Associate Professor David Craig is a communication, media, and platform scholar at USC Annenberg where he has taught graduate courses for over fifteen years. As a pioneer in the field of creator studies, for the past decade, Craig has mapped the rise of the creator and wanghong industries, economics, and culture emerging mostly across U.S. and/or Chinese-owned platforms. These industries are distinguished by how social media entrepreneurs, whether referred to as creators, influencers, KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders), or wanghong (“internet famous”), harness these platforms to monetize their online communities.
Alongside dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and public-facing commentaries, his field-setting work includes three books, Social Media Entertainment (NYU Press, 2019), Creator Culture: An Introduction to Global Social Media (NYU Press, 2021), and Wanghong as Chinese Social Media Entertainment (Palgrave, 2021). His work has contributed to the emerging field of creator studies, an interdisciplinary field of international scholars engaging with creator scholarship from diverse theories, frameworks, and methodologies.
Aligned with the International Communication Association Conference, Craig has produced conferences about creator governance (D.C., 2019), creator culture (Amsterdam, 2021) and creator activism (Toronto, 2023) and his fourth conference about creator studies will take place in Denver 2025. While a 2023-24 visiting scholar at Harvard in the Institute for Rebooting Social Media in the Berkman Klein Center, Craig conducted research into the strategies and tactics of NGO, HROs, and CSOs partnering with social media “creators for change” who align with impact organizations, political activists, and social movements. While a visiting Global Fulbright scholar from 2023-2025 in Thailand, Chile, and Israel, he is also interrogating how these national creator cultures operate in response to rising platform nationalism.
