Dissecting the TIME 100 Creators for the aged and/or weary
This piece first appeared on my newsletter, Future Proof. Please subscribe there (there’s a free option, don’t worry) if you want to support my writing.
Part of my role in this blog, as I see it, is to parse the ever-changing world for an audience who are stuck in the 1990s. Like them, I am sometimes taken aback by the speed with which a new technology, a new publication or a new public personality becomes important. How do we keep up with these developments, as our index expands exponentially?
This week, TIME released its list of the 100 Creators, which you can read here. But the whole point of this edition of my newsletter is that you don’t need to read it. What might read, for you, like an endless list of unfamiliar and implausible names (Qbb$fratboi or Señor Nincompoop or Bhad Bourgeoisie) is actually a rubric for understanding the modern world. And that’s why I’m here to digest it. I have dedicated much of the last few years to trying to understand who is important on the internet (and, conversely, who’s not) and, beyond that, I want to ask a fundamental question about this list, namely: why does TIME magazine, a bastion of old school power, rate their influence?
The TIME 100 Creators deploys five, quite irritating, subgroups: TITANS, ENTERTAINERS, LEADERS, PHENOMS, and CATALYSTS. I’m going to dissect them in the order they’re presented, even though some of these distinctions make little sense. I’m also, with each person, going to identify, (in parentheses), the platform that I believe is most important to them. This is subjective and you are welcome to disagree in the comments, but should offer a guide, for the uninitiated, as to the creator platforms that are fuelling this new generation power list.
TITANS
It’s not immediately clear what TIME mean with ‘Titans’ but first and foremost among them is the edition’s cover star: Kai Cenat (Twitch).
Cenat represents industrial level content creation via his 18m Twitch subscribers. And that is the unifying spirit of this group. Some, like Sean Evans (YouTube) who authored the ‘Hot Ones’ channel, have sold their content to a bigger media group (in his case, Buzzfeed) while others, like Alex Cooper (podcasts) have been acquired by major tech companies like Spotify, who distribute her Call Her Daddy podcast.
There are some in this segment who will be familiar even to the most casual of creator observers. Jimmy Donaldson — aka MrBeast (YouTube) — is a name that most people who have logged on in 2025 will know. With 400 million subscribers on YouTube, the bloke is a titan of this industry by anyone’s standards. Like Joe Rogan (podcasts), Donaldson has turned a content factory into a viable media business, which now employs a significant number of people (albeit still almost entirely through the prism of his personality, such is a requirement, it seems, of creator culture).
Heather Cox Richardson (Substack) is an interesting addition to this category. The historian and journalist is the most subscribed-to creator on the platform, but newsletter authors are rarely seen to exist within the creator space. But there’s no substantive difference between Richardson’s output, on a journalistic level, and that of someone like Marques Brownlee (YouTube), who is an industry leading tech reviewer. They’re both journalists who have found atypical outlets. Mel Robbins (podcasts), likewise, feels like a traditional journalist utilising a radically autonomous outlet.
It feels funny, as a Brit, to see Amelia Dimoldenberg (YouTube) on this list. Her father was a local councillor near me, and chair of our local Labour group. But she’s now an internationally famous — and coveted — interviewer, thanks to her deadpan Chicken Shop Dates celeb powwow. (She seems to have left Bobbi Althoff, often held up as her American equivalent, in the dust). Her titanism (a word? who can say) is fuelled by charisma, much like Khaby Lamé (TikTok) the most followed person on the Chinese video platform with 162m followers. You might be asking why — with fellas like Lamé and MrBeast on the list — TIME made Cenat their cover star (he only has 7.2m followers on YouTube and 19.4m on TikTok; comparatively small fry). The answer is probably a combination of availability (Cenat, and several other creators, have made specific content for TIME’s list) and a feeling that Twitch is a much more effective, and interesting, revenue-generating platform than either YouTube or TikTok. Oh, and everyone sane is sick to death of MrBeast.
