🔴 Introducing the Creator Spotlight Monetization Trend Report

We’ve interviewed 49 creators and counting this year.

Some monetize through ads. Some through subscriptions. Then there’s Adam Biddlecombe, who sold his newsletter to HubSpot 17 months after launch. There’s Sydney Graham, a YouTuber who generates 85% of her income from sewing pattern sales. 

Through the end of the year, we’ll be gathering monetization insights from top-earning creators and industry experts across platforms for our first Creator Trend Report.

Most importantly, we want to hear from you and your fellow creators. How are you making money? We’re surveying our readers! Share your experience here. Results to be published in December.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Since I joined Creator Spotlight in March, I’ve written about newsletter operators who've scaled to six figures, learned what a sustainable creator business looks like, and watched LinkedIn continue its emergence as a revenue driver.

Across the board, creators are becoming more savvy and sophisticated in their operations — shifting from constant posting to flexible consulting, collaboration, and equity-based models.

For years, work was structured into a few rigid categories: you were an employee, a freelancer, or out of the workforce entirely. Now, there’s a booming demand for “flexible senior talent,” and consulting and fractional leadership are redefining how people, and creators, build careers and reclaim their time.

As the $250+ billion creator economy matures — possibly doubling by 2027 — creators are earning more while posting less.

Take Jayde Powell, whom we interviewed about her journey to $250,000 in annual revenue. Her career trajectory is a deliberate shift from full-time social media management to creatorpreneur with fractional strategy work; she’s charging premium rates with reduced hours, offering a blueprint for financial independence that doesn’t require grinding until burnout. Her exit strategy centers around a concrete goal: retire by 40.

This suggests a new paradigm for career planning among creators. As the creator economy professionalizes, I think we may see more creators adopting similar strategic approaches to founders and executives — designing exit strategies, setting revenue goals, and building toward freedom, not fame. The next phase of the creator economy may not be as defined by virality or follower count, but by how creators architect their labor and assets.

The newest wave of “creator exits” is about reconfiguring ownership. Brands like HubSpot, Semrush, and Kajabi are acquiring creator-led media properties to bring trusted voices in-house, blending community credibility with corporate scale.

Former Spotlight guest Adam Biddlecombe sold his AI-focused, 100K+ subscriber newsletter, Mindstream, to HubSpot just 17 months after launching it — demonstrating that tech companies are buying into expertise and trusted relationships, not just large audiences.

Caspar Lee, who had 15 million followers across platforms at his peak, engineered a different kind of exit: he stopped creating content and built four creator economy businesses instead. His influencer marketing agency employs 180 people, his talent management company represents other creators, his venture capital fund invests in creator tools, and his student housing venture utilizes social-first marketing — none require him making content foregrounding his face.

What’s emerging is a class of hybrid deals: creators who sell while staying on as editorial leads, acquisitions structured more like partnerships than buyouts, and corporate-owned creator media models that blur the line between employment and ownership. Think of it as the next evolution of the fractional creator economy — creators becoming shareholders, consultants, and brand operators all at once.

I'm particularly interested in tracking how these structures evolve, and whether they genuinely build wealth for creators or create new forms of dependence on institutional capital.

Liz Kelly Nelson and Lex Roman’s Creator Journalist Bundle — $15/month for their combined newsletters, access to a Slack community, live sprints, and cross-promotion tools — represents something fundamentally different from traditional bundling strategies. It’s a recognition that in a saturated attention economy, collaboration creates more value than competition for the same subscriber dollars.

This collaborative approach mirrors what successful creator businesses already look like at scale. Kajabi's data shows that six-figure creators are not relying on single revenue streams — they're combining courses, coaching, communities, memberships, and digital downloads, with the most successful maintaining an average of five different streams. Liz and Lex's model extends that principle from individual product diversification to collective infrastructure.

What journalists lost when newsrooms collapsed — health insurance, legal support, editorial oversight, retirement plans — creators are now reconstructing through voluntary collective action.

Brandon Smithwrick has earned approximately $30,000 a month from LinkedIn this year. Jayde Powell scaled to $50,000+ quarterly working less than 30 hours per week, primarily through LinkedIn. Sophie Miller built Pretty Little Marketer into one of the most active communities on the platform.

LinkedIn rewards consistent, value-driven content in ways that other platforms don't. Since 2022, LinkedIn has seen a 41% increase in original content sharing, with more than 18 million users activating Creator Mode.

It works as a creator platform because who is in your audience matters more than how large that audience is. The B2B creator landscape is lucrative and rewards hyper-specific influence: a hundred marketing directors are worth more than a thousand general followers. The professional context means audiences come ready to invest in expertise, courses, consulting, and tools that solve business problems.

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These four trends — fractional creator work, evolving exit strategies, collaborative bundling, and LinkedIn monetization — represent patterns I'm seeing, but they're not the full picture.

Whether you're earning $1,000 or $100,000 as a creator, whether you're working solo or building a team, whether you're thriving or struggling, we’d love to hear from you.

Are you working less and earning more? What’s your primary medium and revenue stream?

Tell us more. Your responses will directly shape the next phase of this research. It’ll take you less than five minutes to fill out our survey: