They spent years covering the creator economy—now with Scalable, they’re helping build it
Talking Points highlights the topics, trends, and technology, defining the media and communications sectors.
They spent years covering the creator economy—now with Scalable, they’re helping build it
For nearly a decade, Kaya Yurieff had one of the more enviable beats in media. While working at CNN and later The Information, she was among the first journalists to treat the creator economy as a legitimate business vertical—tracking the rise of influencers, newsletter operators, and platform-native brands at a time when most newsrooms were dismissing them.
At the same time, Jasmine Enberg was tracking the rise of the landscape from another perspective. Since 2018, she had been building out EMARKETER’s social media and creator research vertical—and in 2024, formally established its creator economy research desk—helping demystify the black box that many brands saw the industry as.
Last October, they stopped following the industry and joined it. Yurieff and Enberg co-founded Scalable, positioning the upstart as a bridge between creators and the brands and platforms trying to work with them. “After writing a near-daily newsletter on the business of the creator economy for 4.5 years, it was only natural that I would eventually join the industry myself,” Yurieff tells us.
Enberg echoes a similar pull: “A decade ago nobody was using the term ‘creator economy’ and influencers were an afterthought for many big brands,” she says. “’Influencer’ was considered a dirty word… [Now] every CMO knows they need to be working with creators and influencer marketing budgets continue to rise. But as the tactic has moved from an experimental play to a must-have in marketing strategies, the pressure to prove the effectiveness of investments has also grown.”
The timing wasn’t random. The duo had been tracking the gap between how companies think the creator economy works and how it actually does, and Yurieff kept hitting the same wall. “A major thing missing is measurement,” she says. “It still feels very much like the Wild West when it comes to assessing the success of creator campaigns. Creators don’t know how to price themselves, and brands are still figuring out how to measure ROI. There is no standard framework. The creator economy has matured much faster than the infrastructure around it.”
“Finding robust, reliable data has always been the biggest challenge,” Enberg added. “So much of the data is biased, fragmented or expensive. It can also be hard to compare data sets over time because things are changing so fast or data providers do one-off studies.”
That infrastructure problem is, in large part, what Scalable is trying to solve. In April, the company launched a proprietary research database featuring curated, ready-to-use charts on everything from AI and M&A to influencer marketing spend. The pitch: reliable creator economy data is hard to find, expensive, or biased, and business leaders making decisions in this space need something concrete to work from.
Last month, Enberg and Yurieff spoke at the inaugural Creator Economy Summit at the Marché du Film in Cannes—a milestone they view as symbolic. “Creators are in many ways still fighting for recognition and acceptance from traditional entertainment,” Yurieff says. “While streamers have increasingly started working with creators, the film industry has been much harder for creators to break into. Creators who are making movies—or want to make them—still face a stigma from the industry.” The Summit’s existence, she argues, signals “a recognition that the creator economy is only getting stronger and more influential. Attitudes may be starting to slowly change. But we’re still at the very beginning of the convergence between movies and creators.”
For someone who’s spent years studying the space, Yurieff keeps coming back to one thing that still isn’t getting enough airtime—how challenging it is to actually build a creator business. “We don’t talk enough about the burnout, pressure and challenges of operating a creator business,” she says. “So much of what we see online looks glamorous and effortless, but so much work has to happen behind the scenes to bring even a 15-second video to life.”
Enberg points to platform dependence as part of the same pressure. “Almost all social media creators are still at the behest of platforms and their algorithms when it comes to distributing their content,” she says. “Many creators have lessened their reliance on social platforms by diversifying into other channels, including newsletters, podcasts, online communities, digital or physical products and live events… but the big checks are still largely coming from brand deals and they still need to make content for social media in order to reach and grow their audiences.”
Yurieff sees a reckoning arriving for podcasting in particular, as the format’s pivot to video has made an already crowded space significantly harder to survive. “The list of podcasters who have thrown in the towel is growing, and we expect this to hit women and minorities especially hard.” The reasoning is layered and complex: video opens hosts up to appearance-based scrutiny and online harassment that audio didn’t, while simultaneously demanding more time, money, and production overhead. “The truth is that the shelf-life of creator businesses can be quite short and there aren’t clear ways to exit.”
