unbundling phase — journalists, entertainers, and subject-matter experts peeling off from institutional publishers to build independent operations. Now the rebundling is beginning. Larger creators are hiring staff, bringing on executives, and building organizations that look increasingly like traditional media companies. The sharp divide is disappearing into a spectrum.

Monetization Beyond Ads: What Actually Works for Independent Operators

Simon is skeptical of advertising as a standalone revenue model — not because it doesn’t work, but because it only rewards scale. The math doesn’t work for most creators. Programmatic ad rates are declining because supply has exploded. Advertisers operate in a buyer’s market. The scarcity that gave legacy media pricing power — one newspaper per city, one TV channel per time slot — is gone and isn’t coming back.

The models he sees working for independent operators:

• Subscriptions for intimate, niche audiences. A creator with 10,000 hardcore followers of a newsletter or podcast can build a solid income through subscriptions in a way that would be impossible through advertising alone at that scale. Substack’s rise is not accidental — it matches a subscription model to the audience types that can actually sustain it.
• Owned products. The MrBeast / Feastables and Emma Chamberlain / Chamberlain Coffee examples are the clearest illustrations of what creator-owned commerce looks like at scale. Instead of renting their audience to brands, they become the brand. Simon notes that traditional media outlets occasionally dabble in this, but it’s not structurally built into how they operate.
• Sponsorships done well. Simon makes a distinction between programmatic banner ads (which he views as largely ineffective and easy to tune out) and creator-read sponsorships where the creator treats the ad almost as content in its own right. Brands value that level of integration enough to keep moving budgets toward it.
• Ebooks, courses, and affiliate deals. These are smaller in aggregate but meaningful revenue contributors across the creator economy, particularly for creators in verticals with clear purchasing behavior (fashion, finance, fitness).

His advice on product-market fit cuts against how most new creators approach monetization. He gets frequent outreach from people who announce they’re launching a subscription before they’ve built any audience or tested any product. His pushback is direct: subscriptions are hard to build, and they’re not the right product for every audience. A fashion creator should probably be doing affiliate sales. A consultant might sell coaching calls before anything else. The most successful operators figured out both what their content was and what they were actually selling to their audience.

The Newsletter and Podcast Argument: Own Your Audience or Lose It

One of Simon’s clearest pieces of advice to any creator is to launch a newsletter — regardless of whether they think of themselves as a writer. His reasoning isn’t about content format. It’s about distribution control.

Platform algorithms can suppress your content from people who explicitly signed up to see it. A newsletter bypasses that. An email list is a direct line to your audience that no algorithm can sever. Simon argues that creators who have large TikTok or Instagram followings but no newsletter strategy are renting attention, not owning it. They’re one algorithm change away from losing a significant portion of their reach.

He’s not prescribing a specific format either. A newsletter doesn’t have to be a long-form essay. It can be a link roundup, life updates, or a short note — anything that creates a consistent, direct touchpoint with your audience outside of platform control.

His argument for podcasts runs parallel. Getting someone to subscribe to a podcast requires deliberate action — opening an app, searching for the show, hitting subscribe. That friction filters for genuine interest. Once someone clears that bar, they become a far more reliable audience member than someone who encounters your content algorithmically. There’s also an intimacy specific to audio that even video doesn’t fully replicate: someone listening to an hour of your voice through earbuds while they drive or work out develops a parasocial relationship that ten short-form videos rarely achieve.

AI: The Slop Problem and the Productivity Upside

Simon’s take on AI is neither utopian nor dismissive. He breaks it into two distinct effects.

On the downside: AI has accelerated content saturation in algorithm-dependent platforms. Short-form feeds on Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook are increasingly infiltrated by AI-generated “slop” — high-volume, low-effort content that exploits algorithmic distribution. In an environment that was already oversupplied with content, AI makes the supply problem worse, particularly for creators who depend on algorithmic reach rather than direct distribution channels like newsletters and podcasts.

On the upside: for creators using AI as a production tool rather than a content generator, the efficiency gains are real. Simon’s own example is transcription — what used to be a mind-numbing, hours-long manual process is now instant. For video creators, AI is reducing the cost of production elements like thumbnails and visual effects that previously required larger budgets. His broader thesis is that AI could be a democratizing force: if tools allow independent creators to produce at a quality level that previously required Hollywood-scale budgets, the competitive landscape opens up considerably.

His nuance on this is worth noting: the creators using AI well are largely invisible because they’re doing it intelligently — keeping a human firmly in the loop and using AI to enhance rather than replace. The ones who are visible are the slop merchants. That asymmetry skews public perception of how AI is actually being deployed across the industry.

What Sustainable Creator Businesses Actually Have in Common

After years of interviewing the operators who built lasting media businesses, Simon has identified a short list of patterns that separate them from those who burned out or gave up.

The first is consistency — sticking with it long past the point where the signal is strong enough to be encouraging. Simon is direct about why most creators fail: they quit before the audience finds them. They don’t see enough response quickly enough, so they stop. The ones who last trust that an audience exists for what they’re doing and keep creating long enough to locate it.

The second is product-market fit — understanding not just what content to make, but what to sell. Most creators treat these as separate questions (or ignore the second one entirely). The operators who build businesses treat them as inseparable.

The third — relevant to creators who’ve already built an audience but can’t figure out how to grow beyond it — is recognizing when outside expertise is required. Simon points to a pattern among larger creators: they hire CEOs who come from product-based companies or traditional media, because they recognize that building a larger organization requires skills that content creation doesn’t develop. The creator stays on the creative side; the executive handles the operational and business-building side. It’s not a failure to need that — it’s an honest accounting of where the skill gaps are.

His parting advice to anyone who wants to start: stop planning and launch something within the next week. The version of your channel or newsletter that exists in five years will look nothing like what you launch now. The only way to get there is through five years of iteration — and you can’t iterate on something that doesn’t exist yet.