I think the picture re creators is a bit more complicated than just whether there's a 'middle class' or not. On the one hand, there are tools around like Substack, Patreon, Kofi, that help creators directly reach those who want to pay them, so it's possibly easier now to move towards the Kevin Kelly 1000 True Fans model than it has ever been. It wasn't like that when I first started creating content online in 1998 or even when I started my blog in 2001. Aggregating small payments from lots of people was essentially impossible.
But the problem now isn't payment, it's audience. There was a golden age of social media where you could reach a whole raft of people without too much effort. Indeed, that's partly how I launched The Open Rights Group, though that was 2005 so a little early in the history of social media, but I certainly noticed that when it got blogged about we got more supporters than when I did BBC News. But social media was instrumental to the launch of Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, and it was social media that turned that into a global movement. It literally wouldn't exist without Twitter, and for the last 9 years it's given me a full-time (if not luxury!) professional life. The economic downturn has hit sponsorship badly though, so it's not looking good for this year.
Now it's much, much harder to gather an audience together using those same tools, because they all punish external links, and in Twitter's case, reach has fallen off a cliff. So it's easier to get paid, harder to find people to pay you.
Then when we look at some of the key kickstarters for creative careers, such as getting a book published (which does still hold a cachet in many people's minds, regardless of the success of individual self-published authors), that's harder and harder to do, and it pays less and less. In the UK, the median yearly income for professional writers – including freelance journalist, screenwriters, authors etc – is now £7,000. In 2007, it was £12,330, which is not a huge amount more, but it would make a difference. The rest of the stats aren't good, and do show that the long tail is doing much worse than the very successful minority:
Worse, publishers are increasingly likely to focus on celebrity writers, to the detriment of true debuts from authors without a huge following.
When you look at the people who've been really successful here, lots of them had existing platforms, such as tens or hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, or an existing profile as a journalist, author, artist, subject matter expert, or academic, or they are hooked directly into business- and money-oriented subjects like marketing, investing, productivity. For your average Jo, those case studies are teach us very little, if anything, because we're not beginning from the same starting point.
So, I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I think that the devil is in the details and the topline figures don't give us an accurate picture of what the creator economy really looks like for most people. When you're at (or near) the top, the world looks very flat. When you're in the foothills you see the true size of the mountain. I'd like to see more profiles of successful newsletter writers who genuinely started in the foothills, without any of the advantages of an existing profile and without any other structural advantages.
Because ultimately, the strength of the creator economy is not about the absolute numbers, it's about mobility – is it possible to start from zero and still be a success?
You’re 100% correct - I’ve always felt it was very odd that mainstream press talks about creator economy pursuits as if they’re employment and not entrepreneurship. I read a post from a pair of journalists who quite their papers to start a substack and had grown to $60k in revenue in the first year and were complaining - I thought, dude, that’s incredible for a first year. They were clearly thinking of it in employment terms and not business terms.
The barrier to entry is both easier and opaquely difficult. Easy to start a YouTube channel or self publish a book. But the real barrier is to put in the necessary reps, learn the platform and improve at the craft abs business. You have to toil away for free or low money for awhile while you build. Some longer than others.
That’s why I love Substack - of all the platforms I’ve tried it’s been the easiest to monetize - even covering small city politics and news I’ve grown to a sizable side income and in a couple of years I project it’ll be in full-time income territory.
Anyway, great newsletter and I’m glad someone pointed out the fallacy of most creator economy reporting.
I agree with you about needing a content threshold for studies of people who've succeeded or failed as content creators. Here are two anecdotes:
1. Last year, I did a little podcasting experiment. I posted three episodes of a show that has nothing to do with my current brand, and then I got busy and stopped. That show would be counted as a failure, but I had very little intention of ever continuing with it. It was just a fun side project.
2. I know professors who give "create a podcast" assignments, and >99% of those students have no intention of continuing to make a show after their class ends. But again, these would be counted as failures.
As one of those small entrepreneurial creators, who has made a living wage in the past 10 years as an author, I applaud this post, because it describes my experience as an indie author. In case you haven't run across this survey that has come out by the Alliance of Independent Authors, I think that it supports your conclusions. https://selfpublishingadvice.org/incomesurvey/
As with all creative industries, the top 20% makes 80% of the money. You're right in querying the definition of 'creator.'
