The Creator Economy Is Becoming Temu for Ads & No One Wants to Admit It
The creator economy is starting to look a lot like Temu for ad services.
37 billion dollars is about to move through a system built on burnout, bargain pricing, and “non ads”.
At best, I'm a casual TikTok user watching ASMR organizing and saving videos about folding fitted sheets.
But every few posts, I’m hit with ads. Not flashy or polished, more like your cousin reporting live from her closet.
↳ A gadget to lift my washer.
↳ The most comfortable pants of her life from a brand with a name that looks like random letters.
↳ Clinique’s Black Honey, a lipstick shade from 1971.
Behind those “non ads,” the economics look different.
Creator ad spend in the US has more than doubled since 2021 and is on track to hit 37 billion dollars next year, growing around four times faster than total media.
Almost half of advertisers now call creators a “must buy,” and a lot of that money is coming out of agency and media budgets, not fresh spend.
On social commerce platforms, affiliate commissions often land in the low to mid teens percent per sale. A small group of creators make thousands a month. Most are making dollars, if anything.
In many categories, brands now get the equivalent of a small campaign from creators for what a single agency concept used to cost, because each creator only sees a tiny slice of the total budget.
And unlike agencies, creators don’t come with strategists, producers, editors, or someone focused on brand safety. Brands get the audience, creators carry the overhead.
The real choice isn’t “agencies or creators.”
It’s:
↳ A smaller number of expensive partners with structure and safeguards…
↳ Or thousands of cheaper partners in a Temu style marketplace, where the real costs sit inside someone else’s calendar and nervous system.
It sounds efficient, but if you’ve ever tried to manage it, you know it’s not. On both sides.
All of that work lands on one person, paid a fraction of what the same work would cost inside an agency.
More than half of creators say they’ve hit burnout because of this work, and over a third are actively thinking about leaving.
Agencies aren’t giving up either. They’re trimming, merging, and leaning on automation just to make the margins work. Brands aren’t replacing a broken system with a clearly better one, they’re stacking a fragile one on top.
Creators chase volume because that’s what the algorithm rewards.
Brands chase novelty because that’s what performance dashboards reward.
And the algorithm, the gatekeeper of reach and revenue, belongs to someone else.
↳ For anyone planning next year’s budgets: How much of your strategy leans on Temu Ad Agency economics, and how much depends on thinking that can’t survive inside that model?
And if you’re trying to build content that feels human and not like it came from a marketplace of interchangeable clips, I help founders and small teams shape stories, systems, and writing that people actually trust.
Originally published November 2025 on LinkedIn.
