🔴 How four knowledge creators make money

This year, we’ve profiled several knowledge creators earning a living from their expertise — a space communicator filming inside NASA, a video journalist who left a six-figure network job, a pricing expert running five revenue streams at once, a finance educator who rebuilt his former tech salary.

We pulled their best tactics into a playbook organized around four kinds of knowledge content (education, analysis, reporting, and explainers) and how each makes money.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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A “knowledge creator” is a type of creator whose appeal lies in their subject matter expertise. They’re researchers and practitioners who use online content to teach and entertain.

Earlier this summer, Victoria Watters, co-founder of Dry Atlas, penned an article on Inc.com, chronicling the rise of this category of creator with a salient definition:

Some of my favorites are Carmen Vicente, a social strategist in tech who unpacks the workings of social algorithms; Sophie Miller of Pretty Little Marketer, the first guest in our Self-Timer series, who makes sense of what’s happening across social and marketing; and Brandon Smithwrick, another former Self-Timer guest, who sends weekly playbooks on content strategy, monetization, and brand deals through his newsletter, Content to Commas.

I like how they present as people, definitely, but I’m mainly following because I trust that I’ll always learn something valuable — something I can directly implement into my work.

I’d separate knowledge creator content into four categories, all based on audience intent.

Imran Mumtaz was making around $250k as an engineer at Amazon in 2022 when his department was shut down. He had two options — find another team inside the company or take four months of severance, which would come out to around $40k.

Spoiler: He took the severance.

His first year out, revenue landed around $75k, roughly a quarter of his old salary, almost entirely from brand deals. In 2025 he grossed around $250k and had replaced his former full-time revenue.

He runs two brands. As The Finance Engineer, 1.7M followers across platforms, he mixes personal finance education with comedy, delivering explainers on credit scores, high-yield savings, and what to do with your first $50k in under a minute. Rich Nerd, started in early 2023, has 140k followers and a live call-in show where he walks strangers through their finances on a whiteboard.

Sponsorships make up about 70% of Imran's monthly revenue, with affiliate marketing and platform ad revenue accounting for the rest.

These products he’s advertising are directly connected to what he's teaching. In one of his videos, he featured a high-yield savings account he personally used, tagged the bank, and caught its attention. The company reached out to work with him, marking his first brand deal.

For a long stretch, Imran had no strategy at all.

He went from 29.6k TikTok followers in January 2022 to 220k by spring 2023, then 400k four months later. His YouTube grew more slowly, hovering around 5k subscribers through the summer of 2023 before climbing to just shy of 500k.

He noticed a small number of videos were doing most of the growth work, and built variations of those formats. His most popular YouTube Shorts have 11M views each.

Put it into practice:

Kyle Poyar spent four years writing Growth Unhinged without generating any revenue. At the time, he worked for a venture capital firm, where the rules barred him from monetizing a side project.

The first time he sent a prospective advertiser his rates, they bought more than $100k of inventory without asking to get on a call. He hadn’t even set up an LLC yet. That same week, he quit his full-time job.

In his first full year as a solopreneur, he’s pacing toward $1.5M across five revenue streams, each already clearing six figures: advertising, paid subscriptions, consulting, speaking, and podcasting.

All of Kyle’s revenue streams work together. His writing attracts potential consulting clients; some become paid subscribers looking for deeper analysis, while others hire him directly. Consulting puts him in conversation with the people and industries he covers, giving him insights that make his writing more valuable.

As his reputation grows, so do advertising and speaking opportunities.

It's a cycle where the work that earns him money also improves the work that attracts new customers.

LinkedIn is at the top of Kyle’s content funnel, with 115,631 followers and over 14 million impressions in a year. This is where he tests ideas for his newsletter. The process goes:

He's developed a specific approach to LinkedIn, outlined in his post, “LinkedIn isn’t over, you’re just bad at it.” His advice includes engaging with other people's posts before publishing your own, creating original infographics that give readers a reason to stop scrolling, and sharing the full insight in the post rather than forcing people to click a link.

