Executive summary
The short answer is: for the median creator, rising supply is probably the single biggest driver of “getting paid less,” but not in a simple textbook sense. Total money in the system has not generally collapsed. U.S. social-media ad revenue rose from $64.9 billion in 2023 to $88.8 billion in 2024 and $117.7 billion in 2025, while U.S. creator ad spend rose from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024 and $37 billion in 2025. YouTube says it paid more than $70 billion to creators, artists, and media companies from 2021 to 2023, and more than $100 billion over the past four years; Facebook says it paid creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, up 35% year over year. That means the creator economy’s aggregate revenue pool is still growing. [1]
What has deteriorated is the typical creator’s share of that growing pool. CreatorIQ’s 2025 compensation data shows average creator earnings on its platform rose to $11.4K, but the median fell to $3K from $3.5K in 2023; meanwhile, the top 10% of creators captured 62% of payments, up from 53% in 2023, and the top 1% captured 21%, up from 15%. Linktree’s 2024 creator-commerce survey similarly found that 70% of respondents made less than $49K in the prior year. Those two findings are highly consistent with a market where supply is rising faster than reliably monetizable attention for the median participant, and where algorithms and brand-buying practices funnel disproportionate value to a small winner cohort. [2]
My best estimate is that increased creator/content supply explains roughly 45% to 65% of the decline in median creator earnings or monetization reliability since 2023 for creators who depend heavily on platform discovery and brand deals. But only part of that is “simple supply-and-demand.” A substantial share of the effect comes from supply interacting with algorithmic distribution, originality rules, short-form monetization design, and winner-take-most market structure. I would allocate another 20% to 35% of the effect to those platform-structure forces, with the remaining 10% to 20% coming from macro ad cycles, ad-tech and measurement changes, creator strategy shifts, and fees. This is an inference from the evidence below, not a directly published decomposition, so confidence is moderate, not high. [3]
Scope and definitions
A major source of confusion in this topic is that “content creator” can mean very different things. Adobe’s broader definition captures a huge universe of people posting photos, videos, writing, or other creative work online; by that broad definition, Adobe said the creator ecosystem had grown to more than 303 million globally by 2023, after more than 165 million people joined since 2020. Goldman Sachs used a much narrower creator-economy lens and estimated about 50 million global creators in 2023, with brand deals as the main revenue source at roughly 70% of creator income. SignalFire’s professionalization framework is narrower again, estimating roughly 2 million full-time professional individual creators within a roughly 50 million creator universe. Pew’s TikTok work is narrower still: it defined a creator account as a social-native account with at least 5,000 followers whose owner’s popularity primarily comes from internet/social-media presence rather than offline celebrity. [4]
For this report, the economically useful definition is a creator who is trying to monetize audience attention or fan relationships, whether via platform payouts, advertising revenue share, brand sponsorships, subscriptions, tips, affiliate commerce, or direct sales. That includes YouTube channels in the Partner Program, Twitch Affiliates and Partners, Substack publishers with free or paid subscribers, podcasters with monetization, and social-first creators on Instagram and TikTok receiving platform rewards and/or off-platform brand income. [5]
It is also crucial to define “getting paid less” with the right metric:
| Metric | What it measures | Why it matters |
| Aggregate platform payouts | Total dollars paid out by a platform or category | Can rise even while most creators feel worse off |
| Average revenue per creator | Mean earnings across creators | Easily skewed upward by stars |
| Median revenue per creator | Typical creator outcome | Best single indicator of whether most creators are better or worse off |
| Top/bottom deciles | Income concentration | Shows whether the market is becoming more unequal |
| CPM / RPM / earnings per 1,000 qualified views | Monetization yield | Captures how much attention is worth |
| Subscription or membership income | Direct fan monetization | Much less dependent on broad algorithmic reach |
| Brand-deal income | Off-platform monetization | Often the largest category, but volatile and concentrated |
If the question is about aggregate money, creators are generally not getting paid less as a class. If the question is about the typical creator, many probably are. That distinction is exactly what the CreatorIQ data reveals: the average rose while the median fell. [6]
One way to see the skew is to compare the top and the middle. Forbes estimated that its top 50 creators earned $853 million in 2025, while Linktree found 70% of surveyed creators made less than $49K in the previous year. That is not evidence of a shrinking market; it is evidence of a market that is simultaneously growing and concentrating. [7]
