Creator Economy: What Is It And How Big? (With Stats)

Here are a few facts to make understand about creator economy.

A ten-year-old is making a $100-million-dollar net worth through YouTube videos.

23-year-old MrBeast earns $54 million a year on his YouTube channel for supersized stunts

Furthermore, a seven-year-old girl has 87.5 million subscribers to her channel.

Today, there is no age limit to begin a career or a side business as a content creator. And content creation is an unpredictable but legitimate job. It is possible to make big money and gain fame with content creation.

And it’s the creator’s economy, extending into the fastest-growing small business as the media became much more centralized. People are using their passion for making revenues as other chunks of the population are consuming and distributing amongst each other remarkably.

But what are creator economy and expandability? Furthermore, how is it gaining popularity? And how does it work?

We’ll take you through all the ins and outs in this article.

What Is The Creator Economy?

The first thing coming to our mind as we hear about the creator economy is “Influencers,” but this community extends beyond this single word. It’s a market of over 50 million people creating content and monetizing their skills to become independent creators.

The creator economy stands for numerous side hustles and businesses, including independent creators like influencers, bloggers, writers, videographers, and social media models. It encompasses many companies supporting creators and providing products, content creation tools, website hosting services, and web analytics platforms.

The content economy comprises creating, distributing, and consuming content in the digital world. However, the medium of the creator economy is the internet and social media channels where like-minded people and content creators interact to form highly engaged online communities.

In fact, over some time, the size of the creator economy has expanded as many people turned content creation into a full-time job. And why not when they can earn a decent amount of money?

A recent study by NeoReach, where the organization surveyed 2,000 creators, confirmed that 48.72% work full-time as content creators. And 35% of the creators earn $50k annually and have been building the audience for over four years.

How Does the Creator Economy Work?

The creator economy is the ecosystem of creators, consumers, advertisers, and other stakeholders like businesses, digital marketing platforms, and content creation tools.

Creators

Creators are the people who create content to attract an audience as well as advertisers. They create content using their expertise, build their community and monetize the content for revenue-generating. Content can be in any form, including:

Modeling
Fashion influencing
Online courses
Live Streaming
Speaking engagements
Newsletters
Coaching and consulting
Merchandise
Affiliate marketing
VIP meetups
Ad revenue
Book and e-book sales
Sponsored content
Tipping
Live and virtual events
Podcasting
Crowdfunding
Speaking engagements

Consumers

Creators make the content for the target audience as they rely on people who would consume their content.

Advertisers

Creating content also has the motive to attract advertisers. They give them their products to sell via sponsored posts and shoutouts during live streams; in return, creators earn money for promoting the advertiser’s product to their audience.

Platform & Publishers

Digital marketing platforms, publisher advertising networks, and social media platforms are the primary sources for creators to broadcast and monetize their content. In return, publishers or advertisers also build brand awareness via the influencer’s audience.

Through these platforms, creators receive a percentage of the revenue generated by their content. Moreover, many platforms have initiated “creator-first” platforms to help influencers make more money.

How Big Is The Creator Economy?

The Creator economy is continuously expanding, and with emerging business models, it will grow further. However, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of creator economies since there is no centralized place to record them. Plus, many individual creators are using multiple platforms.

A recent Forbes article stated, “Kids in the US are opting to be YouTubers when asked about their plans as their first choice, and it is about three times more famous career option than aspiring to be an astronaut.”

In another State of Consumer Trends report published in 2022 by HubSpot, the company found that the creator’s economy is rising exponentially, where 40% of 25-34 years old audiences and 30% of 18 to 24-year-old audiences already consider themselves content creators.

In fact, after YouTube and Instagram, Meta is also catching up in this space and introducing similar deals for creators. The creator economy is booming, and new technologies and tools are continually getting included to increase the creator economy’s stats.

Let’s have a look at the growth of this market and popularity stats:

The market size of the creator economy is estimated to be 50+ million, with the influencer marketing industry size of $13.8 Billion in 2021, double what it was in 2019. It is with hundreds of new startups arising daily, as the total Creator market size adds up to at least $104.2 Billion and expands.
According to Signalfire research, there are 46.7 million amateur content creators, and more than 2 million are professional content creators.
Most amateur creators are active on Instagram (30 million), followed by YouTube (12 million), 2.7 million on Twitch, and the remaining 2 million on other social media platforms.
Whereas approximately 2 million professional content creators and nearly half of them are earning sizable amounts of money (12 million) on YouTube, followed by Instagram (500,000), Twitch (300,000), and Other sources (200,000). And according to a Forbes study, top-performing YouTube channels have made $211M between June 2019 and June 2020.
Many amateur creators still monetizing their content need more revenue, so they opted for it as a side hustle. At the same time, the largest group here (30 million) makes their money as Instagram influencers.
1.4% of the responding creators make more than $1M annually. In contrast, around 21% of creators still make a livable wage above $50K in annual income from content creation work.

Conclusion

So what does the creator economy mean to you? It’s a community of creators, consumers, and businesses who support the idea of creation and content and monetize their creations to generate revenue.

After analyzing the various stats, earnings, and growth rates, it is possible to understand the creator economy and harness the power of content creation.