2024 was a seismically significant year for the creator economy and its relationship with the traditional media business. Social media’s answer to Godzilla, Mr Beast, conquered Amazon while The Sidemen struck a deal with Netflix. TikTok continued to drive trends in music and film and YouTube became a major presence on living room TVs. As eMarketer noted in an end of year report, creator revenues from TV-viewed content rose a staggering 30% last year.
As if all of the above isn’t enough, leading TV businesses started to make significant inroads into the digital first space. Format powerhouse Banijay picked up global rights to digital first format The Infiltrators while ITV unveiled a major new partnership with YouTube. In parallel, no TV show worth its salt now goes to market without a companion podcast attached.
But what about 2025 – how will the digital first community push on after an incredibly impactful 2024? Already this week, The Drop has shared predictions from Spirit Studios and Little Dot Studios. In a final flurry of future-gazing, we asked six of the industry’s leading lights to share their own expectations for the coming year. After this, we’ll stop predicting things and get back to the day to day job of supporting the digital first economy’s unstoppable expansion.
Thom Gulseven, co-founder, Strong Watch Studios
Biggest lesson/ key takeaway from 2024: Our big lesson of 2024 – you can’t just pitch a good idea. There’s never been a bigger demand for quality video – but it has to come with a strategy attached. We’ve all got good ideas, that’s not enough anymore. You need good ideas with a great distribution, audience and commercial strategy attached.
Key challenge for your business for 2025: Recruitment! There’s a growing need for more people who have a blended experience of great digital strategy and platform knowledge with TV production and creative rigour and formatting expertise. For lots of people, they’re still two different careers – they can’t be now. You need knowledge of it all. However, the space for retraining is sometimes impossible to achieve without dangerously stretching productions. So we’d love to see someone, be it a media agency, broadcaster or other, help with retraining.
Key opportunity for your business for 2025: Working with legacy IP owners. In the UK, IP owners are sleeping on some iconic legacy formats right now, the digital strategy for which often only extends to putting clips and compilations on YouTube as a secondary revenue stream. What if those IP owners were to invest in an original content strategy, using that IP as the spine? What would that IP look like created on digital budgets, at digital scale, for digital audiences?
Which digital creator or digital first company do you most admire right now? I’m in deep admiration for anyone trying to crack a great factual storytelling strategy in digital. So creators like Ben Zand, and companies like Quintus and Spirit Studios, hats off, we know first-hand it’s a commercially hard road to travel, but if we crack it collectively, I’m positive it will pay back in 2025.
Your key digital-first prediction for 2025: I think we’re leaving an era of investment in indistinct lighter formats where the creators that feature in it are the draw for audiences, and I think we’re entering a period of increased investment in distinctive digital IP, brands and formats that are ownable and exploitable regardless of the creators in them. I also anticipate infrastructural change. I predict that the people who have the most progressive 2025 will stop trying to incrementally change old TV or advertising terms to accommodate a digital present, and instead rip up all the existing infrastructure and work out what we all actually need.
Matt Ford – co founder CoLabX
Biggest lesson/key takeaway from 2024: YouTube’s continued dominance. Social media consumption continues to rise, with Gen Z spending an average of 3 hours daily on social platforms and YouTube is their most-used platform (93% usage). Over 50% of YouTube watch time now occurs on connected TVs, making it the leading platform for video and podcast content.
Key challenge for your business for 2025: Persuading traditional media/production companies to shift their mindset from a commissioning model to a publishing one, and building their own digital brands, specifically on YouTube, to own their own audiences and diversify revenues.
Which digital creator or digital first company do you most admire right now? AfterParty Studios – a creator led digital production outfit with a great business model. Strongwatch Studios – a digital production company closing the gap between the linear and digital worlds.
Your big digital-first prediction for 2025: That Meta platforms are no longer relevant for media businesses. The ad revenue has dropped significantly. With Reels focused algorithms, both Facebook and Instagram reward volume over anything else, which requires significant channel management resource to drive views and engagements but with limited ad revenue return. Brand deals require sales resource and it’s a competitive market. The recent announcement that they’re doing away with third party fact checking will conflict with editorial guidelines and/or business values. Media owners are much better off focusing on YouTube in 2025.
