3 Trends Reshaping the Creator Economy in 2026

**Colin** (0:00)
It is April 1st, 2026, which means by most companies' standards, that is the first quarter of the year.

**Samir** (0:06)
And I want you, as you are listening right now, to try and answer the question that we answer in this episode, which is, what are the three most important cultural things that happened in this quarter?

**Colin** (0:18)
We need to talk about how Markiplier's independent horror film could change Holly.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:21)
President Trump also weighed in, saying, the Super Bowl halftime show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst ever.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:26)
Open AI is saying, it's shutting down its video generation platform, Sora.

**Samir** (0:30)
Flavicular is a look smasher.

**Colin** (0:32)
Now, if you haven't heard of Fruit Love Island, it is a unfortunately viral TikTok series.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:38)
The White House's war videos are racking up millions of views.

**Samir** (0:41)
Does Netflix have the balance sheet to boost its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:47)
To the extent that over a million YouTube channels each day in December used AI technology in creating those videos.

**Colin** (0:54)
In a world where so much happens in a week and in a day, it's actually a really hard question to answer. And as guys who try and distill what happens on the Internet, it's actually an important one to answer. And as we tried to go through this exercise of answering what happened this quarter on the Internet, it helped inform some thoughts around where we think the Internet and the creator economy are going.

**Samir** (1:15)
And in many ways, culture in general. What we talk about in this episode gives us a bit of a glimpse of where the world is heading.

**Colin** (1:23)
So in this episode, we're going to break down three trends that we wrote down as the biggest trends that we saw in the past three months. We're also going to talk about what that means going forward. If you're listening and you feel like we missed something, feel free to reach out. You can tweet at us. You can comment on this episode. You can email us. You can write us a letter, although you don't know where we are. So don't do that. Just do one of the digital ones.

**Samir** (1:46)
Samir, it's getting confusing.

**Colin** (1:47)
OK, all right. Well, here's our look back on Q1 2026 All right, April Fool's Day. Who do you think has the best April Fool's right now? Like, our feed is about to be flooded. I mean, we're recording this before April Fool's, but today, while you're listening to this, while we're all here, it is April 1st.

**Samir** (2:10)
I'll tell you who gets me every time.

**Colin** (2:12)
Who?

**Samir** (2:12)
And this is more of a YouTube thing, but Kelly Wakasa every year uploads some sort of personal vlog where he looks really sad in the thumbnail, and some sort of apology, and it's just so convincing, and he gets me to click every single year.

**Colin** (2:27)
I feel like MKBHD is always good at this. So I would anticipate he has a good one. It's a bizarre week because our feeds are flooded with this KitKat heist, and every company has reacted to the KitKat heist.

**Samir** (2:40)
Every company.

**Colin** (2:41)
So I wonder if people are gonna play with that, or if there's gonna be, who knows? Could be anything.

**Samir** (2:47)
It's a good move. I like the official statement.

**Colin** (2:49)
Yeah, yeah, it's fun. It was funny for companies who had to make official statements this week. Yeah. And then-

**Samir** (2:55)
Tough time.

**Colin** (2:56)
Tough time to make an official statement. But here we are, one quarter in to 2026 It feels like these three months have been so chaotic and kind of wild on the internet. I put out a call on an Instagram because honestly, I was trying to latch on to what has 2026 been about. It used to feel so clear what the moments were. And it was hard for me as I sat down to write out this quarter in review on the internet, like what were the moments this quarter? And so I put out a call out on Instagram, and they were all over the place. When we took a step back, and we asked this question to our writers at Publish Press, we asked this question to our team, and we all sat together and tried to write down, like, what were the things that we think defined the first three months of this year and broke them down into three categories? We'll start with the first one, the continued rise of live streaming. We've talked about live streaming quite a bit, but this has all come to a head in the first three months of this quarter, like the world of IRL live streaming, the world of business live streaming now. Live has proven to create some of the most culturally relevant characters on the internet. iShow Speed is an obvious example, Kais Sanat is an obvious example, and now we have a fellow by the name of Clavicular, that I didn't know this name in December.