Six years ago, Ssonia Ong was a trauma counsellor watching a stranger lip sync to a Disney song in his living room and wondering why she couldn't stop watching. Today she has 20 million followers across platforms, three multi-year brand partnerships, and a product launch on the horizon. She didn't stumble into it. She engineered it — deliberately, from day one, with a business strategy she could articulate before she posted her second video.
Her intentionality as a creator is the thing worth paying attention to. Because it's become the norm, not the exception.
Recently, I joined an event in Vancouver on the state of creator-brand partnerships, presented by Collabstr. Ong joined Ali Adab, partner and chief business officer at Fixated — a creator management and infrastructure company that's spent the last two years acquiring its way toward a one-stop ecosystem for top-tier talent — with marketing and growth executive Ada Slivinski moderating. The room was senior, the conversation was specific, and what emerged over the course of an hour was a fairly clear picture of an industry that has moved well past its influencer-marketing origins and into something that looks a lot more like robust media infrastructure.
Adab framed the shift plainly. When he started working in this space, YouTube was the only viable platform, and monetization was largely about ad revenue share. What's followed is a significant expansion: short-form dominance, algorithmic audience building, platform diversification, and now another layer — fan monetization platforms, content syndication networks, equity-based brand deals, and creator-native streaming content landing in Netflix top-10 lists. Case in point: Two Fixated creators had top-10 Netflix shows recently.
Fixated's own model illustrates how far the infrastructure thinking has gone. Beyond traditional talent management, they operate a network of 25,000 clippers — creators who take the strongest moments from brand integrations and redistribute them across their own channels. The pitch to brands: you get the primary integration, plus tens of millions of additional views across a distribution network that rivals legacy media's native output. "Some of those companies are barely getting that many views on their native videos," Ali noted, "but the amount of their content being shared across Twitter and other platforms is massive."
The Canadian context complicates the picture in ways that don't always get surfaced. Ong was direct about it: TikTok and Instagram don't pay Canadian creators. YouTube and Facebook do. That structural reality means brand partnerships function as primary revenue, not supplementary income, for creators at her level. The economics look different here than they do south of the border, and strategies borrowed wholesale from the American playbook tend to miss that.
Platform diversification, for Ong, wasn't a proactive strategy — it was forced by TikTok uncertainty. She describes it now as the best thing that happened to her, because it produced a clearer picture of what each platform actually does. TikTok is volume. Instagram converts. YouTube pays. Each one is a distinct asset serving a distinct function, and the instinct to treat them as interchangeable is a mistake creators are still making.
Adab pointed to a few less-obvious revenue pockets that are generating real returns: Spotify video for kids creators, whose audiences have been redirected there since YouTube is blocked in most schools; Microsoft's MSN and Edge surfaces, which are quietly delivering significant monthly revenue for creators with older-skewing audiences; and the full range of super-fan monetization platforms — Passes, Fanfix, Patreon-style subscription layers — where some creators are generating six figures monthly from a small, highly engaged base. The point isn't that any one of these is the answer. It's that the monetization stack has become genuinely complex, and the creators treating it that way are pulling ahead.
On AI, both speakers were measured. The consensus: useful for workflow, insufficient as a substitute for the thing that actually drives audience growth. "People follow people," Ong said. "It takes years to build the kind of following where people trust you." The unresolved question is what platforms do as AI-generated content scales — policies vary widely, and no one knows yet how that volume affects consumption of creator-native material. It's worth watching.
The brand-side gap that kept surfacing was simpler: most brands are still evaluating creator partnerships against reach and conversion metrics, which misses the actual value on offer. Ong put it directly: "Brands that invest in relationships with creators have access to something that doesn't show up in a sales number." Adab's version was more operational — hire creators onto your teams, because understanding how the audience relationship actually functions isn't something you can brief your way into. As Slivinski framed it in closing, the human story is what transcends platform. Always has been.
The creator economy has infrastructure now. Distribution networks, monetization stacks, talent management ecosystems, streaming deals. What it still lacks, on the brand side, is a measurement framework that matches the asset being purchased. That's the gap. And closing it is probably where the next several years of value get created.