Somewhere in San Francisco, another startup and wannabe tech bro is pitching their revolutionary creator economy platform. He is clutching his oat-milk latte like it’s somekind of a divine artifact. He stands before a room of eager VCs,where he is spewing gospel about his “game-changing” creator economy platform. His Patagonia vest is zipped just enough to let everyone know that he means business.
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The slides behind him are filled with slick animations, and all of them are promising exponential growth. For us, creators, it’s only a “mere” 10% platform fee, and we havre an ecosystem that will “empower” us, the creators, and of course “democratize content creation”.
He is either lying, delusional, or some hybrid of the two. But he ain’t trutful. That’s for sure. Because here’s the thing, we creators aren’t waiting for yet another creator platform.
Not one of us is sitting around, staring at our monetization dashboards, and thinking, You know what I need? Another middleman to take a cut of my already pathetic revenue.
We’re not waiting.
We’re drowning.
Every “revolutionary” creator economy platform follows the same f**ked up pattern. First, it arrives with a shiny promise to be different.
Sigh.
Then it quietly rolls out the same old subscription fees, the same old revenue-sharing model, the same old excuse to dig its hands deeper into our pockets. And by the time the sheen wears off, it’s just another layer of wealth extraction, another toll booth between creators and the people who actually give a damn about their work.
The cycle repeats, and somehow, the suits behind these schemes still expect applause.
They see the multi-hundred-billion-dollar creator economy and think, How do I get a piece of that pie?
But what they don’t see, because they don’t care to see, is what it’s actually like to be a creator.
The unglamorous grind. The endless platform-hopping, content repurposing, trend-chasing desperation just to remain relevant. The constant anxiety that, at any moment, an invisible algorithmic hand could throttle your reach, and make your rent check vanish along with it.
These people, they don’t see the writer churning out clickbait because it pays better than thoughtful work, nor the musician watching Spotify funnel 99% of revenue to industry giants while they scrape by on fractions of pennies per stream. And they also don’t see the artist drowning in invoices for software subscriptions.
Man, have you seen my post about Exa Websets?
I got sucker-punched into buying a $200 subscription for yet another deep-learning tool, one I thought I had free access to after extensive beta testing. For my research, I’m glad I can use Gemini 1.5 Pro with Deep Research costing me $20, but $200? That’s a whole freaking new level. For that kind of money, I’d rather get ChatGPT Pro with their unlimited Deep Research. But altogether, my subscriptions stack up to four or five hundred bucks a month. On software. Just because I feel the need to stay sharp, keep up with what’s new, and test this stuff for what it’s actually worth.
And yet, somehow, I’m still doing better than the lonely creators on OnlyFans, who are desperately and trying to screw their way on top, only to remain lying dormant at the bottom.
Literally.
These people, they don’t see the writer churning out clickbait because it pays better than thoughtful work, nor the musician watching Spotify funnel 99% of revenue to industry giants while they scrape by on fractions of pennies per stream. They don’t see the endless grind of content production, the soul-numbing realization that the only thing separating success from obscurity is a cold, indifferent piece of math that couldn’t care less whether you’re baring your soul or just baring everything else.
Where did this whole Creator Economy thing come from?
It started, just like any other revolution, with a handful of internet weirdos, like you and I, who were posting homemade content online. And the world turned that into a full-blown economic system, one that Silicon Valley couldn’t resist slapping a price tag on. And now, everyone with a half-decent camera and a questionable life decision can try their luck in the gladiator pit.
You can be your own boss.
Set your own hours.
Burn out on your own terms.
The promise was freedom.
But the reality is a freaking hamster wheel that is greased with desperation with a whiff of exhaustion.
For a while, it looked like a revolution though.
YouTube paid out ad revenue. Instagram turned influencers into gods. Patreon promised a world where fans directly funded their favorite artists. But every utopia has an expiration date, and the platforms figured out pretty quickly that creators were more valuable when they were struggling. When they had just enough hope to keep posting, but not enough stability to walk away.
So the rules started shifting.
Monetization got harder.
Organic reach got strangled. Algorithms demanded constant sacrifice, and were rewarding those who played by their rules which are always changing.