What the supply and demand data say
The highest-confidence evidence shows that supply has grown rapidly across most creator ecosystems, but demand has grown more unevenly and is often intermediated by algorithms rather than flowing proportionally to all creators. On YouTube, the company says there are now over 20 million videos uploaded daily, and in 2025 YouTube said it had 3 million channels in the YouTube Partner Program, up 700,000 in three years. On Twitch, monthly active streaming channels were 7.34 million in 2024, after peaking much higher in the pandemic years; yet the platform still averaged 95,700 concurrent live channels in 2024. On Substack, paid subscriptions grew from more than 2 million in 2023 to more than 3 million in 2024 and 5 million in 2025. In podcasting, Listen Notes data cited in 2025 put active shows at about 605,122, while the larger total database exceeded 3.7 million podcasts and nearly 190 million episodes. [8]
The supply picture is less transparent on TikTok and Instagram because the platforms do not publish a clean daily “uploads per day” time series in the sources reviewed. Still, the scale is unmistakable. HypeAuditor’s 2025 state-of-market analysis covered 104 million TikTok accounts, 76 million Instagram accounts, and 13.1 million YouTube accounts, and found that nano-creators dominate: 87.7% of TikTok creators and 76% of Instagram creators were in the 1K–10K follower tier. That is exactly the structure one would expect in an oversupplied creator market: a huge long tail competing for a small number of outsized outcomes. [9]
Demand, however, has not stood still. DataReportal reported YouTube ad reach at 2.53 billion users in early 2025, Instagram ad reach at 1.74 billion, and TikTok ad reach at 1.59 billion. Instagram later reached 3 billion monthly active users by September 2025, according to Reuters reporting on comments from Mark Zuckerberg. In podcasting, Edison’s Infinite Dial 2025 said U.S. podcast consumption hit an all-time high, with 104 million Americans listening weekly. Spotify said in May 2026 that more than 500 million users had streamed a video podcast on Spotify, up nearly 50% year over year. [10]
The strongest demand-side evidence is the ad market itself. The IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report shows U.S. social-media ad revenue rising from $64.9 billion in 2023 to $88.8 billion in 2024 and $117.7 billion in 2025. IAB’s digital-video report says U.S. digital video ad spend rose 18% in 2024 to $64 billion, was expected to reach $72 billion in 2025, and was projected to surpass $80 billion in 2026. IAB’s creator-economy report says U.S. creator ad spend went from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024 and $37 billion in 2025, with a path to about $44 billion in 2026. Podcast advertising also resumed strong growth after the 2023 slowdown, with IAB projecting it past $2 billion in 2024 and near $2.6 billion by 2026. [11]
U.S. social-media ad revenue
2023 $64.9B ███████████
2024 $88.8B ███████████████
2025 $117.7B ████████████████████
U.S. creator ad spend
2021 $13.9B █████
2024 $29.5B ███████████
2025 $37.0B █████████████
2026 $44.0B ███████████████ projected
That combination leads to the central analytical point: demand has grown, but it has not grown evenly enough to keep the average marginal unit of creator supply valuable. More creators and more posts are competing for a rising but still rationed pool of monetizable attention, and that pool is not allocated pro rata. The result is lower monetization reliability for the median creator even while platform and category revenue totals continue to rise. [12]
Platform comparison
| Platform | Supply-side signal | Demand-side signal | What that implies |
| YouTube | Over 20M videos uploaded daily; 3M YPP channels in 2025, up 700K in 3 years | 2.53B ad reach in early 2025; 125M Music/Premium subscribers; YouTube says $70B paid 2021–2023 and $100B+ over four years | Massive supply growth, but also the deepest payout pool; still highly competitive |
| TikTok | HypeAuditor analyzed 104M accounts; 87.7% nano creators | 1.59B ad reach in early 2025; 1.6B MAUs in 2024 estimate | Huge supply and low barriers to entry push down median monetization reliability |
| HypeAuditor analyzed 76M accounts; 76% nano creators | 1.74B ad reach in early 2025; 3B MAUs by Sep. 2025 | Large demand, but monetization is less standardized and heavily brand/algorithm driven | |
| Twitch | 7.34M channels live monthly in 2024 | 20.9B hours watched in 2024, below 2021 and 2022 | One of the clearest cases where creator supply stayed high while attention softened |
| Substack | Paid subscriptions rose from 2M+ in 2023 to 3M+ in 2024 and 5M in 2025 | App and recommendation network drive a growing share of paid subs | Direct-fan economics can offset general oversupply if a creator converts loyal audiences |
| Podcasts | ~605K active shows in Sep. 2025; 3.7M+ total shows in database | 104M weekly U.S. listeners in 2025; ad revenue projected near $2.6B by 2026 | Supply is large, but demand and monetization are healthier than in many social-feed markets |
