Author: Krystal Scanlon

For years, the dominant platforms of the internet have treated content moderation as both shield and scalpel — eulogized as “trust and safety,” enforced by a mix of algorithmic blunt force and human discretion, and backed by sprawling bureaucracies tasked with adjudicating whether a buttock or a stray word crosses the invisible line.

Substack, the subscription publishing platform, is taking a different tack. 

Rather than tinkering with the machinery of enforcement, it’s betting that the real problem lies not in the rules, but in the incentives — that a system built around advertising and virality will inevitably reward outrage, and that no amount of moderation will fix that. Its solution? Change the business model, and let trust between writers and readers do the work that moderation never could.

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Advertising industry professionals have been eyeing the creator economy — not only to understand it for their work with clients but also for themselves, as more agency employees consider becoming creators.

Agency-based creators aren’t limited to the creative departments, either. Some employees outside of creative, like one marketing associate who works for a digital agency, have dabbled in becoming creators too. “It turns you into a hybrid,” said the marketing associate. “You’re a copywriter, you’re an art director, you’re an editor.”

In the latest edition of Digiday’s Confessions series, in which we trade anonymity for candor, we hear from this marketing associate and creator about the difficulty of the strictly-defined lanes that exist at agencies, why today’s social media landscape requires more flexibility than in the past and what she wishes the agency world understood about the creator economy.

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