It’s a notably unsentimental take from someone who’s now a founder in the space she’s describing. But it tracks with how Yurieff and Enberg have always, and continue to, approach the industry; less interested in the glamour, more focused on the mechanics underneath it. One spent years counting what the industry produced, while the other spent years explaining why it mattered. Now they’re building the infrastructure they both kept saying was missing.
AI has a perception problem—and graduation commencements just proved it
New reporting from The Wall Street Journal says AI is just as controversial as political party affiliation, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and President Donald Trump amongst US voters. Between 64-79% of voters (depending on age) say AI advancement is moving “too fast,” and it’s becoming too polarizing to ignore—especially for communicators.
Despite the technology shaping everything from consumer tech to politics, the comms impact of the AI talk track is finally showing signs of wear, and nowhere as acutely as college graduation ceremonies across the country.
Throughout May, ceremonies at the University of Arizona, Tennessee State University, CalArts, and more were derailed over the mere mention of AI during speeches. Executives representing Google, Apple, and Delta, as well as university leadership, all turned to the technology with many of the same talking points big tech has been relying on to win over institutional investments, pre-IPO hype, and potential partners.
These AI-laden speeches–and students’ reactions to them–went viral, largely because of how speakers positioned the technology.
“AI is rewriting production, as we sit here. I know it,” said Big Machine Label Group CEO Scott Borchetta.
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” said real estate executive Gloria Caulfield.
“AI is going to touch everything else as well, whatever path you choose,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Some even acknowledged that these bullish claims may be provocative to the audience. Borchetta’s response, for one, was to “deal with it,” drawing jeers from the crowd. Schmidt says in his speech, “There is a fear in your generation: that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”
The innovation-rooted AI narrative that has long driven media coverage, investment, and opportunity is showing its age as perception surrounding the technology shifts from optimism to concern amongst many consumers. Students embody this shift, as the young workforce braces to navigate an uncertain job market and growing concerns about AI’s environmental impact.
But AI-laden graduation speeches didn’t all turn sour. Delta CEO Ed Bastian began his speech at Emory University by acknowledging how “quick and easy” it was for AI to generate his first draft of his graduation speech, it lacked “soul” and “warmth.” That first draft, he said, was almost immediately discarded.
Bastian was a standout on this year’s commencement ceremony circuit for a few reasons, but mainly, he highlighted what AI can never replace: human talent. This is a departure from what his peers were saying, which urged students to hop aboard the AI bandwagon and embrace the change—like it or not.
These diverging messages and their responses from AI-sensitive audiences highlight the pivot AI communications must make today.
Beyond Silicon Valley, AI inundation is underpinning how lay audiences respond to corporate messaging. Whether it’s a stream of new tech workflows or the growing focus of AI capabilities in brands’ advertising, this growing sentiment of AI advancement moving “too fast” risks leaving everyday audiences behind if brands stick to the B2B talk track that has driven their business conversations.
But striking a balance between corporate and consumer AI narratives isn’t uncharted territory. In fact, one of the biggest players in today’s AI landscape, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, threaded the needle during a graduation speech he gave at Carnegie Mellon University.
In contrast to the other commencement speakers, Huang first celebrated the graduates, shared his personal story of perseverance and how he led Nvidia through many peaks and valleys. Notably, Huang doesn’t mention AI until nearly halfway through his speech, and when he does, it’s through a lens of opportunity as opposed to the prevailing narrative.
“For many, AI creates uncertainty,” he began, acknowledging the hesitancy in the room. “People see AI writing software, generating images, driving cars, and naturally wonder what happens next. Will jobs disappear? Will people be left behind? Will this technology become too powerful?”
But after acknowledging the widespread views of his audience, Huang didn’t force them to embrace AI—he invited them to be part of the solution. “Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity. When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it… The responsibility of our generation is not only to advance AI, but to advance it wisely.”
If company leaders want to expand beyond investment and big tech to win over general public perception, AI communications will need to maintain bullishness amongst capitalistic crowds while also offering solutions and addressing concerns amongst consumers.
The commencement circuit made clear that the business-facing talking points for AI don’t translate to the public square. The speakers who stuck the landing (like Bastian and Huang) met their audiences where they were before asking them to follow. But the lesson in this for communicators is actually simpler than you might think: know your audience and read the room.
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