Arizona State University will enroll its first Content Creation majors this fall. The bachelor’s degree, housed in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaches video and podcast production, audience analytics, and personal branding, and its capstone requires students to build a following on a platform of their choice and show measurable growth before they graduate. It is the newest entry in a quiet wave: three content creation bachelor’s degrees launched in the fall of 2023 alone, and Syracuse University opened the nation’s first academic center for the creator economy last September.
These programs are easy to mock. Nobody needs a diploma to go viral, and the MrBeasts, Ms. Rachels, and Alix Earles of the world never majored in it.
The story is the scale of the need. An entire economy now runs on this breed of entertainment, personality-driven video built to capture and hold attention in the feed: creator companies staffed like studios, brands building creator teams of their own, agencies in between. All of it is thirsty for people who understand how it works, and until now those people were trained nowhere. The degrees are for them, not for the stars.
One Face on Camera, a Company Underneath
The organization behind MrBeast, onte of the largest creator business on earth, spans Beast Industries, Feastables, Beast Philanthropy, and Viewstats. A Net Influencer reconstruction of public employment records counts roughly 370 people working there today, out of more than 1,100 who have passed through over the company’s history.
The most common job title in the MrBeast organization is not influencer. It is producer, followed by assistant editor and camera operator. Barely a third of the jobs today involve making content at all; the rest sit in operations, finance, engineering, marketing, and HR, the jobs of a mid-size media company. One face carries the channel. The rest is a company, and every seat in it demands fluency in a breed of entertainment nobody was teaching.
The pattern holds at every scale. “Hiring people was the turning point when my work started to feel like a small business,” says the creator Ryan Kelly. Creators stall at the point where growth means management, and the successful ones recruit seasoned executives, because operating experience is the one thing an audience cannot teach. The trade runs both ways: the executives arrive with the operating experience and must develop a fluency in the attention economy that no previous job taught them. A creator, at scale, is a payroll.
Attention Is the Contest
Creator companies staff for attention natively, because attention is the business. Beast Industries spent June recruiting a Head of TikTok for all MrBeast ventures, and the posting’s requirements measure how thin the qualified pool is: six to ten years running TikTok or short-form social for a major creator or consumer brand, with team management and proven channel growth. TikTok has been available in the United States for eight years. The company is asking for someone who has held a job almost as long as the job has existed.
Brands are bidding for the same thin pool, in public. The job postings of the last two months read like a roll call of the consumer economy: Unilever building a global influencer function, and Cadillac, e.l.f. Beauty, Temu, SharkNinja, Rivian, Instacart, Hilton, Campbell’s, SEGA, and Warner Music Group all hiring creator and influencer roles, with OnePay offering $240,000 to $290,000 for a Head of Social and Influencer Marketing. These are not media companies; they are car makers, soup makers, and hotels, and a $290,000 salary for social media is what scarcity looks like. Ishveen Jolly, founder of OpenSponsorship, summarizes where the market has landed: no brand is skipping influencer marketing anymore; the only question left is whether to do it in-house or through a third party.
The logic driving this is the one we mapped in June. Attention lives in feeds, content spoils in hours, and no marketing department can produce at feed velocity, so companies buy the capacity from creators. But the buying side is itself skilled work: sourcing, vetting, briefing, negotiating, measuring. Gabe Gordon of the agency Reach watched that work move onto payrolls, with large companies writing standing job descriptions for roles that used to be one-off agency engagements. Marketing has run this play before: the tech sector began pulling agency work in-house around 2013, starting with media buying. What is moving in-house now is the entire discipline of manufactured attention.
Nobody Trained This Payroll
“Influencer marketing is kind of stuck in most brands because they cannot hire,” says Aurélie Sauthier, who runs the influencer agency Maiden. The discipline does not scale like software, she notes. It scales like staffing, and the staff does not exist.
Jeremy Barbara, a consultant who builds influencer programs inside brands, prices the gap in time: hiring one in-house influencer marketer takes about six months, then three to six months of testing before anything works, roughly a year from decision to functioning program. The brands that call him keep arriving with the same opening line: we do not know where to start.
Run-of-the-mill marketing degrees have not improved the talent pipeline. Jacob Hiler, a marketing professor at Ohio University, says the standard curriculum has barely moved since his own student days: still the four P’s, consumer behavior, market research. Kyle Hjelmeseth and Kofo Jolaoso, who run the talent firm G&B Digital Management and the education venture College of Influence, dated the gap precisely: until this year, students received virtually no education about influencer marketing, despite its becoming a giant share of the digital marketing mix. An economy-wide hiring need, met by a syllabus written before the feed existed. Markets do not leave gaps like that open.
