Everything that Built the Creator Economy is Trying to Kill It
The future may be direct-to-fan instead of direct-to-consumer, but the hurdles in place are more seismic than ever
Beware all studies. A good piece of advice that most data analysts will remind you of whenever you bring up a recently published report from some group. Be extra suspicious of studies published by companies with invested interest in their own bottom line. All that said though, sometimes the interests of companies and my interests in how our attention patterns shift because of said companies' incentives crossover. Case in point: Patreon’s new report on the creator economy’s “hopeful” future that must exist not on the backs of platforms but in spite of them.
Nothing’s too surprising in Patreon’s report, but sometimes the beating heart of any trend story is repeating a clear problem over and over and over again. Attention is consolidating as the number of apps where people spend the majority of their time slims down to a few. Those few may change (ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than Instagram or TikTok), but more people are spending less time with a wider array of sites. Since these apps are also designed to extend “session times,” the structure isn’t necessarily conducive to creators — even though it’s because of the litany of creators that these apps have enough content to keep pulling audiences back in.
Instead, the structure is designed to remove unnecessary steps to finding something to watch, providing just enough balance between well known creators and topical interests to keep audiences scrolling and, most importantly, not direct people outside the app unless it’s for advertising purposes.
In last week’s Halftime, I said that X all-but-evicted journalists, academics, and researchers from the platform because their incentive is to use X as a promotional vehicle for work that exists elsewhere. That doesn’t work in the new app economy, which is to provide everything people need within one space. It’s not just the Instagrams, TikToks, X’s, and YouTubes of the world either; Google Search uses Overview AI to rip content from publications and sites like Reddit to provide an answer directly within the main Google Search window. What was once the gateway to the internet is now a fully stocked self-serve service station alongside the highway. Not only does this make creators more reliant on the whims of the dominant platforms to earn revenue, but those same platforms are no longer prioritizing creators so much as content.
Just look at some important details from Patreon’s report:
57% of people’s time on TikTok is spent watching content from creators they don’t follow or don’t know
More than half of creators surveyed said it’s harder to reach fans than ever before, but nearly 60% of creators say that connection is more important than ever
Nearly 80% of creators say that “the algorithm” impacts what they create
56% of creators say that “the algorithm” prevents them from creating what they want
Less than 25% of fans on Instagram spend time in their “Following” feed versus relying on the algorithmic feed; this is less than YouTube (32%) and TikTok (38%)
Again, beware studies from companies with vested interests. The report ends on the creator economy's future, pointing to sites like Patreon, Substack, and others that cater to direct relationships with fans — and specifically “core fans” — allowing creators to make a more sustainable career. There is an increase of 67% in creators who report earnings from subscriptions and memberships compared to five years prior, according to Patreon.
Seeing that increase in direct to consumer relationships between creators and fans is great…but it also ignores the obvious elephant-sized hurdle facing all these creators and all these fans: getting a fan to seek out stronger opportunities to connect with creators is difficult enough because of the platforms’ designs to not have them leave a centralized space, but getting a segment of fans to move over from one platform to another is increasingly difficult.
Ironically, considering the direction of Patreon’s report, the data only doubled down on what we’ve all kind of known for some time: the creator economy is unsustainable in its current structure. Before reflecting on where we’re going and how we can possibly change it, we have to quickly look at how we got here in such a short amount of time.
From Content to Creators to Content
Underlining the message of every platform that caters to individual creators is the oft-spoken sentiment that over the last couple of decades, power has shifted away from the institution to the talent. NBA players are bigger than the NBA and journalists are more trusted than their publications are just two examples that Instagram chief, Adam Mosseiri, mentioned in a recent Instagram Stories Q&A. Anyone who’s read about or studied the earliest days of Hollywood’s studio system will recognize this line of thinking. Movie stars like Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, and Rock Hudson were bigger than the studios, which is why those very studios chased after exclusivity deals for the most shining stars. Mediums change, but attitudes don’t.
These systems, like all systems defined by their curve, exist because of power law structures. The NBA is still bigger than 80% of its players. The New York Times is still more recognizable than a portion of its staff. There are always extraordinary outliers, but the remarkable few don’t replace the vast majority of other contributors. These points, however, often failed to get mentioned by the Mosseris of the world. But why would they go out of their way to point out the obvious: most individuals are not going to appear on the left side of the line below in the chart. That’s okay — exceptionality, not defined by talent in this scenario per se but by audience size, exists because it sits outside of the norm.
You may be sick of hearing it at this point, but everything comes back to empires and islands. Most of these exceptional creators (islands) found their audiences through the websites, publications, organizations, and platforms (empires) that draw a collectively larger, broader audience. What the creator economy has allowed for is hyper specific followings around more personal interests. So, yes, you can love LeBron James and Bad Bunny without being a dedicated NBA viewer or a diehard latin music lover. But as these creators are coming up, they find their audiences through those bigger gateways. The same goes for the biggest YouTube creators, many of whom learned to game the algorithm or collaborated with different creators to increase their audience. They’re still being discovered through a much larger system, even if they end up building mini fan-driven empires of their own.
