Before They Called It the Creator Economy, I Was Arming the Rebels

I’ve been listening to Marc and Ben’s podcast about the evolution of media, and I have to smile. It’s like hearing brilliant war correspondents analyzing a battle from a safe distance, a battle I was fighting in the trenches back when the internet still made screeching sounds to connect. They’re right, of course. The world has changed. The old gods of media are mostly dead, and the new ones are born on platforms we built. But for some of us, this isn’t a new revelation. It’s the validation of a playbook we were writing in real-time.

Working alongside Craig Newmark on Craigslist, we learned the power of simple software to enable powerful communities. At the same time, we were both active on message boards like The WELL, which demonstrated that decentralized, community-run boards were incredibly effective engines for communication, learning, and entertainment. That was the insight that gave me my direction: to build software platforms that empower average people to share their worlds directly with their fans. It has been my life’s long work.

Later, when I founded Buzznet, which would become SpinMedia, we weaponized this insight. The idea was simple, yet radical for the mid-2000s: what if the fans, the passionate ones, were the media? We built a portfolio of over 30 web communities not by hiring a legion of journalists, but by empowering the most passionate users to create content—effectively giving birth to the model we now call the ‘influencer.’

That’s how we ended up at the center of cultural moments the mainstream couldn’t yet see. We changed the media landscape forever with SpinMedia.  We platformed a firecracker of a personality named Jeffery Star and an entire music scene that the legacy media dismissed. The Emo movement, with bands like Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and My Chemical Romance, was a subculture built on raw, unfiltered emotion. Rolling Stone didn’t get it, but we gave them platforms like PureVolume and AbsolutePunk, and they exploded.

It’s also how we discovered a sixteen-year-old assistant to Paris Hilton named Kim Kardashian, not through an agent, but through our own community’s obsession. We built and ran the Kardashian family’s blogs and social media before “Keeping Up” was even a concept. Our insight wasn’t a gut feeling; it was based on first-party data. We saw the comments, the astronomical engagement on her photos, and we knew she was a supernova in the making.

As we watched this new form of celebrity gossip exploding, we made a strategic move to dominate the space. We launched Celebuzz and acquired a network of over 20 leading celebrity blogs. At our peak, the SpinMedia Entertainment Group, which included Celebuzz, was a dominant force, reaching over 100 million unique visitors a month and becoming a top 10 comScore-ranked entertainment news property. We didn’t just participate in the celebrity gossip narrative on the internet; for a time, we owned it.

Why did it all work? It comes down to a few core principles that Marc and Ben are talking about today.

First, authenticity over everything. I have always found that true authenticity comes from the edges of society, not the middle. What moves culture today are the new, authentic ideas found on a random Reddit thread, a GitHub repo, a niche podcast, or a deep-cut YouTube channel. Hollywood has lost its importance as a source of new ideas; it’s mostly just looking to monetize old franchises and safe bets. If you want real authenticity, you have to go looking for it on the fringes. That’s precisely why the kids in the Emo scene connected so deeply—they wanted artists who screamed their insecurities into a microphone. It’s why Jeffery Star, who was pure, unapologetic Jeffery, built a kingdom. It’s why Kim’s early appeal was her accessibility. That rawness, that “uncomfortably unusual” quality that Ben ascribed to Trump, is what builds a true connection with an audience in this new world. It’s the opposite of the polished, media-trained image that old media projects.

Second, drama is the engine. In a world of infinite content, you need to be interesting. You need to create what Marc calls “heightened drama.” When working with Ashton Kutcher at Katalyst as President of Digital, I learned so many unique insights that Ashton had on social media, entertainment, and storytelling. He was a master of many things, but one that amazed me was his deep understanding of creating improvisational theater on the streets for Punk’d. We made a whole YouTube Channel called Thrash Lab which was all about finding dramatic stories and ideas that could be entertainment or software. It reinforced the idea that Kim Kardashian’s rise wasn’t just about a TV show; it was a masterclass in turning life into a movie, a concept Neal Gabler wrote about in “Life the Movie” long before the first iPhone.

Third, go direct or go home. The most profound shift is the death of the middleman. The internet allows for a direct, unmediated relationship between the creator and the audience. At Buzznet, we didn’t need a journalist to tell us if a band was good. We could see it in the passion of their fans. We built our own network because we knew that relying on traditional media was a losing game. Their business model was fundamentally at odds with the decentralized nature of the internet.

So, when I hear the discussion today about the crisis of authority in media and the rise of the creator, I nod in recognition. This isn’t a theoretical exercise for me. It’s the story of my career. From helping to name Craigslist and watching it dismantle the newspaper business model, to building a social media company that gave a voice to the misunderstood, I’ve seen firsthand how technology empowers the individual and disrupts the established order.

The playbook is out there for everyone to see now. The question is, who has the courage to use it? The old guard is still clinging to the wreckage, and many in the new guard are still afraid to truly embrace the chaos and the power of the individual. But the future belongs to the authentic, the dramatic, and the direct. It always has. The rest of the world is just finally catching up.

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