The Tuition Was Already Being Paid
The paradox of creator education is that the information is free, and people pay anyway. One course business has put more than 30,000 students through its programs. One creator community charges $5,000 a year. Talent firms now run mandatory monthly workshops for their own rosters, and the YouTube franchise Spy Ninjas is building what it calls a creator class, “essentially like a creator university,” where recruits are paid while they learn. Every technique these programs teach is a search away. What buyers pay for was never the information. It is structure, mentorship, and a signal they can show someone else.
That signal is becoming formal. The industry has started manufacturing credentials for itself: BBB National Programs is building an influencer certification, digital training with an exam and a credential at the end, and the EU, Australia, and India already run formal creator training and certification. An industry writing its own exams has stopped debating whether the training matters. It is deciding who the certifier of record will be, and the universities are slowly noticing that trade groups, foreign regulators, and the creators themselves are encroaching on turf that was historically theirs. They have been responding in ascending order of prestige: a community college certificate in 2022, three bachelor’s degrees at small colleges in 2023, a Texas public university in 2024, and the flagship journalism schools in 2026.
What Film School Actually Sold
Higher education has run this exact sequence before. On February 6, 1929, the University of Southern California opened a course called Introduction to Photoplay, built with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with Douglas Fairbanks giving the first lecture and a founding faculty that read like a studio call sheet: Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck. USC’s own history records that the “crazy idea was the talk of Hollywood.” Three years later, USC granted America’s first bachelor’s degree in cinema, in 1932.
Film school never minted stars. The great directors still come from everywhere, and the degree was never selling stardom anyway. It sold three things, and all three worked: standardized training for the crew, a hiring pipeline for the studios, and a respectable reason for parents to fund a child’s entry into a disreputable industry.
The two clocks nearly match. Film: one course in 1929, a degree in 1932. Creators: a first-of-its-kind influencer course at USC in 2019, the first bachelor’s degrees in 2023, the flagship journalism schools in 2026. The sequence is not similar. It is the same sequence, on almost the same clock.
The wave will produce failures, the way credential markets always do. East Carolina’s much-publicized MrBeast credentialing partnership never launched, and Columbia College Chicago is folding its early social media major into a generic marketing degree. Neither is evidence against the trend. It is how a real market separates winners from losers.
The Universities Need This Too
What makes institutionalization stick is that the need runs both directions. Higher education is under a microscope on return on investment, enrollment is the revenue line, and journalism schools have spent a decade watching their traditional destination industry shrink. For Cronkite and its peers, the creator economy is not a curiosity. It is a lifeline.
Nobody sits closer to that calculation than Mark J. Lodato, who spent 14 years at Arizona State’s Cronkite School and now, as dean of Syracuse’s Newhouse School, is building the rival: a Center for the Creator Economy led jointly with the business school, with a minor open to any major on campus. He describes the demand engine plainly: students argue they do not need college because they can earn as creators, while their parents very much want the diploma. The standoff resolves in the university’s favor. The student gets the industry, the parent gets the degree, and the school gets the enrollment. His warning to his own sector is blunt: the creator economy will keep pushing higher education to adapt, and if it fails, the industry will pass it by.
The Filters Are Coming
The industry built these jobs on its own. The degrees are the outside world catching up: the institutions that certify professions have decided this one qualifies. The sequence from here is predictable because it has run before: standardized titles, then salary bands, then credential filters, then campus recruiting. No job posting anywhere requires a degree in content creation yet, and none will for years. That is what early looks like. The jobs arrive first. The filters follow. And at the end of the sequence, one school’s name becomes the default line on a résumé. That is what certifier of record means, and the contest for it opened this fall.
The graduates will go, overwhelmingly, to work for creators and for the brands chasing them. Twenty years from now, nobody will ask why anyone would major in content creation. For the jobs that fill the org chart under the face, the strategists, campaign managers, and producers, the question will point the other way: why would we hire someone without it. The studios that called film school a crazy idea spent the next century hiring from it. The companies laughing now will do the same, and sooner.
