What Comes After the Creator Economy?

The internet is done asking everyone to perform.

The creator economy promised that anyone could make money online. In practice, it created a new profession that demands content calendars, audience management, and the exhausting performance of building a personal brand. Most people don’t really want to be creators. Most who try don’t make real money.

But something else is emerging. We’re watching the shift from creator-led businesses to more informal means of making money through curation: where you can earn by participating in conversations, connecting with others, and sharing what you love, without the formality of “being an influencer” or producing high-quality content.

From CEO to Creator to Curator

Traditional businesses required formal structures: incorporation, inventory, employees, overhead. The internet collapsed some of that. Shopify let individuals run e-commerce operations. Substack turned writers into publishers. But these were still businesses in the recognizable sense—you needed a product, a strategy, an operation to run.

The creator economy went further. It let people monetize attention directly. You didn’t need inventory; you needed an audience. Platforms handled distribution. But “creator” quickly calcified into its own job category, complete with managers, sponsorship decks, and burnout. The infrastructure got easier, but the work didn’t.

This is where we are today. Millions of people are trapped between the old model (build a company) and the current one (become a creator). Neither fits how most people actually want to live and work. But the next phase is already here for some, and it’s coming for everyone else.

The Present: Curation as Participation

X’s creator payouts were an early signal. The platform started sharing ad revenue with users who hit engagement thresholds. You didn’t need sponsorships or a business model—you could get paid for posting things people found interesting. The bar for monetization dropped from “build a media business” to “participate in conversations people care about.”

Prediction markets have made this logic explicit. Platforms like Polymarket pay you for being right about future events. You’re expressing judgment, just like you would when posting on social media. It feels like following the news and having opinions, because that’s what it is. The market mechanism turns your attention and analysis into income.

Even meme trading and social tokens push this forward. People make money by being early to cultural moments, by recognizing what will resonate before others do. The “work” is taste and timing, not production.

As Virgil Abloh put it: “Curation is creation.” The act of selecting, filtering, and contextualizing is the creative work. You don’t need to produce from scratch—you need to see clearly and share meaningfully.

The Future: Ambient Earning

With AI companions like Zumi, we’re pushing this further. When AI handles content generation, logistics, and optimization, what’s left for humans? Curation. Direction. Deciding what matters. The scarce input becomes judgment, and that is what gets rewarded.

Why This Matters

This shift changes what “entrepreneurship” means.

For decades, entrepreneurship meant independence: making money without a traditional employer. The gig economy offered a version of this, but gig work still feels like a job. You’re driving, delivering, completing tasks. The work is legible as work; you’re just doing it for an app instead of a boss.

The creator economy offered another version: build an audience, monetize attention. But this required becoming a media company of one. It demanded production, consistency, personal branding. Independence, yes, but also a new set of professional obligations.

Curation-led earning is different. You’re not producing content on a schedule. You’re not completing tasks for a platform. You’re participating in networks and markets that reward your taste, attention, and connections. The “work” dissolves into activities you might do anyway: sharing things you find interesting, expressing opinions, connecting people and ideas.

This isn’t the gig economy—you’re not trading time for money in discrete tasks. It’s not the creator economy—you’re not building an audience or a brand. It’s something more ambient: earning from participation itself.

What This Changes

The threshold for monetization drops dramatically. You don’t need to be a full-time creator or start a formal business. You don’t need high production value or a content strategy. You need taste, attention, and participation in the right networks.

Income becomes more granular. Instead of one salary or a few big sponsorship deals, you might have many small streams: platform payouts for posts that resonate, returns from prediction markets, earnings from curating and connecting.

The definition of value shifts. In a curation-led economy, the scarce resource isn’t labor or even content—it’s judgment. Knowing what matters, what’s good, what will resonate. AI can generate infinite content; it can’t tell you what’s worth paying attention to. Humans remain essential as filters, curators, tastemakers.

Zumi: The Infrastructure for Curation-Led Earning

Zumi is a discovery platform that aggregates opportunities for curation-led income—what might be called “side hustles,” but without the hustle.

Here’s how it works: Zumi learns your taste. Through your interactions, preferences, and the things you naturally pay attention to, it builds a model of what you find interesting, what you’re good at spotting, and where your judgment creates value.

Then it exposes ways to financialize that taste. Zumi surfaces opportunities matched to your specific profile: prediction markets where your knowledge gives you an edge, platforms that reward the kind of content you already share, communities where your connections and curation skills translate into income.

You’re not changing your behavior to fit a platform’s requirements. You’re discovering which platforms already reward what you naturally do. Zumi turns ambient participation into income by connecting your existing taste and attention to the mechanisms that compensate it.

This is the future: not everyone becoming a creator, but everyone’s judgment becoming legible and valuable. Curation as the new creation. Participation as the new production.