Paris Creator Week is trying to do for creators what Cannes did for film: become the place where deals get made. According to Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy, the gathering opened this week at the Halle de la Villette with about 8,000 industry pros expected — double last year’s crowd — and a fresh market study that puts the global creator economy on a $1.22 trillion path by 2033.

A market that nearly tripled in five years

The study unveiled at the event estimates the global creator economy will hit $217.3 billion in 2026, up 26.2% year over year, after nearly tripling over the last five years. France alone is pegged at $10.1 billion this year (up 23.7% from 2025), ranking seventh worldwide and third in Europe behind the U.K. and Germany, with about 227,000 full-time equivalent jobs tied to the sector. The report says France’s market could more than double to $24.3 billion by 2030.

On the money mix, sponsorships and commercial partnerships now make up 49.8% of the global creator economy, followed by advertising on creator content at 22.7% and paid subscriptions at 13.8%. Advertisers are expected to put in $172.8 billion in 2026 — about 79.5% of total spending — while creators take home an estimated $92.6 billion, or 42.6% of the market.

Built for deals, not fans

Co-founder Marc Lesage-Moretti, a former Goldman Sachs vice president who creates content online as Jokariz, told Variety the event is meant to be “the VivaTech of the creator economy” — a B2B room for creators, platforms, brands, agencies and investors, not a consumer fan fest. Exhibition space has grown fivefold, from 200 to 1,000 square meters, and YouTube alone is taking a 100-square-meter stand. Overseas attendees are expected to account for about 30% of the room, with senior execs from YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, Spotify and SoundCloud on the guest list, plus traditional groups like Banijay and Mediawan.

According to Net Influencer‘s Cecilia Carloni, co-founder and general manager Pierre Allary frames the program as a path “from upload to exit,” with creators making up about a third of attendees and brand marketers another third. He told Net Influencer the first edition was entirely French; this year’s crowd is more than a third international, and he wants an even split next year.

M&A moves to center stage

The Paris Creator Week study counted 70 acquisitions globally in the first half of 2026, up 23% from the same stretch a year earlier, with North America as 64.3% of targets and Europe 27.1%. The event added a full M&A track on how investors value creator-led companies and handle “key man risk” when a business rides on one personality.

Allary told Net Influencer there’s “a lot of M&A going on in the U.S. market” and that “it’s starting in Europe,” pointing to creator-led food and clothing brands, software tools and agencies as what buyers want. Lesage-Moretti told Variety that French podcast company Legend drew a Belgian fund at a €72 million valuation — the kind of deal some people once assumed couldn’t happen because of founder dependence.

Drew Baldwin, head of Prentiss Media and founder of Tubefilter and the Streamy Awards, told Variety creators are still “renting audiences” on social platforms. The ones who figure out how to own that relationship, he said, are the ones who can build real businesses — pointing to names like MrBeast, Dhar Mann and the Sidemen as proof that scale beyond a single feed is possible. Baldwin is also using the Paris stop to launch Creator Kitchen, aimed at putting traditional and new-media executives in the same room.

The takeaway

Coverage from Variety, Net Influencer and roundups such as MisterGeeks paints the same picture: the creator economy is past the “kids in bedrooms” stereotype and into conference halls with M&A tracks, platform C-suites and trillion-dollar forecasts. Whether Paris becomes the Cannes of that world depends on whether those deal rooms keep filling — and whether Europe can turn more one-person brands into companies buyers will actually buy.

Photo: Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, by Fred Romero, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).