Creator Monetization / What Is Coming Next

The next way to make money online is live retail, and almost nobody is ready for it

Everyone asking how to make money online is still looking at sponsored posts and affiliate links. Meanwhile a wave that already reshaped shopping across Asia is arriving here: selling real products, live, to the audience already watching you.

By Vince Dwayne, Founder & CEO, Searchlight Social · Updated June 2026 · 8 min read

If you want to make money online as a creator, the traditional answers are sponsored posts, brand deals, and affiliate marketing. Those still work, though sponsored deals are getting harder for smaller creators to land. The channel most people are missing is live shopping, which means selling products in real time during a livestream, with your audience buying on the spot. It already dominates shopping in much of Asia, it is growing fast in the US, and it rewards engaged audiences over big ones.

I get asked the same question constantly. Some version of: “Vince, how do I actually make money online?” And almost every time, the person asking has already decided what the answer is before I open my mouth. They think it is sponsored posts, or a rebrand into something more marketable, or affiliate marketing. Those are the three lanes everybody knows, so those are the three lanes everybody fights over.

Here is the thing. Those lanes are real, and I am not going to tell you to abandon them. But they are crowded, and one of them is quietly closing for the people who need it most. What almost nobody asking me that question has noticed is the wave coming up behind all three of them, and it is going to be bigger than any of them. So let me tell you what it is, where it came from, and why your audience is already standing exactly where it is going to land.

The three lanes everyone already knows

Before the new thing, let me be fair to the old things, because the right answer is usually “add a lane,” not “burn the others down.”

• Sponsored posts and brand deals

  Still real, but getting harder for small creators

  A brand pays you to post about their product. This is the lane everyone dreams about, and it still pays well at the top. But here is the honest part: for smaller creators, sponsored brand deals are getting harder and harder to land. Brands have gotten more selective and more data-driven about who they pay, and the budget is concentrating toward proven performers. If you are a small creator waiting for brand deals to be your income, you may be waiting a long time. That is exactly why the new lane matters so much for you specifically.

• Affiliate marketing

  Reliable, but it leaks the moment

  You share a link, someone buys later, you get a commission. It works, and it scales without a brand having to choose you first, which is its real advantage. But affiliate marketing has a structural leak: it relies on a follower seeing your content, feeling interested, and then acting on a link at some later moment, often somewhere else, after the spark has cooled. You are counting on the purchase happening away from you and after the fact. A lot of interest evaporates in that gap.

• Rebrands and repositioning

  Useful, but not actually an income stream

  Plenty of creators, when they ask how to make money, are really asking whether they should rebrand into a more commercial niche. Sometimes that is the right move. But a rebrand is a positioning decision, not an income stream on its own. It can make the other lanes work better, yet by itself it does not put money in your account. It is a lever, not a source. People reach for it because it feels like action, when what they actually need is a new channel.

Everyone fighting over sponsored posts and affiliate links is fighting over the lanes that already exist. The money is about to move to the lane most of them have not noticed yet.

The wave: selling live, where the eyes already are

The thing coming is retail sales through live video. Live shopping. You go live, you show real products, you talk about them the way you would talk to a friend, and your audience buys them right there, in the moment, without leaving the stream. No link to click later. No hoping they remember. The interest and the purchase happen in the same breath.

If that sounds familiar, it should, because it is not actually new. It is an evolution of a model that a TV channel called QVC built decades ago. A host demonstrated a product live, made it feel exciting and a little urgent, and people picked up the phone and bought it on the spot. That formula, entertainment plus demonstration plus instant buying, worked enormously well. The only thing that has changed is where it lives.

Because the times have changed. Nobody, at least nobody young, is buying through their television anymore. The younger generation buys wherever their eyes already are, and today their eyes are in two places: they are on Amazon, or they are on social media. So the QVC model did not die. It moved. It moved onto the exact screens your audience is already staring at, and it shed the part where you had to pick up a phone. Now the buy button is right there under the live video.

Why this is not a someday trend

I want to be clear that this is not a prediction about five years from now. In much of Asia, live shopping is not a trend, it is simply how a large share of shopping already happens, and it has been that way for a while. The West was slow to follow, and for a few years it was fair to be skeptical about whether it would translate here.

That window has closed. US live-commerce sales have been climbing fast, growing on the order of forty to fifty percent year over year, with live shopping spending in the US projected into the tens of billions of dollars. The big platforms are not experimenting anymore, they are committing. TikTok built an entire shopping marketplace into the app. Amazon has live shoppable streams and a program built specifically to let creators sell. The infrastructure that did not exist a few years ago is now sitting right there, waiting for creators to use it. The wave is not coming. It is breaking.

Why this lane is built for smaller creators

Here is the part I most want smaller creators to hear, because it is the opposite of the sponsored-post problem. Live shopping does not reward follower count the way brand deals do. It rewards engagement and trust, the ability to get an attentive audience to act. A creator with a modest but truly engaged following will often out-sell a much larger account full of passive followers, because selling live is about connection and conversion, not reach.

Think about what that means. The exact thing that is closing for small creators, sponsored brand deals chosen on the basis of size and data, is replaced by a lane where your size matters less and your relationship with your audience matters more. If brands keep passing on you because you are not big enough, live shopping is the channel that does not ask you to be big. It asks you to be trusted. And trust is the one thing a good small creator usually has more of than a huge one.

This is where it connects to everything else I coach. Selling live well is a content skill, not a luck skill. It rewards a clear personal brand, a real relationship with your audience, and content good enough that people want to keep watching while you sell. That is the same foundation that makes every other lane work, which is why we build it into how we think about a creator’s whole business at our influencer management agency, rather than treating it as a separate trick.

“But what should I sell?”

This is the question I get the second someone accepts that live selling is real. And the answer is simpler than people want it to be. Sell almost anything. The product is not the hard part, and treating it like it is the hard part is what stops most creators before they start.

Here is the mechanical version. Go to a sourcing marketplace like Alibaba. Find a product you can get at low cost with a reliable supply chain behind it, and pick something you believe you can sell at a high margin. That is the whole sourcing decision. You do not need to invent anything. You need a product you can buy low, sell higher, and deliver consistently.

The product should fit your brand, because that is what makes it sell. If you are the hot influencer, sell fans. If your whole thing is being the financial wizard, sell the coolest calculator anyone has seen. It almost does not matter what the object is, as long as your audience can attach it to you. They will buy it because it came from you, and then, this is the part that matters, they will buy the next thing from you too. And the one after that. Each sale carries its margin, and those margins stack, over and over, into real income.

The convenience margin

If this feels like it should be more complicated, think about any store you have ever walked into. They did exactly this. A retailer did not manufacture the products on their shelves. They found them, bought them at a low cost, and sold them to you at a higher one. The difference they keep is what I call the convenience margin: you pay it because they are closer to you than the factory that actually made the thing and shipped it across the world. The store is just reselling a product it never created. That gap, between the manufacturer and you, is the entire business.

For the whole history of retail, you needed a storefront and capital to stand in that gap. You do not anymore. Your livestream is the storefront, your audience is the foot traffic, and your relationship with them is the reason they would rather buy from you than hunt down the manufacturer themselves. You can now stand in exactly the same gap that every store you have ever shopped at stands in, and keep the same convenience margin they keep. The only thing that changed is you do not need the building.

So when someone asks me how to make money online now, my honest answer is no longer just the three old lanes. It is: keep the lanes that work, stop waiting on the one that is closing, and get in early on the one that is about to be enormous. The creators who learn to sell live to their own audience, while everyone else is still fighting over sponsored posts, are going to look very smart in about two years.

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