🔴 The 2025 monetization report

We surveyed 427 creators for our 2025 Monetization Report — a mix of newsletter operators, video creators, podcasters, and social media builders across every experience level.

Nine percent of creators who responded will make over $100k this year. Meanwhile, nearly half of creators earned less than $500 this year.

These numbers track with other studies we found.

The results paint a clear picture of a $250 billion industry, with most of that wealth concentrated at the very top. This isn't news, exactly. We've heard this story before.

Our data reveals what actually separates those who break through from those who are still building.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

You built something people actually want to read. Now let advertisers compete for it.
With Google AdSense, you’re connected to millions of advertisers from around the world, so your ad space always goes to the highest—and most relevant—bidder.

Blogger Of Life and Lisa put it best: “I’m able to show ads from advertisers I never would have connected with otherwise.” Because with AdSense, every niche has global appeal.

Maximize ad competition, and your earnings, with Google AdSense.

This is an advertisement.

By Natalia Pérez-González

A brief note on methodology: We sent a 28-question survey, using Tally, to nearly 300,000 of the most-engaged Creator Spotlight subscribers; the results below are self-reported data reflecting the creators in our audience. Respondents are full- and part-time creators aged 18 and older, primarily based in North America, across a range of experience levels and income brackets.

Of our 427 respondents, nearly half earned below $500 in 2025 from their creator work. Another 92 earned between $1k and $5k. If you’re a creator earning $30k this year, you've earned more than 80% of our sample.

The top tier is tiny. Only 37 creators (8.7%) reported earning six figures or more.

In a positive signal for our data’s relevance to the broader creator economy, this distribution mirrors what we’ve seen in other industry research.

In Influencer Marketing Hub's 2025 Creator Earnings Report, more than half of creators still earned under $15,000 a year, even as the creator economy surges to $250 billion. A G2 analysis found that about 4% of creators earn over $100,000 annually, indicating significant monetization potential but also underscoring how few have reached that level.

When we isolated the 37 creators in our survey earning $101k or more, a few patterns emerged:

When we compared platform usage by income bracket, creators capitalizing on LinkedIn and newsletters were ahead of the margin.

Creators like former Spotlight guest Jayde Powell, who made $40,000 from LinkedIn brand deals alone in 2024, had earned over $50,000 through work centered on the platform in Q1 2025 (at the time of our interview) — all while working fewer than 30 hours per week. By the end of 2025, she’d projected to hit $250,000. Last week, she told us she’d reached her goal (and that brand deals were her biggest driver).

Creators in our study who own their audience — meaning they have email addresses for a significant portion of followers — are 2.7x more likely to earn $31k or more than those who are fully platform-dependent.

We've written extensively about platform ownership versus platform dependence. Social followers aren't yours; they're rented from the platforms you’re building on. The only truly liquid form of content capital is an email list you control — one you can export and take anywhere, store on a hard drive, even print out.

Of course, not all formats pay equally.

Podcasters in our survey are more than 3x as likely to earn $31k+ as short-form creators, with YouTube following close behind. A few factors that likely contribute: 

That said, podcasting isn't a guaranteed path to income — there are millions of shows out there that don’t monetize. But for creators who've built an audience, long-form formats tend to convert more reliably than short-form. The takeaway isn't necessarily to switch mediums, but to consider how your format strategically supports your business goals and the relationships you want to build with your audience.

We asked creators to identify their biggest monetization challenge. The answers shifted slightly based on income level.

For those earning under $500, the biggest barriers to increased revenue were about access — getting discovered and landing that first deal:

For those earning $101k+, the barriers to increased revenue remained largely unchanged, except for the added challenge of managing time and capacity.

Regardless of income, audience growth and conversion remain top concerns — even creators earning six figures want greater reach. But the emergence of burnout as the second challenge for top earners is telling. The recent Content Creator Mental Health study found that burnout rates climb with tenure: 66% of creators with two years or less experience report burnout, rising to 80% among those with eight or more years.

Our survey respondents were roughly evenly split by gender — 51% male, 46% female. But among top earners, 84% are male. Among low earners, the split is more equal — 54% are female. This aligns with broader economic trends: women in top leadership positions earned $0.85 for every dollar a man earned and are largely underrepresented in leadership and executive roles.

The creator economy mirrors these systemic inequalities: unequal access to high-paying niches, less transparency in rate negotiations, and the lingering effects of which creator archetypes brands have historically valued. We don't have a tidy solution here, but ignoring the gap doesn't make it smaller.

The Content Creator Mental Health study reported that female creators are significantly more likely to want transparency in brand pricing (62% vs 44% of men), highlighting how they're navigating a less transparent market. Other industry research has found that male creators earn roughly 40% more per collaboration on average, even though women make up 70% of the influencer market.

Creators like former Spotlight guest Rachel Kisela founded their businesses to help fill this gap. As of 2022, Rachel shared with us, women accounted for only 24% of working video editors, while 77% of influencers were women who often needed to hire editors. Women have been getting left out of the conversation — and the money.

This striking imbalance prompted Rachel to found EditHers, a network and 223-member Discord (at the time we interviewed her) serving as an informal labor union for women editors. It’s this type of collective power that could reshape who gets paid, and a model for how creators can build protective infrastructure that the industry won’t.

If you're earning below $30k per year — the reality for 80% of our respondents — here's what our data suggests you should do:

If you're already in the $31k-$100k range — the scaling tier — the challenges shift:

Editor’s note: If you found this data helpful, we ask that you share it with your network — anybody you think could benefit from these learnings. And if you’d like us to do a follow-up next year, or other studies of our audience, please let us know! We love hearing from you.

Google AdSense connects you to millions of advertisers worldwide, so they compete to reach your audience. The result: smarter ads, stronger revenue, and zero effort on your end. Start earning more with AdSense.

This is an advertisement.