Table sources: YouTube, DataReportal, HypeAuditor, TwitchTracker, Substack, Edison, Spotify, IAB, and Listen Notes. Exact daily upload counts for TikTok and Instagram were not published in the reviewed sources, so creator-account and audience-reach data are used as supply and demand proxies. [13]
How platforms change the economics
The strongest evidence against a purely mechanical supply-and-demand story is that platform design now determines how much of the revenue pool any creator can actually reach. Patreon’s 2025 State of Create report argues that creators were seeing their reach dwindle because the old “follow” function was being deprioritized, and its survey data shows only 48% of creators were confident their fans would see their work on Instagram, 53% on TikTok, and 56% on YouTube, versus 72% on Patreon. Fans themselves also expressed lower confidence that they would reliably see creator work on Instagram and TikTok than on Patreon. Linktree’s 2024 survey found that 55% of creators cited algorithm uncertainty as a top reason making money is difficult, while 59% cited difficulty producing consistently enough for platforms’ demands. [14]
This is why the market behaves more like an auction plus recommendation system than a clean commodity market. Cong and Li’s NBER paper on the influencer economy explicitly models superstar and network effects in creator markets, and Reuters Institute’s work on digital subscriptions similarly describes a winner-takes-most dynamic in adjacent digital-media markets. In practice, that means extra content supply does not simply lower price evenly; it raises the value of being one of the few creators whom algorithms, recommendation systems, or brand buyers select repeatedly. [15]
Platform monetization models make those differences even sharper:
| Platform | Core monetization options | High-confidence payout mechanics in reviewed sources |
| YouTube | Ads, YouTube Premium, Shorts, memberships, fan funding, shopping | 55% creator share for long-form ads and YouTube Premium on monetized videos; 45% of allocated Shorts revenue; 70% of membership revenue after applicable taxes and fees |
| Twitch | Subscriptions, Bits, ads, sponsorships | Standard subscription split 50/50; Plus Program tiers of 60/40 and 70/30; Ads Manager can unlock 55% net ad revenue share |
| Reels, stories, photo/text monetization, bonuses, fan support | 2026 framework emphasizes qualified views, longer watch time, deeper engagement, and originality; creators are shown an “earnings rate” per 1,000 qualified views | |
| Substack | Paid subscriptions, bundles/recommendations, audio/video, app discovery | Creators keep 90% of subscription revenue, less Stripe fees |
| Podcasts | Host-read ads, network ads, subscriptions, direct fan funding, Spotify Partner Program | No single industry-wide rev-share formula; Spotify Partner Program includes audience-driven payouts for Premium video engagement plus ad monetization |
Table sources: YouTube help and creator pages, Twitch help pages, Meta’s creator payout update, Substack’s publisher materials, and Spotify’s creator and newsroom pages. For TikTok and Instagram, the reviewed sources showed monetization options but did not yield a single transparent, platform-wide revenue-share formula comparable to YouTube’s 55% or Substack’s 90%. [16]
These monetization rules matter because not all attention is worth the same amount. Even within YouTube, long-form and Shorts have materially different economics: creator share is 55% for long-form but 45% for the allocated Shorts pool. On Facebook, payouts are explicitly tied to “qualified views,” watch time, and originality rather than raw gross views. On Twitch, subscription splits and ad-share thresholds vary by creator status and behavior. That means creators can feel paid less not because attention vanished, but because the type of attention they generate is less monetizable, less qualified, or less favored by the current ranking and monetization rules. [17]
Meta’s recent policy changes make this explicit. In 2025 and 2026 Meta said it was cracking down on spammy and unoriginal content, deprioritizing copycats and accounts gaming engagement, and updating original-content guidelines so that greater reach and monetization would favor genuine creators. That improves the user experience, but it also means that some creators’ revenue declines are policy-driven reallocations, not pure supply shocks. [18]
A useful way to think about the system is this:
The diagram reflects the observed pattern: growing demand can coexist with worsening median outcomes when algorithmic distribution and payout design amplify concentration. [19]
Alternative explanations beyond supply
Supply growth is not the whole story. The first major alternative explanation is the macro ad market. IAB’s podcast revenue study says 2023 was a “challenging advertising climate” that slowed podcast advertising growth to just 5%, especially hurting mid-tier companies. That kind of macro softness absolutely affected creators, especially those dependent on sponsorships or ad-revenue share. But it is a poor explanation for the full 2024–2026 period because social and creator ad spend rebounded strongly afterward. In other words, macro conditions mattered, but they do not explain why median creator economics remained difficult even as ad dollars came back. [20]