He also recommends posting two or three times a week, and has found that Sundays perform particularly well for him.

Rule of thumb: A post is a cheap test of an argument. An issue is an expensive one. Run the cheap test first.

Put it into practice:

Fernando Hurtado left his $125,000 job at NBC and Telemundo in January 2024 to become an independent journalist. He bought $9,000 worth of equipment on a credit card with zero interest for 12 months, giving himself a year to make his YouTube channel work before the interest kicked in.

Fernando's first major video, explaining “Why so many Americans speak Chicano English,” barely got a few hundred views in its first two days. Then it took off, passing 100,000 views. Within five days, he'd qualified for YouTube monetization and received five sponsorship offers.

He assumed the sudden demand justified premium rates. He held firm on his pricing, and all five brands passed on working with him.

The issue, he recalls, was a stubborn know-your-worth mindset, when he did not truly understand his nascent account and content’s worth in the eyes of serious advertisers.

After taking Colin and Samir's brand deal course, he got a better understanding of how to price his work. Five months after the viral video, he landed his first sponsorship with Amazon's This Is Small Business podcast, through a connection he'd made during his newsroom career.

In the first six months after securing his first sponsor, Fernando had to find a new sponsor for nearly every video. It was an exhausting cycle of pitching, selling, and starting over.

Now he sells packages of at least three videos, planned weeks in advance. Brands get more consistent exposure, and Fernando gets more predictable revenue. When we spoke, about 60% of his upcoming videos were sponsored, compared with just 10–15% during his first six months.

He's also expanded into short-form sponsorships after realizing that much of his speaking business came through TikTok and Instagram.

Fernando organizes his reporting around three subjects covering Latino life.

These content pillars help him decide which stories to pursue and make it easier for brands to understand his audience.

But sponsors don't get to choose the stories, the reporting, or the editorial direction — they're just paying for a 60–90-second ad read. It's a distinction Fernando understands from his newsroom days, where editorial and advertising operated separately.

Put it into practice:

Kobi Brown started posting short videos about space from his bedroom in early 2022. He was studying for a physics degree; building a given concept into a 60-second explainer made it easier for him to absorb.

Within his first 20 uploads, astronomers released a new image of a black hole. His quick video on the topic pulled nearly 50M views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Four years later, AstroKobi has 8.5M followers across platforms, and when the choice came down to a PhD or content creation, he took the “larger classroom.”

Explainers are among the most hackable content categories, because a chatbot, in theory, could answer any question on demand. Kobi has built his content and business to protect from that risk.

About 18 months ago, generative AI began flooding the space niche, eroding the things that once set Kobi apart, including the slick visuals and the clear style.

In response, he built a verification layer. He runs videos past a network of working scientists, many of them friends from his physics degree. He also writes rough Python simulations of a system’s true scale before handing them to his animators, so the picture stays honest once it’s made beautiful.

When an interstellar comet passed through the solar system last year, much of the space internet ran with the possibility that it was evidence of alien life. Kobi knew how to capitalize on the speculation: tease the possibility of aliens, withhold a definitive answer, and keep audiences coming back.

Instead, he published a long-form breakdown plus a few shorts, using 3D models to explain what scientists actually knew about the object, and moved on. He passed up follow-ups that could have earned millions of views and thousands of dollars.

Rule of thumb: Trust compounds. Accuracy might not always get the most views, but it's what gives people a reason to trust you the next time. And for a knowledge creator, that trust is the business.

AI can’t replicate Kobi filming with NASA, or watching a telescope’s first images come online in the Atacama Desert before they’re public. He’s been filming with NASA and the European Space Agency, and the business has shifted from explaining the news toward reporting from inside it.

But access doesn't automatically make someone credible. “Going to NASA doesn’t necessarily grant you accuracy and legitimacy,” he says.

That level of reporting and production takes a team. Eight to ten people work on the AstroKobi project in a typical month, including management, a freelance editor, a longtime thumbnail designer, and four animators. Kobi still handles the research, writing, presenting, and most of the editing himself.

Put it into practice: