What is a content factory? I decided to find out

Over the last couple of months I have been talking to owners and commercial directors a lot more. And almost every meeting gets to influence marketing and content factories. After all of them I concluded that people mean very different things by “content factory”, and they run influence in very different ways. That is fine. I still want a shared picture of what the tool is and how it works.

I am not the deepest person in this. I have run a content factory at the level of the funnel, not the day-to-day operation. So I asked someone who does know. Dina Mukhutdinova, Head of UGC and Influence Marketing. Here we go.

Denis: Dina, in the middle of 2025 everyone piled into content factories because the advertising law changed. They were afraid ads with bloggers would become impossible. A year has passed. Is influence dead, and is there no way forward without a content factory?

Dina: It is not dead. It got more careful.

Since 2022 the market has had trouble reaching the big platforms, mandatory ad labeling, and the new limits of 2025. Influence marketers have become close friends with lawyers in that time and put them on speed dial. Every disputed point is now discussed on its own.

The audience did not vanish with the limits. Brands keep looking for legal ways to talk to people where that is still possible. A content factory is one of the tools. It works. It is not the only one, and it is not universal. For some companies it became the main channel. For others, a few placements are enough. It depends on the product, the budget, and the goal.

Denis: Fine. This is where most people get confused. Is a content factory just influence under a new name? Or a different mechanism, in the money, in who owns the content, in who is in front of the camera?

Dina: A different mechanism.

Influence marketing is work with people who already have an audience and trust. The brand reaches someone else’s audience through someone else’s face. A content factory works the other way. The brand does not buy attention from someone else’s creator. It builds its own system for producing content.

Put simply: a team of creators who regularly shoot short video for accounts the company owns. The creators are paid for the volume of content. The brand fully controls what is published, the analytics, and what happens to the material afterwards.

So it is not influence with a new label. Different economics, different rights in the content, a different level of control over the result. Classic influence has not gone anywhere. The two mechanics complement each other more than they compete.

Denis: Tell me about the risks. A content factory is content in the voice of real people, not of the brand. What does the company lose in this setup? And what happens if the creator everything depends on leaves?

Dina: Fair question. It is one of the most common ones.

If the content is built around one strong creator, the business inevitably depends on that person’s recognition, style, and bond with the audience. When that person leaves, reach and engagement drop. Sometimes by a lot.

That is why a mature content factory is rarely built around one face. A brand usually develops several creators at once, or mixes formats: some of the content comes from specific people, some is not tied to a person, and the product stays in the center.

A good example is the cosmetics brand VOIS and the blog yapobeauty. The creator built the accounts from zero on different platforms and became known beyond the project. When the work ended, the brand kept the accounts and kept going with other creators on them. Yes, the numbers fell. The company did not lose the main thing: its own media and the audience it had built. That is the real advantage of a content factory over a classic placement. Even if the creator leaves, the brand does not start from zero.

Denis: Which platforms actually work for content factories right now? And how stable is that picture? In a couple of years, will it be the same platforms, or will everything move again?

Dina: Content factories work best where the algorithm pushes short video regardless of how big the account is. Right now that is first of all TikTok, Pinterest, and a number of other services with a recommendation feed.

The main discovery of the last few years, for me, has been Pinterest. A lot of people still treat it as an inspiration board. In practice it is a strong tool, and the content lives a long time. People arrive with an interest already formed, they save ideas, and they often come back to them before they buy. The result is not immediate. The effect is long.

On stability, I would not bet on specific platforms. Over the last few years the market has moved too fast: the technology, the algorithms, the regulation. What will stay is the approach. Brands will want their own media and will produce content regularly. The set of platforms where that works best will change.

Denis: Last one, a forecast. If ads on Instagram and YouTube start to be punished harder, how will bloggers make money, and where will they publish? Does the content factory become their only legitimate income?

Dina: However much one might want to send every blogger to the factory (remember Technonikol’s “TikTokers” retraining program), I do not think that will happen.

Even under hard regulation, creators still have enough ways to make money: a personal brand, their own products and services, partnerships, and work with platforms in formats that meet the law.

In this story a content factory is not a replacement for bloggers. It is one more way of working. For some people it is a stable income, especially if they like making content and do not want to build their own brand. For others, their own audience and working under their own name will stay the priority.

The market will get more varied. Brands will invest more in their own media. Creators will pick the model that fits their goals. There will not be a single scenario.