Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
The creator economy is thriving. There are more creators making more money than ever; there are also more creators making less money than ever. It’s a precarious industry for most participants.
I see five levels of protection and precarity, from survival to sovereignty. Each level grants a new level of freedom, empowerment, and autonomy.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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Creators are an unprotected class
Creators are the backbone of a thriving $250 billion industry that offers them no safety net.
The industry grew 60.8% between 2023 and 2024 alone, and it’s projected to hit $500 billion by 2027. However, the average U.S. creator earns $44,000 per year, or approximately $3,680 per month. It takes 18 months for most creators to fully support themselves, and 59% of beginner creators haven't monetized at all.
It’s the fastest-growing labor force, and also among the least protected.
So last Friday, when I sat in on a Press Forward Chicago panel with dozens of creators (shoutout to past Spotlight guest Liz Kelly Nelson, who helped assemble the core group of speakers), founders, media professionals, and local stakeholders, the conversation felt overdue: What would it look like for institutions, media organizations, and agencies to actually support the creators they worked with rather than just rely on them for content distribution?
Deborah Douglas, founding director of Northwestern's Medill Solutions Journalism Hub, put it plainly: "There needs to be an acknowledgement from the get-go that there is a power imbalance." One side has legal teams and institutional guardrails. The other side tends to be a team of one, fighting for a foothold.
Building a collective infrastructure
Our subsequent discussions centered on this: Creators need to be able to negotiate from positions of knowledge and expertise, which means building community-maintained salary databases, contract templates with red-flag checklists, negotiation frameworks, and clear payment timelines.
Some protective infrastructure is already emerging. Earlier this year, the Creators Guild of America launched the CGA Rider — the first-of-its-kind legal document that protects creators and streamlines deals. Essentially, it’s a standardized contract supplement specifically designed to protect digital creators. Major platforms, including Linktree, Beacons, and Whalar Group, have adopted it. The Rider establishes maximum payment windows, asserts creator ownership of content, requires brand approval before reusing work, ensures proper crediting, and restricts companies from feeding creator content into AI training systems.
As an account manager at Hauswirth Co — a Chicago-based marketing and communications firm — Ayoko Djsseglo handles the relationships between creators and clients, and walks creators through the landmines hidden in standard contracts:
Usage rights: Brands often bury vague terms about how long and where they can use your content. Ayoko advises to scrutinize anything related to usage and distribution. If it's unclear, ask.
Production costs: Always follow up on whether the brand will provide products, or if you’re expected to buy them yourself. Will you be reimbursed? And if so, when?
Payment timelines: Industry standard is 30-60 days, yet creators routinely wait three, four, five months for payment because there's no standardized timeline to reference in negotiations.
Contract-brief alignment: Ayoko flags this as a critical but often overlooked issue. Misalignment between what's in the contract and what's in the creative brief leads to scope creep, unpaid revisions, and blown deadlines.
"If you're getting the contract first but you don't understand what the brief looks like, ask what the parameters around the content are. You never know if something might change down the line."
Without shared standards, each negotiation becomes a test of individual leverage, with influence as your biggest bargaining chip.
A path towards creator actualization
Think of creator protections as a hierarchy. Where you are determines what you need next and your level of freedom, empowerment, and autonomy.
Level 1: Foundational protections
If you're here: You're building your creator career while handling everything solo — from health insurance to retirement planning to legal questions.
What to do:
Secure health coverage through the ACA Marketplace (Healthcare.gov, November 1 - January 15) or organizations like the Freelancers Union and Solo Health Collective.
Build an emergency buffer — Liz's framework advises calculating your exact monthly expenses and multiplying by six before going independent. Her and Lex Roman’s collective, Project C, also offers bundled subscriptions with collective benefits, including health insurance and liability coverage, as well as platform-agnostic support systems.
Level 2: Professional stability
If you’re here: You're building a steady income but still having to do some guesswork around rates and contracts, and perhaps are waiting months for payment.
What to do:
Build multiple revenue streams simultaneously — brand deals, subscriptions, affiliate income, digital products. When one stream underperforms, the others sustain you.
Break revenue goals into manageable chunks: $60,000 yearly becomes $15,000 quarterly, then $5,000 monthly. This gives you specific benchmarks to track.
Establish guardrails around when and how you get paid, and work with clients who meet those expectations. Document your rates and share them with other creators — collective knowledge is collective power.
Level 3: Growth and autonomy
If you're here: You're making income but are maybe stretched thin, vulnerable to platform changes.
What to do: Instead of competing, start collaborating through bundled subscriptions with complementary creators. Diversify across platforms — own your email list. You don’t own your audiences on social platforms, but email lists are truly yours — exportable and platform-independent.
Pool back-office operations with other creators to share accounting, legal, production, and admin costs. Define clear scope boundaries, including deliverables, revision limits, and additional charges.
Level 4: Creative fulfillment
If you’re here: You have stability but still defend your creative decisions and rates to brands who may not fully understand your value.
What to do: Protect your editorial independence in writing. Douglas advocates for clarity and transparency at every step of the process: "What is the expectation on ideation, script generation, filming and edits? How many edits do you get? It's got to be cut off at two." Beyond that, implement a rubric for additional charges.
Create work that demonstrates your expertise, and let your content do the pitching. Your portfolio shouldn’t be confined to a website, but extend to your social posts and responses to comments and DMs, showing brands and potential partners exactly what you bring to the table.
Level 5: Creative sovereignty
If you're here: You have the luxury to define success on your terms, whether that’s engineering a creator exit or building a sustainable, multi-stream solo practice.
What to do: Work only with brands whose values align with yours — former Spotlight guest Jayde Powell's three-part framework rings perfectly here: Is this something I actually want to do? Will my audience gain value? Are the brand's values aligned with mine?
Some creators want to build empires. Others, Liz said, "just want to write, reach the right audience, and pay their bills doing it." Both paths work. The goal shouldn’t be scaling for scale's sake, but rather achieving sustainability on your own terms.
"Your voice and your brand belongs to you. If they're contracting with you, they're contracting with that voice and that brand. They can't massage it into something different."
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Survey: How much money did creators make this year?
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.
