🔴 The best of Creator Spotlight 2025

We’ve published 51 (!!!) episodes of our podcast this year. And a further 39 written-only issues of our newsletter.

It’s a hefty collection; you probably missed some of our best work this year.

So, for the last Friday edition of the year, we collected it for you.

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

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By Francis Zierer

The creators we profile are united in being entrepreneurs.

They may come from different backgrounds, create different media products, and focus on different subject areas, but they’re all trying to make a living publishing content on the internet.

This is a creator: a type of worker who posts.

In our interviews, we seek to catalogue as many versions of this worker as possible, to learn from them alongside you. In our original essays and reporting, we seek to synthesize those learnings for you.

Below are five instances where we delivered on that goal this year.

By both unique opens (the number of people who opened the email) and total opens (the number of times the email was opened), our most popular issue this year was Equity and exits for creators.

One thing I know about our audience as a whole — your favorite Creator Spotlight topic is money. Revenue. Income.

Across the newsletter and the podcast, issues and episodes get more clicks when the title mentions specific dollar amounts or, as in this case, a way to build wealth. A creator is a type of worker where the upside can hit elastic highs, as Spotlight readers aim to do.

In this piece, I wrote about the idea that, for a creator who trades on their face or persona, “exit” means the ability to make a living leveraged by their career as a creator but no longer reliant on their face or persona.

How do creators achieve such an exit in practice? Read the piece.

Newsletters live and die by the subject line. Tyler Denk, beehiiv’s CEO, once told me (I’m paraphrasing here) that the trick is to write a clickbait subject line that actually delivers on the bait. In other words, Equity and exits for creators may have been a great issue, but all I know for sure is that it was an effective subject line.

The best piece we published this year, if you ask me, was Assistant Editor Natalia Pérez-González’ Why Chicago is a great creator city. By unique opens, it ranked 19th out of 89 issues we’ve sent so far this year (one more to come on Tuesday).

Why was this piece so good? It’s a portrait of how creators, capital, and the people connecting them form a local ecosystem that grows itself.

Recent Spotlight guest Brett Dashevsky says New York City is the center of the creator economy, but as this still-young industry matures, local ecosystems like the one Natalia identified in Chicago will grow in cities all over.

Natalia’s piece is useful if you’re in Chicago and want to join this scene — it’s all the more useful if you’re looking for a model to foster a creator-economy scene wherever you may live.

Creators, by our definition, work online. But they’re made stronger by in-person bonds.

These are the three podcasts that more of you watched and listened to than any other. Unsurprisingly, they’re all from the first half of the year — while the newsletters don’t get many new opens after the first week or so, podcast listenership compounds over time.

Listen | Read

This is an episode about a hobby turning into a creator business leveraging multiple platforms and revenue streams. Is there a more classic creator narrative? This is a dream for so many: monetize your passion by making content about it.

Sydney makes a living selling sewing patterns to her audience of over 600,000 social media followers (at the time we published the episode in July).

The core story here is how she added over 100k YouTube subscribers in one year through specific, replicable video formats.

I just checked — Sydney’s YouTube following has grown a further 52k (from 118k to 170k) since we first spoke.

If you’re trying to grow a YouTube channel, listen to this episode.

Listen | Read

This is an episode about using the skills and expertise developed in a corporate career to build a new career as a B2B creator.

In our recent monetization report, we found the 30% of respondents earning six figures or more place LinkedIn among their top platform priorities, compared to just 8% of those earning under $500. Creators on LinkedIn can attract high-value brand deals because of the niche, business-focused audiences they’ve developed.

The title of this episode was a prediction, but earlier this month, Jayde confirmed she had surpassed that $250k goal. She did so primarily through brand partnerships, fractional marketing work, and speaking engagements.

If you’re trying to build a creator brand based on professional skills, listen to this episode.

Listen | Read

This is an episode about how to start, scale, and sell a newsletter business. There are all sorts of newsletters out there — non-monetized personal blogs, paid-subscription journalism, and everything in between.

Mindstream is a shining example of the post-Morning Brew model, which is to say, it’s an archetypal beehiiv newsletter. From the start, it had multiple people (Adam focused on growth, while his childhood friend Matt Village focused on editorial). They were acqui-hired by HubSpot after only 17 months.

Adam is a great guest, speaking transparently throughout this episode about how they grew.

If you’re trying to grow a newsletter-based business, listen to this episode.

This is our second-to-last issue of the year.

Thank you for subscribing, for reading, for watching, for listening, for opening our emails, for clicking through to check out our sponsors, and for keeping Creator Spotlight in your rotation this year.

We can’t do what we do without folks like you showing up and engaging. It’s as simple as that.

On Tuesday, on the podcast feed, Assistant Editor Natalia, Podcast Editor Tom, and I sit down together for the first time to chat about patterns we noticed this year and what we think we’ll see in the creator economy next year.

One pattern, as evidenced in this collection of top content — a creator, truly, is an entrepreneur. It’s honest work.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

P.S. One request. Is there a creator you’d love to see us cover next year? A type of creator? A topic you’d like us to essay on, a trend you’d like us to report on? Just reply to this email and let me know.