What’s the deal with the creator economy?

By now you’ve heard the phrase creator economy. It includes everyone from TikTok stars to Twitch streamers and adult-content creators on sites like OnlyFans.

According to one report, more than 50 million people around the world consider themselves creators, and it’s become the fastest-growing type of small business.

“The influencer marketing industry is projected to be over a $20 billion business in the next couple years,” said Taylor Lorenz, who covers tech culture and online creators for the New York Times. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book “Extremely Online: The Rise of the Online Creator and Creation of a New American Dream.” 

“For so long, it was really, really, really hard to build tech products for influencers or creators … because tech executives and tech investors really thought of it as a niche market, right? Now, obviously, there’s so many creators, the pandemic kind of pushed everyone online and the industry is, you know, reaches a sort of a maturation point where it makes a lot of money. And so you see the Silicon Valley investors kind of rushing in.”

Today, we’re doing the numbers on the creator economy and discuss how it’s not only changing the business world, but also changing how people think about democracy, misinformation, the anti-vaccination movement and, ultimately, whom people trust.

In the news fix, we’ll commiserate over airline customer service wait times, and is Kai a psychic? His “Jeopardy!” prediction comes true. Plus, we’ll hear from a listener who is the boss of multitasking, and another one calls in with a life update.

When you’re done listening, tell your Echo device to “make me smart” for our daily explainers. This week, we’re explaining libraries, vaccines and Dolly Parton. You can hear all our explainers here. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter! You can find the latest issue here.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

“Hello, Content Creators. Silicon Valley’s Investors Want to Meet You.” Taylor’s reporting in The New York Times

“The Real Difference Between Creators and Influencers” from The Atlantic

“Analysis | No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons” from The Washington Post

“Consumer Confidence Hits Six-Month Low in US” from Bloomberg

“Need to Call an Airline? Your Hold Time Will Be Approximately One Zillion Hours” from The Wall Street Journal

“Scoop: Facebook’s new moves to lower News Feed’s political volume” from Axios

“Mike Richards is now out as executive producer of ‘Jeopardy!’ too” from CNN

Read the transcript here.