Analogy: I'm a decent cook. If I so wish, I could call myself a restauranteur. On paper, then, I'm a restauranteur. When my restaurant fails or I get bored, that failure drags down the statistics, which include the serious and the capable.
I actually have never heard any theory that only a small percentage of people in the Creator Economy are making a living. I think only a small percentage of people doing *newsletters* specifically are making a lot of money (I usually hear this in the context of Substack), but if we include YouTube and self-published books on Kindle and other parts of the CE, a lot of people are at least making a "middle class" living.
Hi Simon, great article! I like your assessment of the term creator "middle class" perhaps being off the mark. I run an OTT Platform geared to help creators build real DTC businesses with their content. As such, we do believe in the emergence and evolution of the OTT "middle market" (compared to Netflix, Disney+ and the rest of the mega-OTT platforms making up 83% of the OTT market), which will be driven largely by niche entrepreneurial creators moving beyond (but not abandoning) YouTube, TT, and the big social platforms to build their businesses, or the 2nd Renaissance as Jack Conte puts it. Maybe we should call this emerging class of creators the "entrepreneurial class"?
People who are self-employed don't have the same mindset as people building an SMB. The motivations to be a Creator and say open up a retail store are totally different. The majority of creators will never employ other people, and if they do, they aren't in the Creator Middle Class, they are already in the top 10%.
Comparing someone who is self-employed (who usually has multiple jobs or side gigs) with a startup makes no sense whatsoever.
A Creator needs to diversify their revenue from multiple sources and is therefore likely to have a lifestyle that is "always on". Startups have much more defined niches and problems they are trying to solve.
At what point does Simon Owens become a media startup? Is it when he started Seminars or when he starts a successful YouTube channel that involves more people? It's all really subjective. Creators like Ben or Kyla who have a Youtube channel, and a TikTok are likely more Creators than most writers on Substack are. Ben might gain most of his revenue from consulting, but is his Substack a media startup? Is Kyla a Media startup because she is able to trend on TikTok? I think about these things a fair bit.
Is Brian a media startup because he's so good at media and brand partnerships? Are are we just all self-employed folk trying to do what's in our power to expand our audience and reach a business model that makes sense to us?
That you have to worry about an Advertising slowdown or a coming recession coming impacting your subs doesn't make you a Startup. But if Azeem can afford to hire more people, maybe he is. Self-employed people usually want to balance the freedom and the ability to create their own job, a media startup are like the Dispatch who are intent on growing at all costs, even making decisions that end up being their own undoing.
Most self-employed writers will never reach the Creator economy upper echelon, let's just put that notion to rest. Unless you believe Substack is the YouTube for writers.
Based on my experiences talking with creators during this last tax season, I’m fairly confident that there is no “middle class”. Instead, there are small creators who make anywhere from $0-$150, a huge gap, then creators who make thousands in a month.
“The vast majority who try will still fail, but a larger number than ever will actually succeed. That fact alone should give aspiring creators hope.”
What would you say differentiates it now? What about today’s saturated economy makes having a gainful career as an artist/creator more feasible?
I’m not sure my opinions. I guess I haven’t been writing long enough to know personally (only 5 years...) but a few things come to mind. (1) income streams. The majority of people don’t talk or think about it much, but creators/artists don’t usually just focus on their creative work. They piece together income streams that eventually build to a full income. Which actually distracts from the art IMO. And (2) you just have to churn out a lot of it for it to make a dent - both to increase your chances of being seen among the glut of mediocre work out there, and to earn residual micro-income on each little thing that will build to a gainful income.
It’s a grind. More of a grind than many (most?) professions.
I really enjoyed your perspective and argument about what the creative economy looked like and consists of. The last part in which you mentioned more artistic minded could "make it" seems a bit off to me. I don't think people would be any closer to making it now than they would be in the past especially with oversaturation and bigger platforms still having more influence. However, I do a new ecosystem is being created for people to express themselves and invent what this new world will look like. It won't be "making it" like in the past or becoming an A-list artist, but it will create a wider reach, more platforms, and more dynamic communities for creators.
I think the picture re creators is a bit more complicated than just whether there's a 'middle class' or not. On the one hand, there are tools around like Substack, Patreon, Kofi, that help creators directly reach those who want to pay them, so it's possibly easier now to move towards the Kevin Kelly 1000 True Fans model than it has ever been. It wasn't like that when I first started creating content online in 1998 or even when I started my blog in 2001. Aggregating small payments from lots of people was essentially impossible.
