For most of her twenties, Mariyah Gerber’s week looked the same. A new city, a new rink, a new audience. She skated professionally for “Disney On Ice,” then for “Royal Caribbean” and “Holiday on Ice” in Europe, logging a decade on tour before COVID shut the shows down. Content creation was not a backup plan.

Today, Mariyah and her husband Peter run a family creator business across Instagram, TikTok, and a family YouTube channel that has grown into their largest platform with more than four million subscribers. Six years in, however, the platform is no longer the story she is most focused on. “I am spending this year focusing on building beyond brands.”

That means one business is shutting down, new ventures are taking shape in private, and an entertainment project called “Show Skaterz” is developing in the background, aimed at converting her skating background and audience into a real push for diverse casting in ice skating entertainment. The creative instinct driving it predates anything she has ever posted.

“I was not the girl who grew up watching YouTubers and aspired to be an influencer,” Mariyah says. “I had no idea that it could even be a job.”

The Management Deal That Made It Real

For about a year, the channel was more experiment than enterprise. Mariyah signed up for creator platforms that connect influencers with brands and picked up sporadic deals during her first pregnancy. The scale was modest.

The shift came after their first son Aiden was born. A management company reached out; they signed, and the size of the opportunities changed. “Once we signed with [the management company], we started getting bigger deals,” Mariyah says. “We were like, ‘Maybe we can actually make this a job.’” The couple hit 100,000 Instagram followers the week Aiden arrived, roughly four years ago.

Today, Mariyah works with both a management company and a PR agency. Deals move through a combined pipeline: a brand or her team makes first contact, a commercial concept is defined and brought to her for approval, she shoots, and the content goes through an edit-and-review cycle before posting.

“I feel like for us, we have had businesses outside of socials for a while,” she says. “However, I do feel like a bulk of our income still comes from brand deals.” The platform has also become a place for more personal stakes. After her husband received his U.S. green card following a three-year application process, Mariyah posted about the experience. “We waited three years for an interview. My husband couldn’t work,” she says, describing the point of sharing it: making something real for audiences who encounter the immigration system only abstractly.

Storytelling, Not Selling

Mariyah manages distinct content across her platforms by a principle she attributes to a creator she follows: “Your audience is your boss.” She applies it as a sorting mechanism. Not all content goes to all platforms. Placement depends on how previous content has performed and how she reads each audience’s expectations and tolerance.

“If there are certain things where I know this is more aligned with my TikTok audience or this is more aligned with my Instagram audience, that’s how I pick,” she says. “If you want people to follow you on multiple platforms, you have to [sometimes] offer different things so that it’s worth it for them.”

The same audience-first thinking is what pushed her to close The Match Me Boutique, a clothing business she launched and is now winding down. The misalignment was not with her values but with her actual relationship to her audience.

“There’s a difference between a content creator and an influencer,” she says. “I would put myself more so in the category of content creation, where I like to tell stories or relate to my audience in more of a storytelling format versus selling them on clothes and products. That’s not really my niche.”

The diagnosis became the policy. “I started a business,” she says of The Match Me Boutique. “And when I thought about it, it wasn’t aligned with my audience.” The replacement criterion is now clear: “If I am going to launch a business, it would need to be something that is organic and aligned with my audience.”

The TV Show Pitch Is the Point of the Whole Platform

What passes that test is “Show Skaterz.” Mariyah has been thinking about diversity in figure skating entertainment for longer than she has been making content, and she sees the two as connected rather than parallel tracks.

“Growing up in the figure skating space, I really am passionate about bringing more diversity to ice skating in general,” she says. “In order for there to be more diversity in figure skating and for years and years to come, we’re gonna need a TV show; we’re gonna need a movie.”

The casting problem, as she describes it, is that decision-makers in ice skating entertainment tend to work from familiar lists. “The people who are in those rooms, the last thing they’re thinking about sometimes is diversity,” she says. “They’re just thinking about creating something that has to do with ice skating, and they have these usual suspects of people that they hire.”

Social media, in her framing, is not the destination. It is the credential that earns the meeting. “Content creation has been a great way for me to open up a door,” she says, “but now I’m like, ‘Okay, now that there’s a crack in the door, I need to see if I can take it further.’”

For Mariyah, “any kind of step forward would feel like a win.” The underlying ambition is larger. Given unlimited resources, she would build a touring or stationary show running every year with a diverse cast drawn from across performance disciplines. “I think something like that would be so cool.”

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The Long Career Is Built on Showing Up When You’re Not Winning

After six years in a career she did not plan and could not have anticipated, Mariyah is running several things simultaneously: the brand deal pipeline that still provides a bulk of her income, new businesses calibrated to her audience that she is not yet ready to discuss publicly, and a longer entertainment bet with no guaranteed timeline.

This year she also started taking breaks from posting, something she had not done before. “You come back almost refreshed,” she says. “Outside noise can be so loud, and you don’t even realize.” The practical advice that follows: meditation, regulating the nervous system, setting defined hours for when going online is permitted.

The framework she offers: “Sometimes, virality shouldn’t be the goal,” she says. “You want to work backwards versus just creating to create.”

For anyone measuring their beginning against someone else’s visible progress, she has the answer that also describes her own relationship to what comes next.

“It’s easy to look at other people’s lives and get discouraged,” she says. “But trust and believe. If you have a dream and a vision that was put on your heart for a reason, just keep going.”

Photo credit: Amanda Riley Photo

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