The Next Job Pivot: Professionals Becoming Creators — and Cashing In
White-collar workers are quietly taking over the creator economy
This is a preview of Like & Subscribe, my standalone Ankler Media newsletter on the creator economy. I wrote about the hot podcast market, spoke to two Chernin Group partners about the firm’s bet on creator-led empires, interviewed the co-hosts of TBPN, wrote about YouTube’s new studio era and covered how video podcasts are taking over TV. Email me at natalie@theankler.com
The days of needing millions of followers to make a living as a creator are over.
A new tier of talent — not quite influencers, not quite amateurs — is quietly turning their own content creation into a viable career path. These are professionals, founders and side-hustlers with real expertise and modest audiences, building businesses that don’t rely on being MrBeast.
As layoffs, hiring freezes and stalled development pipelines force many in media and entertainment to rethink their next move, social media is starting to look like a pretty good sudden hustle — if not the entire Plan B.
Take Cherie Brooke Luo.
The Stanford MBA co-owns two small businesses with her sister and attracts millions of views from her 450,000 followers across social media platforms. Luo, 30, might not be whom many people envision when they think of an influencer (example: She’ll likely never feud with Alix Earle or Alex Cooper), but the days of hugely popular creators holding all the power are gone. Niche content is in — as the TBPN sale to OpenAI recently highlighted. That’s created perfect conditions for more people to ditch their corporate jobs and turn to content creation, where they can use the tools of the internet to become their own small business.
Avi Gandhi, who advises creators on their businesses, calls this group “grownups” and forecasts that they’re the fastest-growing segment of the creator economy. I’m calling them the new creator middle class, aka people with a respectable audience (think follower counts between 100k and 1 million) who are supporting themselves with the help of content creation.
Collectively they’re growing in power.
The digital economy hit $4.9 trillion in 2025, accounting for 18 percent of the GDP in the U.S., according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Estimates peg the total number of creators in the country at 27 million total people who make money on social-first content — and, more conservatively, 1.5 million working full-time as creators.
That 1.5 million includes people like Luo, who has been making vertical video since 2020, when she was a product manager at LinkedIn. She decided to pursue full-time work as a creator after graduating from business school and with her sister, Jean Luo, now co-hosts the business podcast Tiger Sisters while also bootstrapping an organic small-batch matcha business, Sisters Matcha.
“We’ve done everything ourselves up until this point,” says Luo. That means packing every box, sending handwritten notes to customers and making regular trips to the post office. “The marketing and distribution is really challenging, and I feel very fortunate that Jean and I have a platform, both from my personal socials and from Tiger Sisters, to talk about the story behind Sisters Matcha and why it’s so important to us.”
I’ve already taken you deep inside the job opportunities available in the creator economy:
Today, I’m zooming in on the segment of creators who might not command the most headlines, but who are shaping up to be as big a threat to traditional media as the TikTokers and podcasters striking Netflix deals.
As the real shift is happening further down the ladder, I have career intel over at Like & Subscribe on:
Why the most overlooked creators are suddenly the most valuable
What “working creators” actually make — and how it stacks up to traditional jobs
Why professionals across industries are turning to content
The booming ecosystem built to serve this new class of creators
The tools helping them scale — and keep more of their income
The rest of this column is for paid subscribers to Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter dedicated to the creator economy from Ankler Media.
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