🔴 What is the creator middle class?

As recently as 2022, according to Pew Research Center, the American middle-income range was around $56,600 to $169,800 per year. This is for a household of three people.

Does this map to the creator economy? How can we define the creator middle class? And how can we strengthen the creator middle class?

— Natalia Pérez-González

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By Natalia Pérez-González

For most of the twentieth century, the American middle class was built inside corporations.

Then, pensions gave way to 401(k)s, which transferred retirement risk from employers to workers. Healthcare costs began outrunning wage growth, union membership collapsed, and corporate restructuring, offshoring, and a new investor focus on quarterly returns made layoffs routine. By the 2010s, the average American worker was changing jobs every four years, and by 2020, the pandemic forced round after round of mass layoffs, followed by wage stagnation that didn't keep up with inflation.

For increasing millions of people, the corporate path is no longer a reliable path to a middle-class life.

So they started businesses. U.S. small business registrations jumped from roughly 3.5 million a year pre-2020 to nearly 5 million a year now. Many of those are the creator businesses we cover: newsletters, consulting practices marketed on LinkedIn, podcasts with sponsorship revenue, and agencies built on a personal brand.

And all of these businesses are built, often completely, on tech platforms.

In a 2020 essay for the Harvard Business Review, "The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class,” venture capitalist Li Jin argued that the shape of the creator economy mirrored the shape of the U.S. economy — a few huge winners, a long tail barely surviving — and that platforms had the levers to change it.

She identified 10 levers, all platform-side, including:

Build a better platform, she argued, and a middle class would emerge. Six years on, platforms have moved in some of these directions; YouTube became friendlier to niche long-form creators, and TikTok's creator monetization shifted (imperfectly) toward views-based payouts.

And yet, while platforms have developed creator programs, 52% of creators report career burnout, and a G2 analysis found that only 4% of creators earn over $100,000 annually. Jin called for an expansion of the creator middle class. Six years on, has the creator economy developed in kind? Who is today's creator middle class (CMC)?

These numbers are all technically correct, but to get an accurate view of the creator economy as a whole, we need to weigh professional creator businesses by different metrics. A side-hustle creator business in its first year, for example, should not be measured the same as a full-time, seed-funded, expert-level creator business in its first year.

Media commentator Simon Owens argues for this distinction in his 2023 essay, "The Creator Economy ‘middle class’ does exist.”

The creator middle class, then, isn’t confined to a wage tier, but a point at which a creator-business has survived its startup phase and reached durable profitability.

To better understand the creator middle class, it helps to stop thinking solely in terms of content capital or visibility and start thinking in terms of tiers of economic stability.

Mirroring the broader American economy, the creator landscape has its own class system with a tiny elite at the top, a crowded base at the bottom, and an increasingly important middle in between.

1. Viral hopefuls. New creators posting for free. They're trading time for attention, chasing momentum, and learning the mechanics of distribution. Some will break through, and some won’t. This is the largest rung by population — tens of millions of people worldwide — and the one most creator-economy statistics are actually measuring when they publish doomsday numbers about median income.

2. Side hustlers. Creators earning inconsistent supplemental income. A few affiliate checks, occasional brand deals, freelance work tied to their audience. The ceiling is low, the floor is lower, and the income rarely covers what it costs to produce — but it's real money, and for a lot of creators this is the stage where content stops feeling like a hobby and starts feeling like a business. Promising and unstable.

3. Sustainable builders. This is the creator middle class. Niche audiences, modest scale, diversified revenue models: A newsletter with sponsors, a monetized YouTube channel, paid courses, a podcast paired with consulting, a service business.

These creators aren’t necessarily famous, but they can pay rent, save money, afford healthcare, and plan for the future. This is the rung where creator work becomes a durable small business. Owens makes this point, too: watch any studio tour of a top YouTuber and you see a bustling ecosystem around them — dozens, sometimes hundreds of employees handling every part of the operation.

4. Scaled operators. Full-time creators running real companies: employees, systems, meaningful leverage. They’re bringing in multiple six-figures or more. Their revenue comes from products, memberships, sponsorships, and owned distribution. The creator is still the center of gravity, but the business has outgrown what one person can do alone. This is also the rung that employs many people on rungs 1 through 3 — editors, producers, writers, managers, ops — its own quieter middle class within the creator economy.

5. Creator 1%. Celebrity-level creators with massive audiences and outsized economics. Talent managers, venture deals, product lines, global reach. Think your MrBeasts, Emma Chamberlains, Alex Coopers. This rung is made up of a few hundred people worldwide, yet it is the version of creator success that’s most visible and least representative of what creator work actually looks like.

The infrastructure sustaining the creator middle class now runs on a handful of overlapping layers, most of which didn't exist five years ago.

The conditions that have gutted our traditional middle class — wage stagnation, healthcare costs, housing costs, the cost of having kids — definitely don't disappear when you work for yourself, though they do change shape. A creator making $120,000 a year is still buying health insurance on the individual market, still without employer retirement matching, still without paid leave, still responsible for every dollar of self-employment tax.

Tools and services can make a business more viable.

Recently, I spoke to Avi Gandhi, a former talent manager and creator economy executive who spent years representing big-name creators — negotiating brand deals, structuring contracts, building businesses around people with millions of followers. Three years ago, he became a creator himself, and now produces a newsletter, Creator Logic, about the business of creator work.

His first year as a creator cost him around $12,000 — $6,000 on an accountant, $5,000 on his newsletter platform, and another $1,000 on membership experiments that didn't pan out.

Last week, he launched Creator Access Network (CAN), a membership organization he describes as a “Costco for Creators,” an attempt to compress that gap. For $199 a year, members get access to negotiated deals across more than 40 creator-focused companies — over $14,000 in discounts at launch.

(Full disclosure: Creator Spotlight is owned by beehiiv, and beehiiv is one of the companies participating in CAN. We were provided with a link for our readers to receive $100 off their first year of CAN; access here.)

Traditionally, creator platforms have been free to use up front and monetized through advertising. Creators professionalizing on YouTube or TikTok or Substack don’t pay until they start making money; then they enter a take-rate relationship with the platform.

The tools and services Gandhi’s CAN is packaging for creators are for prosumer and professional creators. They are not take-rate tools like traditional creator platforms, but they are necessary for the matured creator business.

Gandhi’s premise is that creators are small businesses first, content makers second, so CAN’s deals focus on providing infrastructure. He’s been in the industry long enough to see all the gaps in the system and experience many himself.

For example, Hollywood entertainment lawyers typically take 5% of client income, and only take on clients making north of $500,000 — those economics don't work for a creator making $80,000. Small business lawyers are the right price point, but may not understand brand-deal IP, platform terms-of-service disputes, or content collaboration contracts.

"Creators need a hybrid that, until recently, didn't exist," Gandhi told me.

Down the line, he wants CAN to offer owned-and-operated services, "the Kirkland label of the creator economy," as he put it to me. "In the same way that AAA has its towing service and AmEx has its credit card, I'd like to have some core services we provide creators ourselves,” he said. Like insurance, financing — business-level services that don't yet exist at the right price point for the tier.

If the creator middle class is to grow, its members will be those creators advanced enough in their operations to require such professional tools and services; matured small business owners with the expenses to show for it.