And then there are the creators who defy taxonomical classification, because nobody under the age of 20 really understands the strange alchemy that makes them successful. Charli D’Amelio (TikTok) and Livvy Dunne (TikTok) are both famous, essentially, for commoditising being young, attractive, and willing to dance for attention. The former is now dancing on Broadway, while the latter is doing the world’s longest college degree to further a stalling gymnastics career. But none of that really matters because, according to TIME, they are titans. TV shows, brand deals, products endorsements and more follow them like shadows, which says as much about the non-creator industry as it does about creators. After all, few of these Titans are creating a sellable product, in a conventional sense. Mostly, they are a cypher through which traditional capitalism can exploit digital ephemera.
The remainder of the category: Nick DiGiovanni (YouTube), Dhar Mann (YouTube), Devon Rodriguez (TikTok), Alix Earle (TikTok), Mark Rober (YouTube), Alan Chikin Chow (YouTube), Rhett and Link (YouTube).
ENTERTAINERS
This is the easy category to understand. Every platform we look at runs on entertainment. Content, after all, has to be grabby. And there are cynical people all around the world who try and generate attention-baiting work that teases viewers and keeps them watching long enough for the platform to start paying out (I, myself, have recently become addicted to an Instagram account that adds one random footballer each day to the San Mario national team, until a computer simulation has them winning the World Cup). The rewards for that sort of content are available at volume — but far bigger returns can be found if you can entertain without resorting to defiling the feeds.
Comedians are, in my experience, dominant across self-publishing. This is possibly because they suffer the least amount of credibility reduction by being on a non-traditional platform: if you find a comedian funny, you don’t worry about whether the clip is on their personal Instagram or broadcast on Comedy Central (this is possibly also why being beautiful is helpful — you listen to your gut (*cough*) rather than worrying about whether you’re reading Sports Illustrated). Journalists, like myself, find that most readers or listeners need serious convincing that you are to be taken with more than the most pitiful pinch of salt if you’re not broadcasting through a mainstream publication. And so TIME’s list includes comic performers like Brittany Broski (TikTok), Jake Shane (TikTok) and Hannah Berner and Paige DeSobo aka Giggly Squad (podcasts), all of whom got famous without being on the telly.
There are plenty of more nebulously entertaining creators here too. Pokimane (Twitch) has made a virtue of being a rare woman in a male-dominated field (video game streaming, which is also repped here by TypicalGamer (YouTube)), while Eve Gutowski (YouTube) has weaponised lifestyle porn since 2011. Others, like my fellow Sussex native Madeline Argy (TikTok), straddle a line between beauty and charisma (in a way, that’s the mix that content creation is always striving for, but where the demands are usually bigger, in both directions, on women). Hayley Kalil (TikTok) and Delaney Rowe (TikTok) are other examples of this.
The Entertainers category also nods — obliquely — to the fact that there a lot of content creators who come from more traditional backgrounds (the list doesn’t get into the fact that podcasting, for example, is now dominated by mainstream celebrities who got their break, usually, in film or TV). Taylor Frankie Paul (TikTok), for example, is a reality TV star on Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, while Cole Walliser (TikTok) built his high-speed camera system, the GlamBOT, for E!’s red carpet coverage. It would be boring for TIME to focus too much on celebrities-cum-content creators, but it’s worth remembering that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Will Smith have the 9th and 10th most followed TikTok accounts respectively, while every personal account in the Top 50 most followed on Instagram belongs to a celebrity from a traditional background (which may also account for the platform’s under-representation on TIME’s list).
The remainder of the category: Heidi Wong (TikTok), Josh Harmon (Instagram), Daniel LaBelle (YouTube), Reece Feldman (TikTok), the Stokes Twins (YouTube), Taylen Biggs (Instagram — she’s also 12 years old, so I feel weird to include her in this list…), Prajakta Koli (YouTube).
