Have We Reached the End of an Era for Online Celebrities?

Besides these trends, what can we expect from the internet in 2026? According to one person with a front-row seat to one of the biggest online success stories of recent years, it’s about to take a turn away from the environment that made people like MrBeast and PewDiePie international celebrities. Making the argument is Reed Duchscher, a talent manager whose clients have included the aforementioned MrBeast, which gives this assertion more gravity than you might expect.

Duchscher voiced this opinion in comments made to Dan Whateley of Business Insider. His prediction is that the future of online celebrity won’t involve widely popular figures but rather the online creators who find audiences in more focused spaces.

“It’s much easier to build businesses when you have a hyper-niche, scaled audience because the product makes a lot more sense,” he told Business Insider. He also pointed to social media algorithms that focus on more specialized videos and posts than more general interest ones. And there’s also the matter of how those algorithms are constantly evolving: The hyper-granular way that MrBeast sought to understand the inner workings of the YouTube algorithm may no longer be a viable path to stardom.

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There are other reasons to heed Duchscher’s comments about the future of online celebrity. Perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is the pending spinoff of TikTok’s U.S. operations. Will that be a seamless transition, or will the kind of videos that found an audience under TikTok’s current management no longer be as viable?

There’s also the growth of AI-generated content, something that has made it harder to find quality material online, regardless of your preferred platform. Predicting the future of the internet is never easy, but Duchscher’s comments sound more accurate than not. It’s something to keep in mind as social media evolves over the months to come.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…