🔴 Your favorite creators are burning out

Every creator knows the high of a record-breaking post, a notification bell that won’t stop ringing. Ten thousand views, one hundred thousand, more! My follower count doubled overnight.

Equally, we all know the pain of a follower count that won’t budge except to fall. Posts for nobody, rude comments.

I’ll admit, I’ve archived a post or three for not getting enough fanfare every now and then. Today, I analyze a comprehensive study on creator burnout.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Working as a creator is more isolating than bustling comment sections would have you think.

According to a recent report by Lupiani Insights & Strategies, conducted in partnership with C4MH (Creators for Mental Health), nearly two in three creators say they experience mental health challenges like anxiety and depression — nearly three times the national rate of U.S. adults (per CDC data). Rates climb even higher the longer creators have been in the game.

The part that struck me the most: only 8% of creators describe their mental health as "excellent." And for those who've been creating for eight or more years, that number drops to 4%. More experience accelerates burnout.

The study featured survey results from more than 500 full- and part-time creators aged 18 and older across North America, across a wide range of following sizes.

The main points:

Burnout isn’t unique to creators. Workplace stress is among the leading drivers of poor mental health in the United States. But creators are a workforce building a $250 billion industry with no benefits, no income floor, and no institutional support.

We’re all trying to get off social media.

Time on social peaked in 2022 — in fact, wanting to stop posting has become its own social status symbol, and posting too much is cheugy now.

Even younger influencers at their peak — the cohort of young stars minted in 2020 — have reached their own breaking points and scaled back for periods of time.

Earlier this year, Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s biggest star, with more than 156 million followers, said that she had “lost the passion” for posting content. Later this spring, Spencewuah, a 19-year-old TikTok star with nearly 10 million followers, announced he’d be stepping back from the platform after a spat with BTS fans. Monet McMichael, a BeauTuber turned thriving beauty TikToker, took a summer-long break from her usual cadence on both platforms.

In a recent edition of Kyle Chakya’s New Yorker column, Infinite Scroll, he spoke with Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner about the perks of having a low follower count, a finsta, or just posting haphazardly on Instagram without care for the like-to-follower ratio.

The C4MH study puts numbers to this rising collective sentiment: 72% of creators spend significant time on unpaid labor, with the majority of them experiencing financial instability. Culprits include: obsessive analytics checking, algorithm volatility, and the grind of building a business on rented land.

Creators who ranked lowest in the study’s emotional well-being score were significantly more likely to check their analytics multiple times a day, every day, and to spend more than 20 hours per week on unpaid work.

Taylor Cromwell, founder of Creator Diaries, knows the feeling. "I was kind of feeling like a slave to the algorithm," she told me. "Checking LinkedIn first thing when I wake up... I would listen to a great podcast and be like, 'Oh, I gotta make a post about that.' It was consuming my thoughts."

The disconnect between external perception and internal reality is part of what makes creator burnout so insidious. "Everyone was like, 'Oh, you're killing it on LinkedIn,'" Taylor said. "But I just didn't necessarily feel really good."

The mental health data reinforces what we've been hearing anecdotally: creators are lonely. 54% of creators say they want access to peer-support networks or creator communities. Yet only 27% are currently part of one, and a striking 66% have never been part of a creator community.

This year, we've covered communities extensively — not just as a growth lever or monetization stream, but as an antidote to the isolation that comes with building alone. Take it from former Spotlight guest Lex Roman:

Taylor echoed this sentiment. "An audience — they're just hearing from afar, like they're in the stands. A community is like they're in the room. They're able to talk to you, you're able to hear their inputs. That bi-directional aspect is what's so powerful."

The creators who are thriving aren't just making more money, they're making it in ways that don't require constant performance on platforms they don't control.

Financial instability was the single most-cited stressor in the report’s open-ended responses: 63% of creators are underpaid, and 42% face delayed payments from brands.

Kennedy Rose, creator behind Cozy K Games, had found herself strung out after leaving her corporate law job to pursue content full-time, chasing the same metrics she thought she'd escaped. "I was past burnout," she told me. "I had so much anxiety around proving myself as a full-time creator. Busyness was such a badge of honor. It was something I had to unlearn."

She’s since rejected the growth-at-all-costs model entirely. "The assumption is growth," she said. "The assumption is that everything is bigger and better each new year. And it's so hard to fight against that, because that is everybody else's definition of success in the industry."

So she redefined the metrics. "My goal is not to make more and more money every year. My goal is to make enough money to where I'm comfortable. And if my goal stays the same this year and the next year and the next year, that's okay with me."

Whether you're earning $100 or $100,000 as a creator this year, whether you're working solo or building a team, whether you're thriving or struggling, we’d love to hear from you.

It’ll take you 3 minutes to fill out our survey. We’ll publish the results in December, right here in the newsletter.