LEADERS
There are about half a dozen totally insane posters on LinkedIn who I would gladly have nominated in this category. But TIME has preferred to focus on content creators who provide some sort of aspirational product (and comedian turned wide-eyed libertarian broadcaster Theo Von (podcasts), for some reason). After all, what does the internet have to sell, other than a better life?
What there’s less agreement on is how to achieve that better life. Some of these creators focus on the workplace, such as Steven Bartlett (podcasts) whose show Diary of a CEO began life as hustle-porn for slackers and has evolved into something that had to be censured, by the BBC, for broadcasting medical misinformation. But he’s not the only grifter selling the idea that even you can be rich and professionally successful: the list also includes blogging job-seeker Michelle Khare (YouTube) and personal finance buff Vivian Tu (Instagram). Others, like Jay Shetty (podcasts), have focused on creating a broader narrative around self-improvement, which might be as applicable socially as it is professionally.
There are subject matter specialists in this group, many of whom have found broad audiences for what might have been too niche specialisms for mainstream media. Becky Kennedy (TikTok) is a parenting psychologist, Mary Claire Haver (Instagram) is a menopause specialism, and Shirley Raines (TikTok) is a beauty empowerment blogger (whatever that is). The list also captures a snapshot of the content streams — from lacrosse analysts Colin and Samir (YouTube) to SCUBA diver Brittany Ziegler (TikTok) — that are incredibly potent within relatively self-contained communities. The reality is that a list like this can never capture the true depth and scale of influence culture. If you can conceive of an area — from bouldering to heli-skiing to dogging — I can find you an influencer, in that field, with a six-figure following. That’s just internet maths.
And then, within this Leaders division, there are the politically engaged creators. Interestingly, TIME has largely added liberals, like socialist streamer Hasan Piker (Twitch) and V Spehar (TikTok), the force behind Under the Desk news, to its Leaders, while conservatives (like Rogan and Von) sit in other categories. It’s only really CJ Pearson (X) who breaks the monopoly here, representing the young Republicans whose online movement swept Mr Trump back into the White House. Leadership, under TIME’s vague guidelines, feels like a case of looking for people who have segued into content creation as a result of their own success, rather than deriving their success directly from it. But this speaks to the eternal trap of online celebrity (as alluded to above). It is easy for people who are already famous to become famous on the internet. That’s neither unique nor interesting. What we’re looking for are the new pathways to become influential.
The remainder of the category: Dov Forman (TikTok), Mikayla Nogueira (TikTok), Golloria George (TikTok), Kate McCue (TikTok), Kahlil Greene (TikTok), Wisdom Kaye (TikTok).
PHENOMS
And Phenoms, the extremely irritatingly named penultimate grouping, should be examples of that. This group appears to be unified by a sudden, explosive success. Take, for example, Hailey Welch (podcasts), better known as Hawk Tuah, who has stunningly leveraged a viral clip where she drunkenly gave oral sex advice into a multimedia career. In a way, she has become a symbol of the American Dream as it exists in the internet age; proof, definitively, that anyone can become an overnight celebrity.
Others in this segment of the list have put in more obvious graft. Darren Jason Watkins Jr — aka IShowSpeed (Twitch) — is one of the hardest working (and most irritating) kids on the web. His multi-platform career has seen him travel around the world and pop up at basically any major event, where organisers exchange a seat (and tolerance of him being disruptive) for a dollop of free publicity. His appeal is international, like other Phenoms such as Camila Coelho (Instagram) who produces much of her lifestyle content in Portuguese, and Leana Deeb (TikTok), a Palestinian-Uruguayan fitness instructor.
But here, also, TIME seem to have hit upon the whole issue of this sort of list. They obviously decided to divide into these five vague categories instead of, say, ‘Beauty’, ‘Comedy’, ‘Sport’ etc in order to give them more latitude for their groupings. I’m sympathetic to the approach that TIME have taken, not least because influencer culture is often defined by a form of radical incoherence. You can be scrolling through Instagram and, in the space of 10 seconds, you’ll encounter half a dozen different Titans (or should that be Phenoms?) offering different types of content on very different subjects. And there are the shapeshifting careers that make it hard to pin down what, exactly, is actually being created. Take, for example, Addison Rae, who would have been sneered at a couple of years ago for banal lip-syncing videos, but has just released an acclaimed pop album and opened, last week, for Lana del Rey at Wembley.
