Creator Money is Growing 5X Faster Than Hollywood's. Here's How to Get Yours
The inside scoop on growth areas from int'l to touring to podcasting, as top talent and reps tell me about today's fees and how to become a millionaire
I cover the creator economy at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled for a limited time for paid subscribers to The Ankler. Recently I reported on jobs available in digital content for Hollywood talent and the growth of Webtoon, where creators sell shows to Netflix and Tubi. Email me tips, memes and ideas at natalie@theankler.com
A week after I published a report on employment opportunities available in the creator economy, a new study is highlighting just how big the creator job market is. The number of people working full-time as creators jumped to 1.5 million in the U.S. last year, according to the report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Harvard Business School professor emeritus John Deighton. Researchers say the rise — the space has grown by more than seven times since the study was last conducted in 2020 — is driven by “the shift of ad dollars from legacy media to platforms, streamers, and digital publishers” as well as the low barrier of entry for digital content creation.
The report, first covered by Axios, contains a lot of interesting nuggets, including that creator media revenue is growing at five times (!!!) the rate of traditional media revenue.
Today I’m drilling down on just how all those people who call themselves full-time creators are making all that money — and more importantly, where the areas of opportunity for them and the people they hire as more of them become mini-moguls. In order to even make it onto Forbes’ 2024 list of top creators, you had to earn at least $1 million. And the top earner — MrBeast, no surprise — made an estimated $85 million.
Speaking of content paydays, if you read my report earlier this month about Webtoon Entertainment and how it’s helping creators earn big while also building an IP pipeline for Hollywood, you can hear my conversation with execs David J. Lee and David Madden on a bonus episode of The Ankler podcast today; there’s also video of our session on the NAB Show site.
“The creator economy is growing drastically and it’s fundamentally changed the entertainment landscape,” says Bennett Sherman, a digital agent at WME. For a long time, YouTube was the only platform in town. Today, creators are building multi-platform strategies that include not just YouTube but also Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Patreon, Substack and more. That’s opened up many new ways for them to make money from their videos. Successful creators aren’t just talent, Sherman adds, they’re media entrepreneurs.
Though advertising still makes up the largest portion of their businesses, the savviest creators are diversifying through licensing deals, affiliate fees and subscriptions. And then there are the growth areas like podcasting, live events, business ventures and international that could become their biggest moneymakers.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to more than half a dozen experts in the creator space to bring you concrete examples of how to build a thriving creator business today and where you should be investing now if you want to be ahead of the pack by next year. Read on to learn:
The wide variety of revenue streams for creators, and which ones are the most lucrative
How creators at different levels charge for their brand deals
How much income it takes to be a creator full-time, and when reps come into the equation
The huge range in what small creators and those with bigger followings can charge for the same work
The sneaky revenue stream that means big bucks for some lifestyle creators
Why some reps advise their clients not to get into their own product businesses (like MrBeast’s Feastables)
The three new arenas with the biggest monetization opportunities for creators