What market does the creator economy belong to? 2026 may finally decide

This year, the creator economy will be forced to grapple with a question it has spent the past decade sidestepping: what market does it actually belong to?

The rapid expansion of creator-led platforms has produced an industry that does not squarely sit in any single category. It is not quite television, not quite social media, not quite advertising, and not quite entertainment – at least in the way such terms have traditionally been understood. Yet it increasingly overlaps with all of them.

Netflix has proposed a catch-all solution – the so-called “global entertainment market”, comprising “streaming services, linear TV, cable, gaming, social media, user-generated content, or all the big tech video platforms”.

It’s an argument the streaming platform is floating in anticipation of antitrust scrutiny over its $83bn bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and streaming business. Near the end of last month, it welcomed a recommendation from Warner Bros.’ board to reject Paramount’s rival bid, and in doing so laid bare the competitive logic underpinning its case.

Its biggest competitor, Netflix said, is not another subscription streaming service, but YouTube – citing TV view-share data from Nielsen. The detail affirmed previous reporting in The Daily Influence, which was the first to connect Netflix’s key partnerships with creators Ms Rachel and Mark Rober as part of its wider efforts to compete more closely with YouTube.

Netflix’s argument – that it is a smaller player in a much broader market – is a familiar one, and has been advanced by merging companies with limited success.

In 2023, Adobe and Figma abandoned their $20bn merger after failing to convince regulators that they competed in a broader market for screen design. In 2024, Tapestry and Capri Holdings, the luxury groups behind brands including Coach and Michael Kors, similarly failed to persuade authorities that they were smaller players in a broad global luxury market rather than participants in a specific “accessible luxury” segment.

Regulators tend to be cautious about expansive market definitions, particularly where they risk diluting assessments of market power and concentration.

Still, irrespective of the outcome of any single deal, the question Netflix has raised is one the creator economy itself can no longer sidestep: how this market should be defined, and what its long-term structure looks like.

Global entertainment market

If Netflix’s framing is taken seriously, then the defining feature of the entertainment market is attention. Under this view, streaming services, social platforms and creator-led video are overlapping categories, competing for the same finite viewer time rather than operating in clearly separate markets.

That reframing has implications well beyond regulation. It shapes how platforms position themselves, how advertisers allocate budgets, and how creators are categorised within the ecosystem.

The argument has some weight, given the extent to which convergence is already visible in practice. Instagram, for example, has begun pushing creator-led video onto television screens, positioning Reels for living-room viewing rather than mobile consumption. TikTok has similarly explored TV apps and longer-form viewing experiences.

At the same time, creators have become more embedded within mainstream television commissioning, regularly featuring in unscripted and live programming and further weakening distinctions that once separated “TV” from online video.

None of this guarantees that Netflix’s market definition will be accepted. Regulators may still conclude that, despite convergence in distribution and viewing behaviour, these markets should remain distinct for competition purposes. What has changed is that the question of where those boundaries sit now has to be addressed directly.

2026 marks a shift from ambiguity to definition. Major institutions are being required to set out how they understand the boundaries of this market, and once articulated, those boundaries will inform what decisions are made across the industry going forward.