So providing the necessary scope in a list like this comes with a natural dissonance. You have plenty of creators in the beauty space — like transgender model Alex Consani (TikTok) and privilege peddler Becca Bloom (TikTok — as well as the richly represented fashion space. Dressmaker Joe Ando-Hirsch (TikTok), red carpet reviewer Nicky Campbell (Instagram), and look curator Nava Rose (TikTok) all find places on this list. In part, this is because influence in these spheres feels more traditionally important. Luxury goods are big business (don’t forget that Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, is Europe’s richest man) and content creators are an increasingly dominant force in the marketing of those products. Less clear, for example, is how far the influence of Alex Ojeda (TikTok), a water park reviewer, extends. Food influencers — like Keith Lee (TikTok) and Meredith Hayden (Instagram) — sit in between this distinction. Food is obviously within the purview of traditional media coverage, yet it’s hard to imagine an obvious mechanism to making their enterprises hugely profitable.
Of course, for these Phenoms (that’s the last time I’m ever typing that word) it’s not all about profit. Many of these creators will not be hugely profitable, at present. And there’s no direct correlation between reach and revenue generation. Many of the creators — from this 100 — who have most successfully transitioned into the mainstream would be in the bottom quarter, in terms of audience. It is clear that big brands and traditional media want their content creators to be presentable, middle-class and pre-vetted. Essentially, they’re fishing from the same pond that they would’ve been hiring from in years gone by.
The remainder of this category: Tefi Pessoa (TikTok), Kareem Rahma aka SubwayTakes (Instagram), Nick Viall (podcasts), Ilona Maher (I mean, she’s a rugby player), Drew Afualo (TikTok), Quenlin Blackwell (TikTok), Hannah Neeleman (Instagram), and Jordan Howlett (Instagram).
CATALYSTS
And finally, the category that TIME was always best positioned to opine on. This is not just out of deference to their legendary Person of the Year feature, which highlights someone who — for good or bad — has changed the world. It’s also because it’s also easier to make a judgment on this question. Who is actively involved in the pursuit of change? Who is making a difference? Those are big questions, of course, but somehow easier to work with than “who’s the sexiest thot of the moment?” or “who makes the dankest memes?”
You’ve got creators like Cyrus Vessni (TikTok) exploring queer identity or others, like Taylor Cassidy (TikTok), reinvestigating America’s racial history. James Jones (TikTok) broadcasts about indigenous Americans while Shina Novalinga (TikTok) represents for Inuits, Kelly Gerardi (Instagram) is an astronaut and science communicator, and Sam Bencheghib (TikTok) is educating on climate issues. What they are catalysing is obvious to me. Less clear is what personal development hackers like Diego Perez (Instagram) and April Little (LinkedIn) really offer the world. Others, like Hannah Williams (TikTok) who campaigns for pay transparency and Alexis Nicole Nelson (TikTok) who encourages more POC to engage with nature, are clearly doing good, though not on a really impactful scale.
This is, in part, because if one were to look at the instances where social media and digital content has actually changed the world, it’s happened outside of English-speaking countries. The Arab Spring, for example, might have happened more than a decade ago, but still offers the best example we have of the internet impacting politics. The TIME list predictably steers clear of the current crisis in the Middle East (or even, less explicably, Russia’s war on Ukraine), but it’s equally apparent that a generational discourse is being defined, in relation to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, by digital creators within Palestine. Instead, TIME’s measure of catalytic influence is deferred to liberal (but not leftist) creators like Nimay Ndolo (TikTok), who stay the right side of an invisible line.
