Anyone observing Hollywood in recent years has seen the creator economy reshape the entertainment business in myriad ways, from YouTube stars and influencers’ increasingly common presence in traditional film and TV content to TikTok’s rise as a discovery engine for viewers. But the creator economy’s influence on Hollywood may already be even more pervasive than is readily apparent.
On the latest episode of the Luminate podcast In the Lab, Assistants vs. Agents founder Warner Bailey details the impact social media — and studios’ efforts to compete with it — has had on entry-level roles in entertainment. In summary, creator economy skills are not just desired but often required for the majority of positions in Hollywood nowadays.
“What I hear time and time again is that in the hiring process, execs really want to know, How much do you understand about where this industry is headed?” Bailey said.
Bailey, who began AvA as a still-ongoing Instagram meme page, has grown it into a brand spanning (among other endeavors) live events, a new weekly live show and a job board for young entertainment professionals.
It’s this last venture that provides AvA with quantifiable data on what the site calls “early career jobs in entertainment,” which shows that many traditional Hollywood positions are calling for knowledge and skills related to creator-oriented roles, even if the jobs themselves are not such roles.
According to data aggregated from AvA’s job board, while 63% of all entertainment jobs observed across traditional categories require creator economy skills, only 15% are explicitly labeled as creator economy roles. Moreover, among the jobs not tagged as such, 53% still used creator economy language in the description, with nearly 25% even using the word “creator.”
What this means, in Bailey’s view, is that being “chronically online” is essentially a job qualification for anyone hoping to break into entertainment in 2026. “Certainly in entertainment, you need to have your ear to the ground on what is not only changing culture but what is the culture. At the end of the day, that is social-first content,” he explained.
While this may be disappointing to traditionalists, it arguably presents a wealth of opportunities for those who can find innovative ways to approach entertainment content or integrate creator economy tactics with traditional Hollywood ones. After all, studios’ attempts to do so thus far have had decidedly mixed results.
For instance, season 2 of Prime Video’s Beast Games, co-created by and featuring YouTube megastar MrBeast, saw U.S. viewership in its first 12 weeks fall about 40% from the first season’s total, according to Luminate Streaming Viewership (M).
And as Bailey attests, Hollywood will ignore the ideas and skills of its young, tech-fluent employees at its own peril.
“The next generation decides what’s important in culture,” he told In the Lab. “And if you’re not empowering that next generation internally, you’re going to lose out on a lot of money at the end of the day.”
