Creator Economy is Killing Artists

Art and content creation are not the same thing.

That’s the conclusion I reached after working for four years with influence marketing and online creator management. At first, I confused both concepts—I treated them as synonyms—until the internet creative economy began to make me sick and compromise my creativity as an artist.

In this short essay, I’d like to reflect on the “contentification” of art.

Content as the Internet’s Main Commodity

In 1996, then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King.” He argued that content would be the primary form of monetization on the Internet, driven by advertising and subscription methods.

Today, we see how people consume content while scrolling through social media. “Consumerism” is the key word here: it’s like eating what’s inside a cereal box — the content of the box. The individual ingests, digests, and excretes, and restarts the process all over again.

Thus, everything on the internet is content. This includes text, images, videos, music, games, and countless other possibilities. This means that, to exist online, these media must undergo the process of “contentification”— art ceases to be an object of aesthetic appreciation and becomes an object of consumption. And it’s not even a physical object; it’s information, visual and auditory concepts, pixels displayed on a screen.

And there’s so much content. You have to glance to move on to the next. And then the next, ad infinitum. Time is money, and your attention is what keeps this economy running. The more time you spend on social media, the more profit it makes. So, it must invest in more content to feed you. And that content must be personalized to your tastes.

Content Addiction

In 2006, the engineer Aza Raskin developed the infinite scroll. This revolutionized how online content was displayed. Before, the internet was like a book — you navigated through pages, and at the end, you’d click a button to go to the next one. Now, all social media platforms prevent you from reaching the end of the page, so you’ll keep scrolling without interruption.

In 2014, Facebook implemented a change that also became standard across many platforms: the auto-play. At the time, this was heavily criticized by some users, the main concern was the unnecessary data consumption from videos users didn’t even want to watch. And that was exactly the point: the platform doesn’t want to let the user decide whether to watch a video. The quickest way to avoid watching became the habit of scrolling past until finding something interesting. Today, we let these videos play automatically without being asked, and if they’re not interesting enough within the first three seconds, we move on.

Now, we have a generation of anxious and distracted people. While social media isn’t the sole cause, some studies often point to it as a contributing factor, much of this due to the addictive design these platforms have developed over the years to keep users hooked.

Many platforms launched creator/partnership incentive programs to make more and more content. These aim to attract users who create content (casually or professionally) by offering perks and rewards, encouraging them to upload even more content, feeding the algorithm with increasingly diverse content to cater to ever-more-specific interests. Thus, the user’s feed is never boring.

**The “Contentification” of Art**

Many artists publish their work on social media to promote themselves. Often, social media serves as a portfolio. It’s also common for artists to use these platforms to share their creative process, making-of, tutorials, and so on.

Some artists are fine with posting solely to have an online archive of their work. But others go further: since the goal is to sell their art, they bend to the algorithmic demands of social media so their work reaches more people. Here is when art becomes content.

A drawing stops being a drawing — a work from the artist’s observation and technique, honed over the years — and becomes mere information once published online. The drawing is reduced to content, to be consumed like breakfast cereal. And most users won’t look at it for more than three seconds because they need to move on to the next content.

An artist who wants to promote their work and play the social media game must do more than post a drawing. They need strategies to boost views. The drawing must be catchy (not necessarily in terms of technique, but it requires a hook, a bait). It must follow a trend. It must connect to a theme, and that theme must recur in the artist’s profile. The artist must please, becoming a hostage to the algorithm. They must post stories, memes, short videos; they must livestream, host giveaways. Their personal life may also become content. In short, they must perform.

I used drawing as an example because it’s the medium I’m most familiar with, but this applies to other art forms too: photography, literature, music, video games, and film.

It’s in the cinema where this debate about the contentification of art has been most prominent. In 2024, Patrick Willems published a video essay titled “Everything is Content Now”, which made me realize how “contentification” affects artists in our era. I also came across this critic Stephanie Zacharek’s article, “Are You Watching a Movie? Or Is It Just Content?” Both discuss how streaming platforms are turning cinematic productions into superficial content to fill their libraries and refresh their catalog every week, feeding the users and preventing them from canceling their subscription.

This hunger for endless content sickens artists, leading to burnout. Content creation can blind the content creator, who is no longer an artist. Now, they spend more time analyzing digital trends, metrics, and improving marketing strategies instead of refining their artistic skills. Payment comes from engagement, not artistic quality.

This is where artificial intelligence will step in as a solution for digital platforms. At some point, human content creators won’t be necessary — feeds will be filled with AI-generated customized content. And this has been tested: in 2023, Meta launched AI-generated profiles on Instagram pretending to be real persons, with AI-generated posts. The profiles are now deactivated, but this set a precedent. Once art is stripped of meaning, artists won’t be needed. AI will be a far more efficient, faster, and cheaper way to produce infinite content to keep users entertained without complaints.

The artists? They will be disposable.

For a Slow Art

The first thing I did at the end of 2024, when I realized I was sinking into deep depression with violent spikes of anxiety, was to stop drawing. I had gained many followers on Twitter, and my short comics about gacha games were getting many views. But something felt wrong. I wasn’t content with my content.

That’s when I realized I was making something I didn’t truly want. Those comics, those drawings… they were all conditioned by social media logic. I made them for the engagement. They weren’t art — they were content.

I had to take several steps back and halt that content production to understand the system I was trapped in. I tried to remember what my creative process used to be before the social media proliferation.

I remember when people took a little more time to look at art. Trends lasted longer. Artists had more time to produce their work and remain relevant. Even at the dawn of the popular internet, when art sharing platforms, like deviantArt, used to be a thing, artists had a slower, less frantic relationship with their art than they do today.

I realize all these changes were a matter of habit. We’ve grown accustomed to social media as it is now. We’re the frog that didn’t jump out of the boiling pot because the heat rose so gradually we only noticed it when it was too late.

But bad habits can be reversed by replacing them with new, healthier ones.

We must reclaim the habit of slow art. Of slow contemplation.

M. N. Vulpin