Going Viral vs. Getting Paid: Why Great Content Doesn’t Guarantee a Payday

Written by Oliver Buckley, Lecturer in Marketing at University of Salford, UK 

Valued at over 250 billion USD, the creator economy is vast and thriving (Goldman Sachs, 2023). Yet for millions of people building person-brands across creator platforms, the path to turning fame into fortune remains unclear: nearly half of US creators still earn less than 10,000 USD annually (Influencer Marketing Factory, 2026). The polar opposite, of course, are creators like Mr Beast, whom Forbes ranked as the highest-earning content creator of 2025 with annual earnings of 85 million USD (Fore, 2025). Building an online audience and converting this into income, it turns out, are two distinct challenges. 

For more than a decade, marketing scholarship had little to say about why. Monetization in the creator economy was, in author Andrew N. Smith’s words, "almost like a third rail that couldn’t be touched because we didn’t know what to do with it… [it was unclear] how to talk about it in a way that would have been palatable to journals." Smith’s own doctoral work on online creators back in 2011 ran into exactly this barrier. 

Pierre-Yann Dolbec and Smith’s recent paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, titled "From fame and followers to fortune: How person-brands capture value in the creator economy," provides much-needed clarity on this topic. Drawing on a five-year iterative study of more than 100 person-brands across 11 markets, it introduces a new conceptual vocabulary for thinking about creator economics and a framework to reshape the field’s approach to this domain. 

"We’ve always assumed that the people who are good at creating content are also going to be good at turning that into value for themselves. [This] is kind of an absurd proposition to hold."

Andrew N. Smith

Within the literature, how people build person-brands online and how firms capture value from them is well established. However, neither stream had addressed how creators convert their audiences into income – even though, as Smith puts it, "people don’t person-brand for no reason at all. They’re doing it strategically because… they want to get paid." To theorize that conversion, the authors introduce the concept of a value capture mode, which is an institutionalized pattern of action through which person-brands marshal resources, craft strategy, and execute initiatives to capture value. 

Inside the Data

The authors built the paper’s empirical foundation over several years. Dolbec described the iterative approach as characteristic of his way of working with qualitative data: 

"My projects always grow out of hand… I have a really hard time planning for things I don’t know I’ll be needing. So, I think that’s why I usually end up with […] very large datasets so that multiple data types can cover needs that emerge through the process."

Pierre-Yann Dolbec

The final dataset spans 110 influencers across 11 domains, 61,534 Instagram posts, dozens of interviews, and 656 pages of archival material on a subset of those creators. Supplementing primary interviews with secondary ones enabled Dolbec and Smith to solve the challenge of recruiting creators with large followings. 

Three ways person-brands capture value

The pair identify three modes through which person-brands capture value, each with distinct strategies, resource bundles, activities, and risks: 

• Advertisers monetize engaged attention through partnerships with traditional brands and platforms. The main risks associated with this value-capture mode are shifting platform algorithms, contractual disagreements, and the constant authenticity work required to maintain audience trust. 

• Entrepreneurs identify and exploit market opportunities by launching products, services, and ventures of their own. The risks are product failures, manufacturing and delivery breakdowns, and the challenge of attracting capital. 

• Professionals sell expertise directly to clients or through employment with a third party. Related risks revolve around professional misrepresentation and the credibility costs of being seen to fail at one’s stated expertise. 

  
  

Reflecting on what surprised the team during analysis, Dolbec remarked: "I was really surprised at the breadth of monetization activities… [there is] so much creativity coming from content creators in how they monetize their activity."

From typology to framework

In early drafts, the three value-capture modes, a key empirical contribution, were also a central problem for the team. Reviewers felt that the manuscript read as a typology rather than as a contribution to theory. “We kept on getting feedback that it was descriptive,” Smith recalled. This required a structural fix, as Dolbec elaborates: 

"We restructured the paper so that the types become examples of the theoretical model we’re introducing… so that there’s potential moving forward to accommodate new modes of value capture. We’re not [just] offering a typology, we’re offering a theoretical framework."

Pierre-Yann Dolbec

This pivot, pulling value capture mode out front as the construct and treating Advertiser, Entrepreneur, and Professional as illustrations, allowed the authors to make a broader theoretical contribution. They explain how person-brands grow their value capture, through concentration (deepening within a single mode and field), mode-spanning (crossing into a new mode), and field-bridging (extending into a new content domain). 

