Social Media Followers Have Never Mattered Less For Creators

Follower counts, once the core metric of social media success, are losing relevance as algorithm-driven feeds increasingly dictate what users see. According to creator economy executives speaking in late 2025, the shift has fundamentally changed how creators reach audiences and how platforms measure influence.

“I think that 2025 was the year where the algorithm completely took over, so followings stopped mattering entirely,” said LTK CEO Amber Venz Box. As feeds on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube prioritize predicted engagement over subscriptions, creators can no longer rely on their existing audience to guarantee reach.

This dynamic has been building for years, but executives say the impact is now unavoidable. Even large creators are finding it harder to directly reach followers, pushing many to rethink distribution strategies. At the same time, trust in individual creators appears to be holding up, even as concerns grow about AI-generated content flooding social platforms.

Box cited a study commissioned by LTK and conducted by Northwestern University showing that trust in creators rose 21% year-over-year. She attributed the increase to audience skepticism toward synthetic or low-quality content, saying, “AI pushed people to kind of rotate trust to real humans that they know have real life experiences.”

The shift has led to experimentation across the industry. Affiliate-driven creators are investing more heavily in direct relationships through platforms that minimize algorithmic interference, while others are leaning into aggressive content distribution tactics. One growing approach involves paid “clipping,” where teams – often coordinated via Discord – create and distribute short clips from long-form videos or livestreams across multiple platforms to trigger algorithmic discovery.

As algorithmic noise increases, executives expect niche creators to fare better than broad, mass-appeal personalities that are attempting to dominate multiple disparate audience segments. “Algorithms have gotten so good at giving us exactly the content we want,” Duchscher said.