Sam Barcroft, founder, Creatorville
Biggest lesson/ key takeaway from 2024: Adsense alone does not a business make.
Key opportunity for 2025: The great shift of spend from traditional to streaming media.
Which digital creator do you most admire right now?: Goalhanger
Your key digital-first prediction for 2025: Mr Beast’s annual turnover to exceed $350m
Gerrit Kemming, managing director, Quintus Studios
Biggest lesson/key takeaway from 2024: Even the last person in the traditional TV business has finally realised that massive disruption in their industry is leaving them with a lot of questions about what their business will look like in the future. For many, FAST has already turned into a side note, but YouTube has become a big ray of hope for many content creators.
Key opportunities for your business for 2025: Quintus Originals (digital-first documentaries sold into TV as a second window) helping fill the gap which the smaller amount of commissions in the TV market had created. The professionalisation of social video creating a new business area for documentaries and docuseries for a millennial audience – independent from TV money.
Your key digital-first prediction for 2025: 2025 will be the year that digital creator-led formats become mainstream – in streaming as well as in social or linear & social co-airing forms
Evan Shapiro, ESHAP, media cartographer
Biggest lesson/ key takeaway from 2024: The Streaming Wars are over. The battle between Big Media and Big Tech is now the central driving force in media and entertainment.
Which digital creator or company do you most admire right now? This will sound weird, but The New York Times. I think they are the best digital first media company around right now.
Your big digital-first prediction for 2025: YouTube will be TV’s most important platform.
George Cowin, co-founder and co-CEO, Cowshed Collective.
Key takeaways from 2024: More brands are seizing the opportunity that entertainment-driven social content offers. Through an entertainment-first approach they are reaching new and engaged audiences and building communities. More broadcasters and platforms are choosing to work with digital native production companies to provide premium quality content with a faster turnaround and lower production costs than their traditional partners.
Key challenge for 2025: Across our four business pillars we have a lot going on. One of our most exciting challenges is the focus on the expansion of our Ventures business with new channels and partnerships, working with third party IP owners; production companies and distributors, to support their digital transformation and build revenues across YouTube and social.
Key Opportunity for 2025: We ended 2024 on a high with our two season Netflix commission of Inside. On the back of this, there is a great opportunity for us to bring the authenticity, quality, cost and time-effectiveness of our YouTube productions to a wider client base across platforms, channels and brands. Aside from using our digital expertise to grow Cowshed, we are open to partnerships with companies with strong catalogues to help them grow in the digital/social space.
Digital creator or company I most admire right now: The digital company I most admire right now has to be 4.0. They have embraced digital transformation, innovating not just on YouTube but across all socials, which has paid off with them reaching 1m on TikTok so quickly.
Big prediction for digital first in 2025: 2025 will be the year of YouTube and social content. YouTube will continue to grow its audience base, and we will see an explosion of new channels and opportunities, and many rights owners will see significant growth in digital and social revenues. Traditional media outlets will live or die by how they handle this transition, and how quickly they can do it, and whether they willing to collaborate with companies like Cowshed.
Final Thought – from The TellyCast/Drop team
Well that’s 2025 sorted – more or less. Our own view is that GenAI, the elephant in the room, will become more prevalent this year. The launch of a virtual Michael Parkinson podcast is a tantalising insight into the creative potential of GenAI for companies with engaging IP. GenAI will also be on both the positive and negative side of the misinformation/disinformation debate. Big distributors will be on the lookout to snap up digital-first production companies and their formats. We also predict more industry-leading events dedicated to the digital-first community!
As for issues to watch out for in 2025: the growth of YouTube has been well covered by our commentators – but what if TikTok is banned in the US? Will the vacuum be filled by an established player or a newcomer? Finally, how will the gender balance on YouTube evolve as the platform moves mainstream? To date, female creators have tended to be more prominent on TikTok than YouTube – but could that balance shift in 2025? Will global streamers like Netflix and Amazon start poaching more female digital first talent – rather than more Mr Beast and Sidemen?