Nii A. Ahene is the founder and managing director of Net Influencer, a website dedicated to offering insights into the influencer marketing industry. Together with its newsletter, Influencer Weekly, Net Influencer provides news, commentary, and analysis of the events shaping the creator and influencer marketing space. Through interviews with startups, influencers, brands, and platforms, Nii and his team explore how influencer marketing is being effectively used to benefit businesses and personal brands alike.
Arizona State University will enroll its first Content Creation majors this fall. The bachelor’s degree, housed in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaches video and podcast production, audience analytics, and personal branding, and its capstone requires students to build a following on a platform of their choice and show measurable growth before they graduate. It is the newest entry in a quiet wave: three content creation bachelor’s degrees launched in the fall of 2023 alone, and Syracuse University opened the nation’s first academic center for the creator economy last September.
These programs are easy to mock. Nobody needs a diploma to go viral, and the MrBeasts, Ms. Rachels, and Alix Earles of the world never majored in it.
The story is the scale of the need. An entire economy now runs on this breed of entertainment, personality-driven video built to capture and hold attention in the feed: creator companies staffed like studios, brands building creator teams of their own, agencies in between. All of it is thirsty for people who understand how it works, and until now those people were trained nowhere. The degrees are for them, not for the stars.
One Face on Camera, a Company Underneath
The organization behind MrBeast, onte of the largest creator business on earth, spans Beast Industries, Feastables, Beast Philanthropy, and Viewstats. A Net Influencer reconstruction of public employment records counts roughly 370 people working there today, out of more than 1,100 who have passed through over the company’s history.
The most common job title in the MrBeast organization is not influencer. It is producer, followed by assistant editor and camera operator. Barely a third of the jobs today involve making content at all; the rest sit in operations, finance, engineering, marketing, and HR, the jobs of a mid-size media company. One face carries the channel. The rest is a company, and every seat in it demands fluency in a breed of entertainment nobody was teaching.
The pattern holds at every scale. “Hiring people was the turning point when my work started to feel like a small business,” says the creator Ryan Kelly. Creators stall at the point where growth means management, and the successful ones recruit seasoned executives, because operating experience is the one thing an audience cannot teach. The trade runs both ways: the executives arrive with the operating experience and must develop a fluency in the attention economy that no previous job taught them. A creator, at scale, is a payroll.
Attention Is the Contest
Creator companies staff for attention natively, because attention is the business. Beast Industries spent June recruiting a Head of TikTok for all MrBeast ventures, and the posting’s requirements measure how thin the qualified pool is: six to ten years running TikTok or short-form social for a major creator or consumer brand, with team management and proven channel growth. TikTok has been available in the United States for eight years. The company is asking for someone who has held a job almost as long as the job has existed.
Brands are bidding for the same thin pool, in public. The job postings of the last two months read like a roll call of the consumer economy: Unilever building a global influencer function, and Cadillac, e.l.f. Beauty, Temu, SharkNinja, Rivian, Instacart, Hilton, Campbell’s, SEGA, and Warner Music Group all hiring creator and influencer roles, with OnePay offering $240,000 to $290,000 for a Head of Social and Influencer Marketing. These are not media companies; they are car makers, soup makers, and hotels, and a $290,000 salary for social media is what scarcity looks like. Ishveen Jolly, founder of OpenSponsorship, summarizes where the market has landed: no brand is skipping influencer marketing anymore; the only question left is whether to do it in-house or through a third party.
The logic driving this is the one we mapped in June. Attention lives in feeds, content spoils in hours, and no marketing department can produce at feed velocity, so companies buy the capacity from creators. But the buying side is itself skilled work: sourcing, vetting, briefing, negotiating, measuring. Gabe Gordon of the agency Reach watched that work move onto payrolls, with large companies writing standing job descriptions for roles that used to be one-off agency engagements. Marketing has run this play before: the tech sector began pulling agency work in-house around 2013, starting with media buying. What is moving in-house now is the entire discipline of manufactured attention.
Nobody Trained This Payroll
“Influencer marketing is kind of stuck in most brands because they cannot hire,” says Aurélie Sauthier, who runs the influencer agency Maiden. The discipline does not scale like software, she notes. It scales like staffing, and the staff does not exist.
Jeremy Barbara, a consultant who builds influencer programs inside brands, prices the gap in time: hiring one in-house influencer marketer takes about six months, then three to six months of testing before anything works, roughly a year from decision to functioning program. The brands that call him keep arriving with the same opening line: we do not know where to start.
