Don't just pay creators - invest in them

The 5x advantage of the right-wing digital media machine will not be solved by the standard Democratic playbook of hiring consultants. We can't just pay our creators; we must invest in them.

There has been a dawning realization in Democratic politics that the right wing has come to dominate digital media — especially long-form digital media like podcasts and their accompanying videos — and that something must be done about this.

The problem is that there is no consensus yet on what the “something” should be.

And the even more glaring problem is that the current leading contender for the “something” is for Democratic power players to run their usual playbook, but with more money: hire very expensive consultants who say they can solve the problem. In the context of digital and social media, this will mean paying political consultants even larger sums of money so they can pay actual influencers much smaller amounts of money to make specific pieces of content — which is exactly what Democratic political orgs have done for the last 5-8 years.

It will not work. And it runs contrary to the approach the far right has used so successfully.

Why? Let’s unpack the deeper problem here — and understand that the real solution is to invest in our creators rather than transacting with them.

The right wing approach: The far right has spent between $500 million and $1 billion over the last 12 years, poured into entities like Turning Point, PragerU, CPAC, and the Daily Wire, to turn them into influencer and content factories. Much of the funding has come from some of the biggest fortunes on the far right: Mercer, DeVos, Koch, Thiel, et al. Hundreds of creators have received grants, seed money, training, and further amplification and cross-pollination so they can build larger content engines — along with fan cons, live shows and events, etc. Absolutely nothing like this exists on the pro-democracy side.

The result is what Media Matters just laid out in a devastatingly comprehensive new research report — the far right has a 4-5x audience advantage in digital media, with more than 80% of the top shows tilting right, including 9 of the top 10.

The Democratic approach: On the center-to-left side of the spectrum, the approach has been much more focused on short-term transactions.

Here is what typically happens: A party or a campaign or a super PAC will pay $100,000 to a consulting firm that claims to have expertise at “influencer marketing.” Then the firm will take anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 of those funds to pay actual pro-democracy creators to make specific pieces of content or to do short-term gigs for an election season (the rest of the money goes to the firm’s overhead and profits).

The creators are happy to get paid, but the payments later dry up — often literally the day after Election Day. The content does well, but it is not part of building anything bigger: it’s a set of tweets, or TikToks, or Instagram Reels, all inherently ephemeral. The creators are not getting paid to start shows, build audiences, or build companies that can monetize content and be self-sustaining.

If a left-leaning creator manages to build a longer-form show, it’s usually self-funded — which either means (a) 1-3 years of painstakingly building an audience, or (b) having enough money (say, $5000 a month) to pay for help with production and promotion to build an audience faster. We don’t have time for option (a); we need to build these shows immediately, so they can be ready in time for 2026 and 2028. And most creators, even successful ones, don’t have enough resources for option (b).

The left pays creators for posts. The right pays creators to build larger content machines.

The left pays a creator for a single bespoke item. The right has built creator factories, churning out content at industrial scale.

The left builds sandcastles. The right has built real foundations and edifices.

The left transacts with its creators. The right invests in theirs.

The left sees its creators as mere “influencers” — and uses that frowned-upon word. The right sees its creators as entrepreneurs and leaders.

Throwing money at the problem, the wrong way and the right way: So herein lies the issue: even if Democratic orgs suddenly spend 10 times as much on creators, it will not really matter unless they start spending it differently. Spending $1 million with an “influencer marketing” firm rather than $100,000 will definitely get a lot more posts, and it will have an impact — but it will not do anything to change the bigger-picture disparity in digital media.

If 80% of the digital media world skews to the right, will it really matter that Democrats paid for a few more tweets and short videos?

What we need to do is to stop just paying for posts — and start building shows.

Start a show with the right talent — hosts who are proven experts at creating viral social content (whether native digital creators, or mainstream media figures or politicians or celebs who have serious social chops), producers and promoters and ad sales brokers — and it can start generating advertising revenue and become profitable within a matter of months (but it needs financial support to get to that point). That show, once established, is worth far, far more than a series of posts. The show can generate far more content, platform far more people, and generate far more impact.

And no, this is not a “long game” approach that will take a decade to pay off. Shows that are started in the next few months can be profitable, self-sustaining, with large audiences, within 3-12 months — giving plenty of time to move the needle in the campaign season for the November 2026 midterms.

Finally, this is not to say that the paid messaging campaigns should necessarily be eliminated — it is to say that, at the very least, we should be doing both. If more funds are going to be allocated to digital media, there should be plenty of resources for larger “influencer” campaigns as well as investing in the big stars and big shows we need on our side.

The right investments, made right now, would allow Democrats to win next year and to build a mightier megaphone that would put us in much stronger position in 2028 and for decades to come, rather than getting drowned out by the sheer volume of the right-wing machine.

Are we ready to change course — to start doing things differently? Or are we going to keep doing the same thing, the same way, just with more money — failing more expensively?