A structural change is underway in how brands deploy money inside the creator economy. Rather than directing the bulk of their budgets toward paying creators to post, brands are increasingly spending on paid distribution - boosting creator content on TikTok and Instagram after it goes live. The post performs organically first. If it works, the brand amplifies it. What was once a standalone tactic is becoming a media channel with measurable inputs and outputs.

That argument was laid out in a LinkedIn post published on May 20, 2026 by Tim van der Wiel, founder of GoSpooky and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. Van der Wiel referenced reporting by Dan Whateley and Lucia Moses at Business Insider as the basis for the observation, framing it as the most consequential shift in creator marketing right now - more significant, in his reading, than any individual platform feature or content format trend. The post generated more than 180 reactions and 21 comments from practitioners across media buying, influencer marketing, and brand strategy.

The mechanics of paid amplification

The process described by van der Wiel is operationally straightforward, but its strategic implications are substantial. A creator publishes content. The brand or its agency monitors the post's early performance metrics. If engagement is above threshold - if the content is, in van der Wiel's phrase, content that "performs best in the feed" - the brand then purchases paid distribution behind it on the platform's ad infrastructure.

On TikTok, this mechanism is known as Spark Ads, which allow brands to boost organic creator posts directly through TikTok Ads Manager. Instagram offers a comparable workflow through its partnership ad tools. What this means practically is that creator content is no longer evaluated only on the size of the audience the creator delivers. It is evaluated on whether the content itself performs as an ad unit when placed in front of a broader, algorithmically targeted audience.

The performance gap between creator-boosted content and standard ad formats is documented. TikTok's internal data from 2025 shows that creator content boosted with Spark Ads drove a 159% higher engagement rate than non-creator content at equivalent CPMs in North America during the period from February 2024 to January 2025. That is a substantial differential for a category of spend that is still being classified by many planning teams under "influencer marketing" rather than "paid media."

The scale of the market

The financial backdrop matters. US creator economy ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025, and is projected to reach $43.9 billion in 2026 - a year-on-year growth rate of roughly 18.6% that outpaces most other digital advertising categories, according to IAB projections cited across multiple industry reports. The IAB's 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released on April 16, 2026, confirmed that creator ad spend for the year reached $37 billion, and the IAB characterised the shift precisely: what was once campaign-based influencer marketing is evolving into always-on creator programs.

Social media as a whole generated $117.7 billion in US advertising revenue in 2025, a 32.6% year-on-year increase, according to the same IAB report. The total US digital ad market reached $294.6 billion - a 13.9% year-on-year increase achieved without a major election cycle, Olympics, or FIFA World Cup providing cyclical lift. Within that broader growth story, creator spend and social amplification are among the fastest-moving components.

IAB CEO David Cohen cited $44 billion in advertising spend through creator channels in 2026, describing creators as "the next generation of studios." That framing aligns with the structural argument van der Wiel was making: creators are increasingly functioning as production houses, with platforms and paid media acting as the distribution layer.

What the shift means for creator selection

The change in budget allocation logic produces a direct change in how brands evaluate creators. Van der Wiel formulated this as a question brands are now asking: not "which influencer has the biggest audience?" but "which creator makes content that performs best in the feed?" The distinction is consequential for everyone operating in the space.

Audience size, historically the primary metric in influencer selection, was a proxy for distribution. A creator with 10 million followers could theoretically reach 10 million people without any additional media spend. The organic reach model placed a premium on follower count because follower count was the delivery mechanism. When paid distribution becomes the primary scaling engine, the premium on follower count diminishes. Feed performance - how well the content drives click-through, watch time, or conversion when placed in front of a targeted audience - becomes the operative variable.

This logic has measurable implications for smaller creators. According to van der Wiel, if a smaller creator produces better-performing content, brands can simply boost it. Paid distribution removes the ceiling that limited mid-tier and micro-creators under the organic reach model. A creator with 50,000 followers who produces content with a 3% click-through rate when boosted is, under this model, more commercially valuable than a creator with 2 million followers whose boosted content converts at 0.4%.

TikTok and the Brand Safety Institute published a creator suitability report on March 23, 2026, which documented that 78% of creators turned down at least one brand deal in 2025. The reasons were structural - creators sought long-term relationships, brand values alignment, and genuine creative collaboration rather than transactional posting agreements. That context matters for understanding the amplification model: if brands are increasingly selecting creators for feed performance rather than audience relationships, the trust-based value proposition that differentiated influencer marketing from standard display advertising comes under pressure.

Several commenters on van der Wiel's post raised precisely this concern. One practitioner wrote that once creator content is selected and optimised as an ad asset, the relationship with the audience "becomes harder to treat as the core value." Another framed it as a race to the bottom: content and user-generated creative produced at scale, at the cheapest possible rates, served to a precisely targeted audience through paid infrastructure, with "the least amount of human involvement possible."

Philip Brown, identified in the comments as co-founder of Sodalis, offered a counter-position, arguing that amplification does not replace organic creator influence but rather scales what already resonates organically. According to Brown, "the real power comes from many creators creating native content organically, performance identifying the winners, and paid media amplifying what actually works."

