The creator economy has a new middle class
For years, quitting your job to become a social media influencer belonged in the same category as moving to Hollywood or trying to make the
For years, quitting your job to become a social media influencer belonged in the same category as moving to Hollywood or trying to make the NFL: technically possible but probably best attempted by other people.Now, for a growing number of young workers, it feels like a more plausible career pivot.The rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Amazon storefronts has created a new kind of white-collar exit strategy — one in which workers ditch office jobs not necessarily to become celebrities, but to piece together an income online through brand deals, affiliate links and highly personal videos documenting everyday life.In many cases, the followers necessary to sustain a living are smaller (and more attainable) than people might assume. A small but loyal audience can now generate enough income to rival a midlevel salary. Welcome to the middle-class creator economy.Last year, 25-year-old Abi Platock balanced a corporate marketing job in New York while posting online in her spare time. She built her audience by posting one or two videos a day, offering career advice, beauty tips and daily vlogs.“I signed my first brand deal in the four-figure range, and for me that was just such a big eye-opening moment,” Platock says of her partnership with deodorant brand Secret. She had only 8,000 followers on TikTok at the time. “You can totally make it work without having hundreds of thousands of followers.”Platock, who now has roughly 25,000 followers across platforms, has signed about $25,000 in brand deals so far this year and expects her annual creator income to reach around $50,000 by yearend.Also read | From Bhadohi to Brooklyn: India's small towns are set to go globalHer experience reflects a broader shift in. Brands are increasingly moving money toward so-called microinfluencers — smaller online personalities who have less than 100,000 followers.“They are hiring a bunch of microcreators at scale instead of hiring a handful of macrocreators for what could potentially be the same cost,” says Ali Grant, co-chief executive officer of the Digital Department, a creator management company.And they perform where it matters most: engagement. An engagement rate of 3% is considered strong, and some microinfluencers exceed 10%, Grant says of the closely watched metric that tracks how often followers interact with content through likes, comments, shares and saves.Microinfluencers average a 3.2% engagement rate, almost triple the 1.1% rate for macroinfluencers (more than 1 million followers), according to growth marketing agency ATTN.
And though macroinfluencers generate roughly six times more revenue, their associated costs can reach about 18 times higher, according to an American Marketing Association study.A TikTok partnership with a creator who has around 50,000 followers can run a brand more than $3,500 for a single post, Grant says; with 10 times the followers, that fee might just triple, to around $10,000.Leaning InBonsa Nemera spends his weekdays working 12-hour shifts at a government-run dental clinic in New York. In his spare time, he posts content on TikTok and Instagram spanning oral-care tips to food reviews for his roughly 100,000 followers. The 28-year-old resident dentist has a $76,000 annual salary and says he’s signed around $180,000 in deals from content work so far this year.“I almost doubled what I would have made in a year at my full-time job in two months,” he says.Nemera says his professional credibility resonates with both audiences and brands. His viewers are especially receptive to his personal finance content, where he offers money-management and investing advice, despite no formal training. The posts have landed him partnerships with major financial technology companies such as Inuit Inc.’s Credit Karma and Block Inc.’s Cash App. As his online presence grows, he says he expects to cut back on his hours practicing dentistry.“I treat content creation the same way I treat dentistry,” he says, “if not more seriously.”The influencer marketing economy ballooned to a projected $33 billion in 2025 up from $1.7 billion in 2015. The segment gained momentum after the Covid-19 pandemic, as dissatisfaction with traditional work pushed many to reconsider conventional career paths, says Brooke Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. “They realized the trade-offs in terms of the investments of time, energy and human capital were not necessarily worth sacrificing so much of one’s personal self for,” she says.Also read | Offline Zinda Hai: Why retailers are betting big on outletsSuccess online can bring greater freedom — and even higher pay than many traditional office jobs, which have a median US salary of $69,000, according to Glassdoor. But the middle-class hustle still requires constant effort to maintain. The career has no promise of lifetime longevity. And unlike traditional workers, creators have no predictable paycheck or job protections, making career stability elusive.Doing the MathRoughly 57% of 3,000 surveyed full-time creators earn below a living wage from content creation, according to a report last year from Influencer Marketing Hub.
The BriefWire