And despite all-o-that, the market keeps booming. Because for every creator who burned out, ten more lined up to take their place. The industry ballooned to a staggering $143 billion in 2024, set to hit a mind-melting $1.4 trillion by 2034. The dream is too intoxicating to die. There’s always another hopeful artist, another aspiring influencer, another ex-corporate drone chasing escape. Never mind that the median creator makes less than $300 a month. Never mind that only the top 1% ever break through. The gig economy may have convinced people to hustle for scraps, but the creator economy took it one step further—convincing them to do it for love.
The platforms, of course, saw dollar signs.
They built entire business models around extracting wealth from the very people they claimed to support. Merchandise companies rake in hundreds of millions off creator-led branding. Subscription-based platforms skim revenue like the leaches they are. Even blockchain weaseled its way in. They were talking about decentralization but at the end they still were just in it to take its cut. And the platforms hold creators hostage. They are dangling visibility like a prize and making darn sure that no one gets it for free.
The demographic split of the creator economy is its own little irony.
Millennials dominate in this market. To me that proves once again that they’ll do literally anything to escape a traditional job. But the real thing is that there are more baby boomers in the game than Gen Z.
It turns out that even the retirement-aged crowd is sick of the system and willing to take their chances on TikTok. Slightly more than half of creators are men, which makes sense given that every second guy online seems to think he’s an undiscovered podcasting genius. And most creators have a modest following, like somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, and apparently all have the delusion that “one viral moment” can change everything. And that keeps them grinding.
Let’s talk about monetization.
Oh, it exists.
Just not in the way most people think.
The top earners secure lucrative brand deals, where they use their content into endless infomercials. The rest fight over the scraps. Affiliate marketing here, some merch sales there. YouTube doles out ad revenue like a Scrooge and Spotify pays musicians fractions of pennies per stream, and their executives sip champagne on yachts that are paid for with stolen royalties.
The real nightmare behind it, is that social factors are driving this nightmare forward. People are rejecting traditional work, and craving independence, chasing community. They want flexibility, purpose, and meaning. And platforms know exactly how to exploit that. They are selling a dream of autonomy, where authenticity has become a commodity, relatability is weaponized for profit, and somewhere along the way, the creator economy stopped being about creation and started being about survival.
The tech behind it all also keeps evolving. That is making it easier than ever to enter the game. AI speeds up content production. No-code platforms give creators more control. Video-first platforms dominate, because people can no longer handle reading words on a screen. But none of it changes the fundamental problem, which is that . . . .
The system isn’t built for creators to succeed. It’s built to keep them running, forever chasing, forever adapting, forever on the edge of making it.
Research for this piece-o-crap.
Here’s a fun little statistic
The median creator makes less than $300 a month. Let that sink in.
Three.
Hundred.
Dollars.
And that’s before the platform fees, before the taxes, before the costs of software, marketing tools, the energy bill, hardware, and whatever else we’re told we must invest in to “make it”. Meanwhile, the top 1% are building mansions, hoarding attention, and soaking up brand deals and the rest of us sit in sinking rowboats, and trying to bail out water with our bare hands.
But sure, tell us again how your platform is different.
Want to actually help creators?
Here’s an idea.
Stop designing systems that exist solely to profit off our labor. Stop slapping “engagement metrics” and “data insights” on everything like they are gifts when they are just more ways to quantify and control us. Stop pretending that taking a 10% cut of our barely-survivable income is a service.
If you actually cared (which I know you don’t, but let’s indulge this fantasy for a second), you wouldn’t be building yet another middleman platform. You would be tearing down the barriers between creators and their audiences. You would be handing us the keys to our own businesses instead of charging us rent to access the people who already want to support us. You would be investing in tools that remove friction, not add new ones. You would be designing systems that give us control over our own algorithmic destiny instead of locking us in a cage and demanding that we dance for your scraps.
But no.
That would be too much like actually solving a problem.
So go ahead, keep your Patagonia vest-wearing pitches. Keep your shiny “creator-first” platforms. Keep pretending that you’re here to help when yall are doing is adding another layer of extraction to an already suffocating system.
And the rest of us, well, we will do what we’ve always done. We’ll create despite the machine. We’ll adapt to whatever new hellscape gets thrown at us. And we will survive. And it’s not because of your grand vision, but in spite of it.
The creator economy doesn’t need another messiah. It needs fewer parasites.
And until that happens, the only thing being democratized is suffering.
Shutting down the one place where I can write for free, which is exactly what my stuff is worth.
Marco.
Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Stick around if you like what I write. If not, don’t worry, the AI already already knows you were here.
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