The NASA Mission Specialist Turned Media CEO Who Set Out to Save the Creator Economy
In a bid to challenge the dominance of major social platforms and give creators a sustainable business model, TopFan, an entertainment marketing tech company led by Jeffrey Kohn, began offering independent creators a way to own their audience data in February. Founded by Kohn in 2015, TopFan has long powered fan engagement for major names including the Denver Broncos, Maroon 5 and Warner Bros. Its white-label websites, apps and data platform help entertainment organizations understand how fans behave beyond likes and clicks. Now, the company is extending that infrastructure to independent creators.
The idea is simple: by moving livestreams, online sales and other assets into their own branded apps and websites (and by gaining access to fan data such as phone numbers and locations), creators can gradually reduce reliance on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Over time, that autonomy could help them build independent businesses.
With easy access to YouTube and TikTok, everyone can be a producer or artist today, but most creators still struggle financially. More than half earned less than $15,000 in 2025, even as the overall creator economy surpassed $250 billion. Kohn argues that the imbalance highlights a broken system.
“It’s getting harder for a creator to survive on these social media platforms because their content’s not being seen,” Kohn told Observer, noting that the average engagement rate for Instagram posts sits around 3 percent. “You would never build your house on rented land,” he added.
A technologist by trade, Kohn began his career as a mission specialist at NASA in the mid-1990s, later serving as executive director and enterprise architect at Oracle before founding TopFan in 2006. A conversation there with a studio executive sparked the idea for the company. “I started asking him about the data he owned about his fans, and he said he didn’t have any,” Kohn recalled. Despite tens of millions of Facebook followers, the studio couldn’t actually reach those fans directly.
That same problem now plagues the creator economy. “When we evaluated the landscape of tools that were available for creators, we saw a lot of fragmentation,” Kohn said. Creators often juggle Cameo, Patreon, Substack and merch platforms—all linked from a cluttered bio. TopFan aims to consolidate those into one branded ecosystem where creators can sell merchandise, host communities or courses, manage subscriptions and track key fan data.
TopFan still encourages creators to stay visible on mainstream platforms for discovery. “They need to continue to post and grow their audiences on these big platforms,” said Kohn. “But over time, they become less reliant on black-box algorithms and surface-level audiences.”
Currently, TopFan partners with influencers who have at least 10,000 followers aggregated across platforms. “It shows them that they’re not just starting yesterday—that they’re taking this seriously,” said Kohn.
The formula for sustainable success
Kohn believes long-term success means going beyond content to offer tangible products and services such as coaching, classes, episodic programming or merchandise. One fast-growing area is microdramas—serialized, short-form web videos popularized in China as duanju. These bite-sized dramas, often built around cliffhangers and romance or revenge tropes, have found global traction; last year, microdrama app DramaBox was selected for Disney’s 2025 Accelerator program.
Another promising category is family-friendly content. With social platforms facing scrutiny over youth exposure—Australia even banned social media for minors—creators who own their distribution channels can offer safe, closed environments for younger audiences to engage responsibly.
Across niches, Kohn insists the principle is the same: ownership matters. “Your local plumber has a database of their customers,” he said. “It surprised me that all of these major companies had seeded relationships through the middleman of social media.”
High-profile examples like Alex Cooper’s Unwell and MrBeast’s Beast Industries show what’s possible when creators control their platforms. With TopFan now extending those tools to independent influencers, Kohn hopes more creators will make the same pivot, moving from renting audiences on social media to owning entire digital ecosystems built to last.