There’s a balance to be struck here. Creators are not exempt from the political currents that shape the world. Pro-Palestinian creators, for example, fare better on the Chinese-owned TikTok than they tend to on American-owned Instagram, which deprioritised ‘news’ content at the outset of that war. Al Jazeera, as a case study, is one of the best-performing mainstream publishers on TikTok, where it has been fiercely critical (and openly partisan about) Israel’s invasion. But on Twitter in 2023, for example, they were labelled as “government funded media”, as Elon Musk sort to decentralise power (this label was also applied to the BBC and PBS, and subsequently reversed). Now, obviously, Al Jazeera is not relevant to TIME’s 100 Creators list, the point is simply indicative of the way that internal cultures exist within platforms.
And TIME itself is subject to these pressures. At present they have: 12.5m followers on Instagram, 19.1m on X, 1.4m on YouTube, and 399.8k on TikTok. In some places their content — broadly defined as ‘current events and global affairs’ — performs better than in others. When you take a sample — even a relatively big sample, like 100 creators — you elide these nuances.
The remainder of this category: SL Rockfish (TikTok), Remi Bader (TikTok), Charlie Engelman (TikTok), Devin Halbal (TikTok), Abena Amoakoaa Sintim-Aboagye (TikTok), Mychal Threets (TikTok), Pattie Gonia (Instagram), Sarah Adams (TikTok), and Joel Bervell (TikTok).
IN CONCLUSION…
If you’ve made it this far, firstly, congratulations. Secondly, I think it’s time to either get a life or take out a subscription to Future Proof.
Anyway, there are two things I wanted to point out. The first is the dominance on this list of TikTok. This is accounted for, I think, by a sense that they are trying to capture the zeitgeist — i.e. creators who have relatively recently exploded into the mainstream (though some, like Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper, defy this reading). TikTok is the growing platform, even though it is clearly less influential (and certainly less profitable for creators) than YouTube, which is still the reigning King of Content. On many occasions, while dissecting the list, I had to choose whether to identify a creator as a TikTok-first or Instagram-first publisher. Almost invariably I plumped for TikTok, for the simple reason that people usually had more followers there. The content on TikTok and Reels (Instagram’s short video vertical) is almost identical, but the audience tends to be 20–50% bigger on TikTok. For creators, this doesn’t matter that much: they produce the same content and then cross-post it. But for analysts, this is important.
There is also a sense, to me, that TikTok is a platform that still values the individual, as YouTube and podcasts have evolved to be more embracing of brands and collectives. Still homemade, still disposable, TikTok fits more neatly into a box of society’s own creation.
The other takeaway I have from the list is the absences. I’m a big fan of OnlyFans (not as a consumer, per se, but as a media analyst) which is clearly the most efficient paywalling mechanism in the world. I don’t think it would’ve crossed a line for TIME to have included Corinna Kopf or Sophie Rain or Tyga or whoever on this list, as a sop to the fact that it’s a major media business, and influential in its penetration (ba dum tish). Similarly, I think Substack, and other text-based services like Beehiiv and Medium, are underrated, while some of the world’s biggest and most powerful platforms, like Facebook and Reddit, have apparently not generated any personal spheres of influence. That seems unlikely to me, and would have been an interesting line to pursue.
This is, in part, because when we think about ‘content creator’, we tend to still have a picture of people on YouTube, monologuing to the camera from their bedroom. TikTok, in a way, looks a lot like the old vision of content creation. But the term has evolved, not least because the mainstream media has also borrowed from the aesthetic and distribution mechanisms. And so ‘content creator’ is a broader term than ever, even while TIME’s list still feels restrictive and narrow. The internet, after all, is content, and we are all involved in that creation. Reacting to their list, publishing this newsletter, is content creation, just as it was content creation when I added “Professional Tennis Player” to Bill Ackman’s Wikipedia page earlier today.
And so, while it’s worth being aware of the content creators who have permeated the mainstream and gained recognition by venerable old TIME magazine, it’s equally worth zeroing in on their blind spots. It’s there — in the things we’re missing — that the most insurgent, malleable tendrils of power will take hold.