Run-of-the-mill marketing degrees have not improved the talent pipeline. Jacob Hiler, a marketing professor at Ohio University, says the standard curriculum has barely moved since his own student days: still the four P’s, consumer behavior, market research. Kyle Hjelmeseth and Kofo Jolaoso, who run the talent firm G&B Digital Management and the education venture College of Influence, dated the gap precisely: until this year, students received virtually no education about influencer marketing, despite its becoming a giant share of the digital marketing mix. An economy-wide hiring need, met by a syllabus written before the feed existed. Markets do not leave gaps like that open.
The Tuition Was Already Being Paid
The paradox of creator education is that the information is free, and people pay anyway. One course business has put more than 30,000 students through its programs. One creator community charges $5,000 a year. Talent firms now run mandatory monthly workshops for their own rosters, and the YouTube franchise Spy Ninjas is building what it calls a creator class, “essentially like a creator university,” where recruits are paid while they learn. Every technique these programs teach is a search away. What buyers pay for was never the information. It is structure, mentorship, and a signal they can show someone else.
That signal is becoming formal. The industry has started manufacturing credentials for itself: BBB National Programs is building an influencer certification, digital training with an exam and a credential at the end, and the EU, Australia, and India already run formal creator training and certification. An industry writing its own exams has stopped debating whether the training matters. It is deciding who the certifier of record will be, and the universities are slowly noticing that trade groups, foreign regulators, and the creators themselves are encroaching on turf that was historically theirs. They have been responding in ascending order of prestige: a community college certificate in 2022, three bachelor’s degrees at small colleges in 2023, a Texas public university in 2024, and the flagship journalism schools in 2026.
What Film School Actually Sold
Higher education has run this exact sequence before. On February 6, 1929, the University of Southern California opened a course called Introduction to Photoplay, built with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with Douglas Fairbanks giving the first lecture and a founding faculty that read like a studio call sheet: Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck. USC’s own history records that the “crazy idea was the talk of Hollywood.” Three years later, USC granted America’s first bachelor’s degree in cinema, in 1932.
Film school never minted stars. The great directors still come from everywhere, and the degree was never selling stardom anyway. It sold three things, and all three worked: standardized training for the crew, a hiring pipeline for the studios, and a respectable reason for parents to fund a child’s entry into a disreputable industry.
The two clocks nearly match. Film: one course in 1929, a degree in 1932. Creators: a first-of-its-kind influencer course at USC in 2019, the first bachelor’s degrees in 2023, the flagship journalism schools in 2026. The sequence is not similar. It is the same sequence, on almost the same clock.
The wave will produce failures, the way credential markets always do. East Carolina’s much-publicized MrBeast credentialing partnership never launched, and Columbia College Chicago is folding its early social media major into a generic marketing degree. Neither is evidence against the trend. It is how a real market separates winners from losers.
The Universities Need This Too
What makes institutionalization stick is that the need runs both directions. Higher education is under a microscope on return on investment, enrollment is the revenue line, and journalism schools have spent a decade watching their traditional destination industry shrink. For Cronkite and its peers, the creator economy is not a curiosity. It is a lifeline.
Nobody sits closer to that calculation than Mark J. Lodato, who spent 14 years at Arizona State’s Cronkite School and now, as dean of Syracuse’s Newhouse School, is building the rival: a Center for the Creator Economy led jointly with the business school, with a minor open to any major on campus. He describes the demand engine plainly: students argue they do not need college because they can earn as creators, while their parents very much want the diploma. The standoff resolves in the university’s favor. The student gets the industry, the parent gets the degree, and the school gets the enrollment. His warning to his own sector is blunt: the creator economy will keep pushing higher education to adapt, and if it fails, the industry will pass it by.
The Filters Are Coming
The industry built these jobs on its own. The degrees are the outside world catching up: the institutions that certify professions have decided this one qualifies. The sequence from here is predictable because it has run before: standardized titles, then salary bands, then credential filters, then campus recruiting. No job posting anywhere requires a degree in content creation yet, and none will for years. That is what early looks like. The jobs arrive first. The filters follow. And at the end of the sequence, one school’s name becomes the default line on a résumé. That is what certifier of record means, and the contest for it opened this fall.
The graduates will go, overwhelmingly, to work for creators and for the brands chasing them. Twenty years from now, nobody will ask why anyone would major in content creation. For the jobs that fill the org chart under the face, the strategists, campaign managers, and producers, the question will point the other way: why would we hire someone without it. The studios that called film school a crazy idea spent the next century hiring from it. The companies laughing now will do the same, and sooner.
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