Let’s use journalism as an example because it’s one of those careers that is rapidly changing and, unlike Hollywood or sports, success of an individual is less tied to institutional access. Actors who want to be in movies still need (right now, at least) to find their way into a film with a production company and a distributor. NBA players still, you know, need to sign with one of the 30 teams. Journalists, however, can theoretically find an audience through smaller empires (Substack, Beehiv) rather than get their foot in the doot at the Washington Post or The Guardian.
We’re in this weird in-between moment of the next creator era and our bygone one, and you can kind of see that just by looking at the successful journalists who have managed to go independent successfully. Casey Newton (The Verge, now Platformer), Ryan Broderick (Buzzfeed, now Garbage Day), Taylor Lorenz (New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and now User Mag), Ken Klippenstein (The Intercept, The Nation, and now his own Substack), and Nate Silver (Five Thirty Eight, now Silver Bulletin) found their audiences through a combination of traditional journalism roles and early adoption of social media.
They are the group to the left in the chart below. Other journalists, who either don’t want to assume the risk of going independent, prefer being part of a larger collective, or don’t think they’d make comparable income if they left their publication sit in the blue circle. Effectively, do you think you can mobilize your audience from the larger discovery engine to a smaller, creator-led publication?
The “going independent” crowd exists alongside the “ruling a new platform” crowd. Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At), Emily Sundberg, and Matt Stoller (Big) don’t come from traditional journalism backgrounds, but have found huge success through tackling new subject matters (like AI) and by figuring out how to make new media businesses work on new platforms, like Substack. But while focus may be shifting away from the empires (Gawker, Buzzfeed, Vice) to the islands (individual journalists), the new platforms building their new media empires on the backs of the creator economy are effectively working to push people back to new institutions.
Instagram wants to support creators, absolutely. So does Substack. But as Patreon’s data shows, more people are seeing content from people they don’t follow, meaning they’re less inclined to find people to follow. And Substack is rewarding people for spending time in its app, scrolling through a feed and following rather than subscribing, making the free activity of the writers more prominent than the works.
As User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz wrote, “Substack's whole appeal to creators is that their creative labor is worth something, and creators should own the fruits of that labor, namely the connections with their audience. Substack successfully differentiated itself from other platforms with this value proposition and attracted a vibrant array of talented creators as a result.
“With the follow button, however, Substack contradicts their core principle of creator ownership, instead recreating the very kind of walled garden their founders originally opposed.”
Although the future of these UGC empires is reliant on the creators who choose to produce labor for these distribution platforms to connect with audiences, those same content empires become more and more hostile to the individual creator’s mission by focusing on more generalized attention within these walled gardens. As power laws start to become more apparent as these sub industries — like individual newsletters — continue to grow in supply, we’re starting to see a “new” model emerge with publications like 404 Media, Defector Media, Discourse Blog, and Aftermath: small blogging collectives that compound a few specific niche reporting beats and strong personalities that border the content/creator line in a power law chart. Notably, these are different from the Puck, Ankler, and Free Press type publications that have outside financial backing on top of paid subscriptions.
I’m throwing “new” in quotations because this was basically the model for magazines. High profile writers on specific beats based around macro topics (tech, culture, politics) that subscribers pay for access to each month. What’s old is new again, but it feels even more revolutionary in this post-fully ad supported digital media world (Vice, Buzzfeed, Vox) and the $5 a month individual creator subscription world. One individual might not be able to mobilize an audience or sustain the type out output needed to generate comparable income to a more traditional role, but a group of creators makes that value line easier to reach.
But again, crucially, these new models are only as viable as the platforms investment in individual and small creators being able to find an audience and that audience being incentivized to pay for a product (Substack) or actually hit the follow button (TikTok, Instagram) to create a meaningful difference to their businesses. What’s adamantly apparent from the increase in multi-platform strategies and monetization efforts from creators outside of their go-to app for audience development is that these platforms aren’t interested in that creator’s development outside of its own walls.
Patreon’s report ends on a hopeful note about how platforms like its own alongside Substack, Discord, and others will help better the creator economy — an industry that is expected to surpass $231 billion in 2027, an increase of nearly 20% compared to 2025. My question is relatively simple: are those platforms invested in individual creators or are they invested in the flow of content? If it’s the former, the data tells us over and over again that audiences aren’t going to jump around the internet for multiple creators. Why should they? Those apps are designed to maximize the flow of content.