But the problem now isn't payment, it's audience. There was a golden age of social media where you could reach a whole raft of people without too much effort. Indeed, that's partly how I launched The Open Rights Group, though that was 2005 so a little early in the history of social media, but I certainly noticed that when it got blogged about we got more supporters than when I did BBC News. But social media was instrumental to the launch of Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, and it was social media that turned that into a global movement. It literally wouldn't exist without Twitter, and for the last 9 years it's given me a full-time (if not luxury!) professional life. The economic downturn has hit sponsorship badly though, so it's not looking good for this year.
Now it's much, much harder to gather an audience together using those same tools, because they all punish external links, and in Twitter's case, reach has fallen off a cliff. So it's easier to get paid, harder to find people to pay you.
Then when we look at some of the key kickstarters for creative careers, such as getting a book published (which does still hold a cachet in many people's minds, regardless of the success of individual self-published authors), that's harder and harder to do, and it pays less and less. In the UK, the median yearly income for professional writers – including freelance journalist, screenwriters, authors etc – is now £7,000. In 2007, it was £12,330, which is not a huge amount more, but it would make a difference. The rest of the stats aren't good, and do show that the long tail is doing much worse than the very successful minority:
https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/why-writers-are-at-a-loss-for-words
Worse, publishers are increasingly likely to focus on celebrity writers, to the detriment of true debuts from authors without a huge following.
When you look at the people who've been really successful here, lots of them had existing platforms, such as tens or hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, or an existing profile as a journalist, author, artist, subject matter expert, or academic, or they are hooked directly into business- and money-oriented subjects like marketing, investing, productivity. For your average Jo, those case studies are teach us very little, if anything, because we're not beginning from the same starting point.
So, I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I think that the devil is in the details and the topline figures don't give us an accurate picture of what the creator economy really looks like for most people. When you're at (or near) the top, the world looks very flat. When you're in the foothills you see the true size of the mountain. I'd like to see more profiles of successful newsletter writers who genuinely started in the foothills, without any of the advantages of an existing profile and without any other structural advantages.
Because ultimately, the strength of the creator economy is not about the absolute numbers, it's about mobility – is it possible to start from zero and still be a success?
You’re 100% correct - I’ve always felt it was very odd that mainstream press talks about creator economy pursuits as if they’re employment and not entrepreneurship. I read a post from a pair of journalists who quite their papers to start a substack and had grown to $60k in revenue in the first year and were complaining - I thought, dude, that’s incredible for a first year. They were clearly thinking of it in employment terms and not business terms.
The barrier to entry is both easier and opaquely difficult. Easy to start a YouTube channel or self publish a book. But the real barrier is to put in the necessary reps, learn the platform and improve at the craft abs business. You have to toil away for free or low money for awhile while you build. Some longer than others.
That’s why I love Substack - of all the platforms I’ve tried it’s been the easiest to monetize - even covering small city politics and news I’ve grown to a sizable side income and in a couple of years I project it’ll be in full-time income territory.
Anyway, great newsletter and I’m glad someone pointed out the fallacy of most creator economy reporting.
I agree with you about needing a content threshold for studies of people who've succeeded or failed as content creators. Here are two anecdotes:
1. Last year, I did a little podcasting experiment. I posted three episodes of a show that has nothing to do with my current brand, and then I got busy and stopped. That show would be counted as a failure, but I had very little intention of ever continuing with it. It was just a fun side project.
2. I know professors who give "create a podcast" assignments, and >99% of those students have no intention of continuing to make a show after their class ends. But again, these would be counted as failures.
As one of those small entrepreneurial creators, who has made a living wage in the past 10 years as an author, I applaud this post, because it describes my experience as an indie author. In case you haven't run across this survey that has come out by the Alliance of Independent Authors, I think that it supports your conclusions. https://selfpublishingadvice.org/incomesurvey/
As with all creative industries, the top 20% makes 80% of the money. You're right in querying the definition of 'creator.'
Analogy: I'm a decent cook. If I so wish, I could call myself a restauranteur. On paper, then, I'm a restauranteur. When my restaurant fails or I get bored, that failure drags down the statistics, which include the serious and the capable.
