Views are the most misleading metric online!

Part 1/4: Attention stopped working. What’s next? The Meaning Economy and why views don’t pay the bills anymore.

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Two days, two Creator Economy events and one techno party left me with two things:

• a notebook full of insights (that I’ll turn into a series here for you),

• and a couple of days in bed 🤒 (which turned out to be useful, cause I finally had time to process and connect the dots)

Out of that mix came this realization: we're witnessing four seismic shifts reshaping the Creator Economy right now:

1. From Attention to Intention (The Meaning Economy)

2. From Sponsored to Stakeholder (The Ownership Economy)

3. From Hype to Infrastructure (The Company-fication of Creators)

4. From Celebrity to Relatability (The Cultural Shift)

This is the first chapter! A map of where this industry is headed, with real cases, fresh data and a bit of my own take along the way.

Let's dive in? :)

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Chapter 1: From Attention to Intention
The Meaning Economy

For the past decade, the internet economy has run on a single fuel: attention. Whoever grabbed the most eyeballs won, whether you were a creator, a brand, or a platform.

That game just ended. 🤷‍♀️

“Views are super available. If you study how to get viewership, you definitely can get viewership. The harder thing to do today is to create something that people actually remember and want to come back to,” said Samir Chaudry at the Instagram Summit x Manychat.

And Colin Rosenblum put it in a way that made so much sense for how we spend our time on social media these days:

• Regrettable minutes (doomscrolling you wish you hadn’t done),

• Forgettable minutes (content you consumed but can’t recall),

• Memorable minutes (the ones that spark conversations, reshape perspectives, stick in your head).

When I did Colin's exercise and tried to remember the last thing I saw online that actually stuck... blank!

That's when it hit me: this isn't a trend.

This is the whole damn industry breaking!

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The Economics Force the Evolution

This isn't just a philosophical shift, it's mathematical (and also very much algorithmic).

While the Creator Economy grew 19% and UGC creators surged 93% yoy, individual creators are getting squeezed. We have more creators flooding the feeds with content and most of them are chasing brand dollars. But per-collaboration spending is down, and despite overall budget increases, fewer brands are planning to increase their influencer spend in 2025.

TL;DR: We’ve got more creators than ever, chasing brand budgets that aren’t really growing.

Attention becomes cheap. Intention becomes expensive.

Hugo Amsellem nailed this in his 2021 "Creator Lifecycle" piece: "Early stages run on attention. But survival, scale, and renewal depend on intention."

Sitting in those event rooms 4 years later, I realized most creators still haven't made the shift he was talking about.

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Where Investors Are Putting Their Money?

Megan Lightcap from Slow Ventures Creator $60M fund put it bluntly: "If you come to me with a deck full of follower counts, I'll stop reading. Show me retention, time spent, repeat purchase. That's where the business is."

The difference between having followers and having a business? Reach vs. resonance. In the attention economy, business models are fragile and rely mostly on brand deals. In the intention economy, creators build economic moats.

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Diversification Isn’t Optional

Relying only on brand deals is like building a table with one leg. The most resilient creators build multiple revenue engines: sponsorships, affiliates, digital products, subscriptions, IP licensing, etc.

As Karen Civil put it: “Branded partnerships are growing, but if they’re 75% of your pie, you’re exposed. You need to build other streams if you want to last.”

But here’s the catch: diversification isn’t just stacking five random income streams. If none of those revenue streams are deeply connected or strategically built, you're just spreading yourself thin across multiple weak businesses.

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Loyalty is the business

Jonathan Katz-Moses, who grew KM Tools into a multimillion-dollar woodworking company, skipped sponsorships entirely: “I decided early on not to do sponsorships at all. I wanted to develop a very loyal audience.”

He didn't just avoid those brand deals, he built something better: his own brand that people actually wanted to buy from. He converted 40,000 video views into 4,000 sales. That's loyalty as a business model.

(PS - he just secured a $2M investment with Slow Ventures)

Jason Bergsman at MeatEater proved this point differently. While they produce TV shows, podcasts, books and live events, 2/3 of their revenue comes from products sold directly to their audience.

Both their audiences are intentional, not accidental (like the kind coming from viral hits or those impersonal feeds that don't care who made the content).

And that changes everything. Content is the entry point, but intention drives the business.

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The New Playbook

In this economy, the value of time spent depends on depth, meaning, and utility. And once you see it, you realize it explains a series of other shifts we’ve been feeling:

While everyone’s freaking out about AI taking over, creators missed the real enemy: being boring. And boring isn’t just about making forgettable content and filling the feeds with stuff that looks like everyone else's... it’s also about running boring businesses.

• If your entire model depends on brand deals, that’s boring.

• If your community is just vanity metrics, that’s boring.

• And if 70% of your audience interactions go unanswered (yes, that’s the average), then you’re not building community, you’re leaving money, trust and loyalty on the table.

AI didn’t kill creators. But it sure made it obvious that shallow content and fragile models never had a chance.

The opposite of boring isn’t viral.
It’s ownership.

And that’s exactly where we’re headed next in chapter 2 👉 From Sponsored to Stakeholder (The Ownership Economy).

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