The platform infrastructure enabling the shift

Platforms have built aggressively toward this model. TikTok on May 13, 2026 announced Creator AI Search, an upgraded Partner Exchange, and an expanded global beta of Content Suite under the TikTok One platform. Content Suite specifically surfaces brand-relevant organic creator videos, ranks them by predicted ad performance, and enables one-click Spark Ads authorisation synced automatically to TikTok Ads Manager. The workflow is explicitly designed to operationalise the process van der Wiel described: find content performing organically, obtain authorisation to use it as paid media, and push it through the paid infrastructure at scale.

A case study TikTok published in its June 2025 Content Suite announcement documented Wayfair's use of the product. The furniture retailer searched for organic creator content tagged with hashtags including #Unboxing and #ApartmentCheck featuring Wayfair products. Within one week, Wayfair had authorised hundreds of user-generated videos as paid campaign assets. According to TikTok, the campaign outperformed Wayfair's internal benchmarks. No further performance details were disclosed, though the case study was presented in the context of Content Suite's expanded global rollout in May 2026.

TikTok's Branded Buzz and Search Hubs products, announced in 2026, documented that Brand Ads running alongside Search Hubs saw a 42% improvement in ad click-through rates and a 38% lift in engagement compared to non-bundled ads, according to TikTok internal data from 2025 to 2026. These figures sit within the broader context of TikTok building creator content directly into its paid media stack - a convergence that makes the organic-to-paid pipeline progressively more seamless.

The organic reach question

Van der Wiel characterised the organic reach era of social media as "slowly disappearing," with algorithms becoming more personalised and organic reach less predictable. That characterisation generated pushback from at least one commenter, who argued that organic reach has not disappeared but been stratified - that the top 1% of creators still generate disproportionate free reach, and that what paid amplification actually does is fill the distribution gap for mid-tier creators whose content performs well algorithmically but lacks the network effects of established large accounts.

The distinction matters for how marketing teams should allocate resources. If organic reach remains viable for a subset of creators, the model is not a wholesale replacement of the previous system. It is an extension of it - a mechanism for making the results of the creator selection process less dependent on the creator's existing audience size. But if organic reach continues to compress across the board, as platform algorithm changes push more content behind pay walls, the amplification model shifts from optional to obligatory.

The creator economy is projected to grow from $191 billion in 2025 to $528.39 billion by 2030, representing a 22.5% compound annual growth rate, according to research from The Influencer Marketing Factory published in September 2025. That trajectory assumes continued brand investment in creator content. Whether that investment flows primarily toward creator fees or toward paid distribution behind creator content will determine the economic structure of the industry at the other end of that growth curve.

The measurement challenge

Paid amplification of creator content sits at the intersection of two previously distinct measurement frameworks: influencer marketing metrics (reach, earned media value, sentiment) and paid media metrics (CPM, CPC, ROAS, conversion rate). When creator content becomes a paid media asset, the measurement logic shifts toward the paid media framework - but the creative production process, the talent relationships, and the brand safety considerations remain closer to the influencer marketing model.

That gap is already visible in the data. An April 2026 analysis found that only 25% of surveyed marketers said they understood their audiences "very well," citing data silos and disconnected tooling as the primary obstacles. If the paid amplification model continues to accelerate, those measurement gaps become more expensive - because the brands optimising paid spend behind creator content without a unified attribution framework are, effectively, flying without instruments.

The structural shift van der Wiel described does not resolve those measurement problems. It intensifies them, by adding a media buying layer to what was previously managed as a content and talent relationship.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Tim van der Wiel, founder of GoSpooky and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, is the author of the LinkedIn post at the centre of the discussion. The underlying reporting was produced by Dan Whateley and Lucia Moses at Business Insider. The conversation draws on market data from the IAB, TikTok, and The Influencer Marketing Factory, and is directly relevant to brands, media buyers, agencies, and creator economy participants.

What: The central development is a documented shift in where influencer marketing budgets are flowing - away from creator fees for organic posts and toward paid amplification of creator content on TikTok and Instagram. Creator content is being repositioned as a media asset - selected for feed performance rather than audience size and distributed through paid ad infrastructure rather than organic reach. TikTok's product infrastructure, including Spark Ads, Content Suite, and Creator AI Search, enables this workflow at scale.

When: The LinkedIn post was published on May 20, 2026. The shift it describes has been developing over a longer period - TikTok's Content Suite launched in June 2025, the IAB's $37 billion figure covers the full calendar year 2025, and TikTok's Spark Ads engagement data covers February 2024 to January 2025.

Where: The discussion originated on LinkedIn and references practices on TikTok and Instagram specifically. The market data cited covers the United States primarily, where IAB figures are sourced. TikTok One's Content Suite is expanding globally as of May 2026, which means the operational model is available beyond the US market.

Why: The shift matters because it changes the economic logic of creator marketing fundamentally. Under the organic reach model, audience size was the primary variable - brands paid creators to post, and the creator's existing followers were the distribution mechanism. Under the paid amplification model, content performance in a paid environment becomes the operative metric, which reduces the premium on large-audience creators and increases the commercial value of smaller creators who produce high-performing content. For media buyers and brand planners, it signals that creator marketing budget allocation increasingly belongs inside paid media planning processes rather than being managed as a separate content or talent investment.

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