The Story in the Data
In 2022, Patreon revealed its first ever creator census. More than 40% of all annual income comes from Patreon, according to the “thousands” of census respondents. Around 38% of respondents said they used Patreon for their video-focused businesses (think visual essays), with 70% of creators saying that members chose to pay a monthly subscription fee to access exclusive content. Nearly 60% of those fans said they also subscribed for early content. Unsurprisingly, this data doubles down on Patreon’s “core fans” thesis, which is in itself a version of Nick Wolny’s “thousand fans” hypothesis.
That said, however, Patreon’s census also reports that the vast majority of respondents don’t use Patreon as a discovery platform. And that’s because it’s not. Patreon exists to help support creators who are finding audiences on larger platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. It’s the smallest audience who converts to being paid members. Not surprising! Patreon calls these core fans, but the idea is that if you have enough of a core fan base then you can supplement your income elsewhere. Patreon creators on average earn between $315 and $1,575 a month, according to UScreen, and the biggest complaint members have is over the fees Patreon takes. They’d rather their $5, $50, or $500 go directly to the creator, but Patreon is a for-profit business.
If Patreon is designed to supplement a creators’ income, and if creators are reliant on other distribution networks that prioritize walled garden experiences, then the only question that really matters is how likely audiences seeing content on one app are likely to jump to another website to support the creator. We already know from Patreon’s own report that audiences are less inclined to follow a creator on video centric apps like Instagram and TikTok as algorithmic “for you” pages take over following feeds, which also decreases a creator’s overall reach and visibility.
Apps like Instagram and TikTok actively discourage linking out to other platforms, especially each other’s. Instagram does not allow clickable links in posts; stories are ephemeral and bios aren’t visited often, according to third party analysis. TikTok allows creators to put links to their external sites (like OnlyFans or Patreon) in their bio, but reportedly restricts linking to Instagram and YouTube in some regions. It’s important for these platforms to have creators succeed on their platform, thereby meaning all attention directed elsewhere takes away from maximizing time spent on their own app, and that’s the biggest problem they’re all trying to combat.
Then there’s the sheer problem of size, or supply. Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, found in a new report that the average YouTube video in 2024 sees around 500 views, according to the BBC. Some of these videos are uploaded to YouTube as a means to create a public access arm without that business being a core part of the company or organization’s operations. Think of museums and schools that often upload lectures. Not competing for dollars, but certainly cutting into overall attention even at the most niche level.
Since YouTube is also acting as an archival platform, a marketing arm for larger media players, a dumping ground for random users, and a competition stage for creators, the number of videos has increased tenfold. In 2022, YouTube hosted roughly 9.8 billion videos, according to Zuckerman; by 2024, that number increased to 14.8 billion, representing a 60% jump in just over two years. The growth curve from YouTube’s earliest days to today, seen in the chart below, illustrates the extraordinary hold that YouTube has on audiences — one that isn’t slowing, unlike competitors like Instagram.
Not only are platforms thinking about how to keep viewers engaged with the platform as a whole, but the competition to find those viewers, especially as algorithmic feeds reduce discovery to what you’re served instead of what you stumble upon, increases by a significant percentage with every passing year. A monopoly on online video also means YouTube is the only real place to find an audience. I drew up this exact strategy in a Posting Nexus essay a few weeks ago while talking about why podcasts work so well for the site:
While Patreon is a truly fantastic appendage for creators to better support themselves, it doesn’t solve the problem of finding audiences, fighting against disincentive structures put in place by the platforms to keep viewers within their own walled garden, and converting a small percentage of an audience to paying members.
Two things can be true at once: the future for creators to find sustainable revenue exists in these separate membership platforms where creators can directly charge for their content; also the only discovery apps for those creators are fighting tooth and nail to keep audiences from ever leaving their ecosystem. Something I keep coming back to is Emily Sundberg underlining the reality that independent media needs legacy media and vice versa. One can’t exist without the other in 2025.
The same is true for creators. If the Instagrams, YouTubes, and TikToks of the world want creators to continue putting in the effort of full-time labor to produce videos, they need to make it easier for those creators to survive off of smaller audiences. That only happens by encouraging core fans to follow their absolutely favorite creators to third-party websites where those creators can maintain a stronger direct-to-fan relationship rather than the simple direct-to-consumer one that isn’t working as the creator economy grows.
I’m not trying to paint a picture of a dying creator economy. But I do think we’ll start to see a concentration in the number of creators who can afford to do it full-time and I think we’ll start to see a new middle class appear within said creator economy. What creators need to keep in mind, always, is that even platforms like this one that hosts these essays are solely thinking about time spent on the app. Executives know they need creators to continue pulling in that attention and increasing time.
But if there are enough creators to satisfy enough audiences, then the immense success of an individual is less important than the adequate success of many. Maybe that’s just signs of an industry maturing. If that’s the case, it’s time for us to talk about reimagining what success as a creator means. Again, that doesn’t mean bad. But it does mean different.