What’s most interesting here, Smith argued, is that creator paths are far more varied than the standard narrative suggests: "There are a good number of people who start as advertisers and move to professionals, which is kind of an interesting leap."

Rethinking how brands invest in creators

Perhaps the paper’s most consequential managerial implication is reframing how organizations should engage with creators. Dolbec and Smith argue that framing influencers as merely tools to drive engagement and sales understates influencers’ entrepreneurialism and overlooks the strategic value of long-term, partner relationships.

"…This insight came from the interviews… people telling us, listen, if I want to have an impact on my followers, I need a long-term relationship with a brand… I know my followers best. And if the brand trusts me and my knowledge, then we’re going to change things."

Pierre-Yann Dolbec

The paper offers tailored recommendations for each mode. Dolbec captured the underlying logic with a vivid analogy: "One of the things we’re suggesting that I do feel has legs is to bring influencers in-house, like the same way that you might bring manufacturing in-house."

Key takeaways

This research offers something new to the influencer marketing literature: a framework for understanding the economics of the creator economy from the creator’s perspective. By cleanly separating value creation from value capture and by foregrounding value capture mode as a theoretical construct, Dolbec and Smith provide a vocabulary that can absorb new modes as the creator economy evolves. For brands, the strategic question shifts from "which influencer should we buy?" to "which creators are worth investing in, and how?" For platforms, the task is to design tools that recognize the diversity of value-capture modes. And for the field, the framework is, in Smith’s words, "our bid to try to push [the creator economy] as a separate domain." 

Read the paper

Interested in reading the full theoretical framework, including the complete discussion of growth strategies and managerial recommendations? Click here to read the article in full. 

Want to cite the paper?

Dolbec, P.-Y., & Smith, A. N. (2025). From fame and followers to fortune: How person-brands capture value in the creator economy. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 42(4), 1264–1283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2025.03.004

References

Fore, P. (2025). MrBeast’s $5 billion empire runs on generosity—but at a cost. Fortune (26 September). Retrieved May 1, 2026 from: https://fortune.com/2025/09/26/mrbeast-jimmy-donaldson-beast-industries-philanthropy-profit/.  

Goldman Sachs. (2023). The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027. Retrieved April 23, 2026 from: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-creator-economy-could-approach-half-a-trillion-dollars-by-2027.   

Influencer Marketing Factory. (2026). 2026 creator economy report. Retrieved May 1,^, 2026 from: https://theinfluencermarketingfactory.com/creator-economy-report/. 

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Meet Pierre-Yann

Pierre-Yann Dolbec is Associate Professor of Marketing at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. His research examines marketplace dynamics, person-brands, and the structures that shape consumer-driven markets in the digital age. 

What drives you to do the research / work that you do? 

"I have curiosity about the world… because I need explanations for stuff that I don’t understand. The other one is like frustrations — things that bother me, like I’m trying to make sense of. And sometimes it’s frustration about my own behavior, sometimes it’s frustration about the behavior of others. And I need to figure out why [that behavior] happening."

If you were not in academia, what would you be? 

"I was a consultant before, so… I think probably a consultant, or some form of lawyer, because… some types of law really relates to research, analysis, and recommendations. My left-field take would be a bad jazz pianist, because I’m an aspiring, very bad pianist." 

Meet Andrew

Andrew N. Smith is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University. His research focuses on online consumer culture, content creators, and person-brands in digital media ecosystems. 

What drives you to do the research / work that you do? 

"Innate curiosity… Pierre and I are similar because we’re constantly pinging each other where we will read something in our media diet and be like, oh, this would be a great study… It’s about seeing interesting ideas everywhere and having a curiosity about them. That’s what drives me. Really the issue is about execution and not about ideas."

If you were not in academia, what would you be? 

"I started my career as a market researcher, an advertising researcher, and I enjoyed aspects of that work, especially the relationships and learning about consumers… In high school, I did science fairs, though, and I could probably see myself as another type of scientist, maybe like a bench scientist, if not social scientist, because it scratches many of the similar itches. We had this project where we tried to simulate baseball innings using DNA — that was our science fair project, which I thought was pretty cool."

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This article was written by

Oliver Buckley

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing at University of Salford, UK