I love this newsletter, btw. Excellent stuff.
I actually have never heard any theory that only a small percentage of people in the Creator Economy are making a living. I think only a small percentage of people doing *newsletters* specifically are making a lot of money (I usually hear this in the context of Substack), but if we include YouTube and self-published books on Kindle and other parts of the CE, a lot of people are at least making a "middle class" living.
Cheers,
Bob Sassone
https://www.bobsassone.com
Hi Simon, great article! I like your assessment of the term creator "middle class" perhaps being off the mark. I run an OTT Platform geared to help creators build real DTC businesses with their content. As such, we do believe in the emergence and evolution of the OTT "middle market" (compared to Netflix, Disney+ and the rest of the mega-OTT platforms making up 83% of the OTT market), which will be driven largely by niche entrepreneurial creators moving beyond (but not abandoning) YouTube, TT, and the big social platforms to build their businesses, or the 2nd Renaissance as Jack Conte puts it. Maybe we should call this emerging class of creators the "entrepreneurial class"?
People who are self-employed don't have the same mindset as people building an SMB. The motivations to be a Creator and say open up a retail store are totally different. The majority of creators will never employ other people, and if they do, they aren't in the Creator Middle Class, they are already in the top 10%.
Comparing someone who is self-employed (who usually has multiple jobs or side gigs) with a startup makes no sense whatsoever.
A Creator needs to diversify their revenue from multiple sources and is therefore likely to have a lifestyle that is "always on". Startups have much more defined niches and problems they are trying to solve.
At what point does Simon Owens become a media startup? Is it when he started Seminars or when he starts a successful YouTube channel that involves more people? It's all really subjective. Creators like Ben or Kyla who have a Youtube channel, and a TikTok are likely more Creators than most writers on Substack are. Ben might gain most of his revenue from consulting, but is his Substack a media startup? Is Kyla a Media startup because she is able to trend on TikTok? I think about these things a fair bit.
Is Brian a media startup because he's so good at media and brand partnerships? Are are we just all self-employed folk trying to do what's in our power to expand our audience and reach a business model that makes sense to us?
That you have to worry about an Advertising slowdown or a coming recession coming impacting your subs doesn't make you a Startup. But if Azeem can afford to hire more people, maybe he is. Self-employed people usually want to balance the freedom and the ability to create their own job, a media startup are like the Dispatch who are intent on growing at all costs, even making decisions that end up being their own undoing.
Most self-employed writers will never reach the Creator economy upper echelon, let's just put that notion to rest. Unless you believe Substack is the YouTube for writers.
I'm a writer. I'd rather have a freelance career & create on the side. One never knows :)
Based on my experiences talking with creators during this last tax season, I’m fairly confident that there is no “middle class”. Instead, there are small creators who make anywhere from $0-$150, a huge gap, then creators who make thousands in a month.
Wouldn't thousands in a month qualify as "middle class"? If you make $5k a month, that's $60k a year, which is basically a middle class income.
I guess that would. Apologies - it’s early here, and I’ve not had coffee yet.
“The vast majority who try will still fail, but a larger number than ever will actually succeed. That fact alone should give aspiring creators hope.”
What would you say differentiates it now? What about today’s saturated economy makes having a gainful career as an artist/creator more feasible?
I’m not sure my opinions. I guess I haven’t been writing long enough to know personally (only 5 years...) but a few things come to mind. (1) income streams. The majority of people don’t talk or think about it much, but creators/artists don’t usually just focus on their creative work. They piece together income streams that eventually build to a full income. Which actually distracts from the art IMO. And (2) you just have to churn out a lot of it for it to make a dent - both to increase your chances of being seen among the glut of mediocre work out there, and to earn residual micro-income on each little thing that will build to a gainful income.
It’s a grind. More of a grind than many (most?) professions.
I really enjoyed your perspective and argument about what the creative economy looked like and consists of. The last part in which you mentioned more artistic minded could "make it" seems a bit off to me. I don't think people would be any closer to making it now than they would be in the past especially with oversaturation and bigger platforms still having more influence. However, I do a new ecosystem is being created for people to express themselves and invent what this new world will look like. It won't be "making it" like in the past or becoming an A-list artist, but it will create a wider reach, more platforms, and more dynamic communities for creators.