<\/p>\n
If you were to tell Michelle Khare seven years ago that she would be recreating Tom Cruise\u2019s deadliest stunt on her YouTube channel, she would have been shocked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if I would have believed you,\u201d the host and creator of \u201cChallenge Accepted\u201d said on TheWrap\u2019s latest roundtable, \u201cCreator Power: The Business of Influence presented by Adobe.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from TheWrap<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI think that is just indicative of how quickly the industry has changed and matured and also how much I personally am inspired by other creators who have spun their opportunities into reinvesting in themselves, their own IP and their own ownership, rather than taking it elsewhere,\u201d Khare said.<\/p>\n At a time when traditional media companies are consolidating and scrambling to find growth, user-generated content and the creator space is seeing a surge of interest and investment. The creator economy \u2014 defined as everything from ads pulled in from YouTube content to merchandising and marketing partnerships \u2014 is expected to grow to $480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs.<\/p>\n Khare, who has won two Streamy Awards and has over 5.2 million subscribers on YouTube, is living proof about how much the creator ecosystem has evolved. Earlier this year, she was one of three channels YouTube backed in its quest to secure creators an Emmy nomination. It\u2019s a shift that reflects both how the industry at large has started to embrace creators and how creators themselves have evolved to become more entrepreneurial.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n \u201cThey\u2019re modern media companies,\u201d said Jared Carneson, global head of social at Adobe. \u201cThey have circulation that rivals traditional media companies. They have more watch time and eyeballs on them than Hollywood blockbusters.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re seeing massively increased viewership on living room and television devices,\u201d Khare said. \u201cYouTubers are technically creating TV shows, and viewers are technically choosing them over other shows. I love that because \u2014 to me \u2014 it\u2019s reflective of a democracy of content creation. Whereas historically, in traditional Hollywood, it has been, \u2018Does a room of suits believe in my idea?\u2019 or \u2018Does this casting director like my self tape?\u2019 and \u2018Are they paying attention when they\u2019re watching it?\u2019 now it feels like a far more direct relationship to the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n And everyone is taking notice.<\/p>\n Alessandra Catanese, the CEO of the comedy-centered production company Smosh, told TheWrap that it\u2019s not just Hollywood that\u2019s taking creators more seriously as of late. It\u2019s also advertisers and companies that specialize in merchandising and franchising.<\/p>\n \u201cCreators are building businesses off of the products that are genuine to them. It\u2019s not just selling themselves or the content they create but being able to find natural extensions of themselves as well,\u201d Catanese explained. \u201cThat\u2019s just a natural evolution in a capitalist economy.\u201d<\/p>\n Nowhere is that acceptance more apparent than in the living room. In August, YouTube broke yet another Nielsen viewership record, beating The Walt Disney Company as the media distributor responsible for the most overall TV watch time. YouTube accounted for 13.4% of all TV usage during the month compared to Disney\u2019s 9.4%. It\u2019s now not uncommon to see the YouTube app living next to tiles for major streamers like Netflix, Hulu and Apple TV+.<\/p>\n That democratization of content and audience attention is only expected to continue. YouTube breaks a Nielsen viewership record so often, it now hardly feels like news.<\/p>\n As audiences move more toward creator-generated content, the rise of artificial intelligence has allowed creators to tackle more ambitious projects.<\/p>\n The influencer economy has always required creators to wear multiple hats \u2014 talent, writer, editor and producer, just to name a few of the most common roles. But with the rise of AI tools, time-consuming tasks like sound clarification or adding in captions can be automated.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to master a single tool, never mind master a suite of tools, to be able to do all of that stuff effectively. It\u2019s exciting to see AI coming in and helping close that gap,\u201d Carneson said. When it comes to Adobe designing its AI-driven tools, one of the main goals is to give users more access to these projects and to decrease the barrier to entry.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no storytelling that isn\u2019t human centered,\u201d Carneson added. \u201cAI is a great optimizer. It\u2019s a great augmenter of things. But it is a tool.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s also a goal of Meta, the company behind social media power players Facebook and Instagram. \u201cWith all of our apps \u2014 everything that we\u2019re building, the products inside, the features inside of our current apps and the new apps \u2014 it\u2019s all towards AI,\u201d said Megan Bycel, the head of public figures and creator partnerships in North America at Meta.<\/p>\n Meta, in particular has been very outspoken about its embrace of AI as well as its desire to create a \u201csuperintelligence\u201d lab. The company has bet big on AI, and in July said operating expenses would range between $113 billion and $118 billion, with much of that believed to be dedicated to the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cAI is only going to become more and more prevalent in our day-to-day, in our world, inside and outside of Meta,\u201d Bycel said, paraphrasing something that was recently said to her by a member of Meta\u2019s senior leadership team. \u201cEvery single day, challenge yourself to try to use AI in some way, shape or form because then you\u2019ll just get more and more comfortable with the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Catanese and Khare \u2014 the two panelists who are more directly involved with content creation \u2014 both expressed interest in using AI but emphasized that the emerging technology should never replace human artists or professionals.<\/p>\n \u201cSmosh has a bit of a purist take on this where we\u2019re not fully anti-AI, but we don\u2019t support the notion that AI could replace creatives,\u201d Catanese said. \u201cThat was an early assumption with AI, like, \u2018We\u2019re going to use AI to create X, Y and Z, or to replace these jobs.\u2019 I think even the audience is really seeing and feeling allergic to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Smosh only considers using AI tools as a way to support roles that already exist. \u201cWe\u2019re very people first, not just creator first,\u201d Catanese said.<\/p>\n As for Khare, she likened AI\u2019s potential impact on entertainment to the evolution of \u201cSurvivor.\u201d The CBS reality show first premiered in 2000. Over the years, the camerawork and storytelling has evolved and become more sophisticated, but the main conceit of the show has never changed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a story about a group of humans stranded on an island and trying to survive their way to winning the competition,\u201d Khare said. \u201cThat is how I view the progression of documentary in this new era of technology. At the end of the day with \u2018Challenge Accepted,\u2019 we\u2019re focused on telling human stories and elevating that truth and that reality to our audience as much as we possibly can.\u201d<\/p>\n Watch the full roundtable above.<\/p>\n The post Creators Get Bigger Star Treatment Across Entertainment \u2014 and Brands Are Noticing<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sg.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you were to tell Michelle Khare seven years ago that she would be recreating Tom Cruise\u2019s deadliest stunt on her YouTube channel, she would have been shocked. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I would have believed you,\u201d the host and creator of \u201cChallenge Accepted\u201d said on TheWrap\u2019s latest roundtable, \u201cCreator Power: The Business of Influence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1956684,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[367289,343007,367288,367286,367287,23844],"class_list":["post-2009723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-alessandra-catanese","tag-content-creation","tag-jared-carneson","tag-michelle-khare","tag-traditional-media-companies","tag-youtube"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Ryan-Reynolds-Dwayne-Johnson-Tessa-Thompson-and-More-Set-Panels.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2009723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1956684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2009723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2009723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2009723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Natural extension\u2019<\/h2>\n
Impact of AI<\/h2>\n