A second alternative is ad-tech and measurement disruption, especially after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes. University of Maryland research says ATT made targeted ads less efficient and had “dire economic repercussions” for smaller businesses because iPhone users often opted out of tracking. Meta warned that weakening personalization could materially reduce sales efficiency for advertisers. More recently, Meta has argued that better AI ranking and ad systems are restoring performance. This sequence matters because weaker attribution makes some creator inventory less measurable and therefore less attractive to performance marketers, especially in the middle and lower tiers. [21]
A third explanation is format mix. Short-form video is not just “more content”; it is also a different monetization product. YouTube’s public help pages make clear that Shorts and long-form have different payout logic, and Facebook’s 2026 content-monetization language centers qualified views rather than simple views. If creators shifted their mix toward formats that are easier to produce and easier to distribute but structurally lower-yield, then declining creator earnings are partly a format shift rather than a pure oversupply effect. [22]
A fourth explanation is creator strategy and monetization mix. Patreon’s report argues that direct fan monetization is much more lucrative per fan than ad-driven social platforms; creators in its survey said their annual income per fan on Patreon was roughly 40x bigger than on TikTok. Substack’s 2025 materials emphasize that creators keep 90% of subscription revenue, while Linktree’s survey found affiliate revenue was the top income driver and larger brand partnerships were harder to rely on consistently. That means some instances of “getting paid less” are actually the result of remaining too dependent on volatile social discovery rather than moving toward direct subscriptions, memberships, commerce, or owned audiences. [23]
Finally, there is the issue of fees and fragmentation. Substack takes 10% plus payment-processing fees. Patreon changed fee structures for new creators beginning in 2025. IAB’s creator-ad-spend report highlights lack of standardization and measurement as persistent pain points for brands and agencies. Those frictions do not appear large enough to be the primary causal story, but they do reduce creator take-home pay and make spending less evenly distributed. [24]
Just as importantly, the trend is not universal across every segment. In early 2026, Business Insider reported that TikTok micro-influencer rates rose sharply year over year while macro and mega rates fell, based on Upfluence data. That suggests buyers are sometimes reallocating toward smaller creators rather than simply paying everyone less. So the correct claim is not “more supply always means lower pay for all creators.” The better claim is: more supply makes it harder to earn consistently, and then platform and buyer behavior decide who gets squeezed and who benefits. [25]
Quantified assessment and implications
The simplest way to summarize the evidence is this:
CreatorIQ flat-payment concentration
Top 10% share of payments
2023 53% █████████████
2024 60% ███████████████
2025 62% ████████████████
Top 1% share of payments
2023 15% ████
2025 21% ██████
Typical creator outcome
Median payment: $3.5K in 2023 → $3.0K in 2025
Average payment: $9.2K in 2023 → $11.4K in 2025
That is the clearest empirical pattern in the reviewed material. Spend is up, total creator-market revenue is up, but the typical creator’s outcome is worse because the distribution of value is worsening. The number of creators receiving flat payments within CreatorIQ’s network more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, yet the median fell. By construction, that means rising supply and participation are central to the story. But because the average rose while the median fell, plain oversupply is not enough; the market is becoming more unequal at the same time. [26]
My bottom-line assessment is therefore:
For ad- and algorithm-dependent creators, increased supply is probably the largest single driver of lower median pay, but “simple supply-and-demand” explains only part of the mechanism. A realistic decomposition is:
| Driver | Estimated contribution to declining median creator earnings / monetization reliability |
| More creators and more content competing for monetizable attention | 45%–65% |
| Algorithmic concentration, originality rules, and payout-model design | 20%–35% |
| Macro ad market, ATT/measurement, fees, and creator strategy mix | 10%–20% |
This is a synthesis, not a quoted published estimate. The reason I give supply the largest share is that aggregate demand indicators are growing, while supply indicators and creator participation are also growing and observed earnings concentration is worsening. The reason I stop short of calling it a “simple” supply-and-demand story is that platform rules are demonstrably shaping which creators get paid, and by how much. [27]
For creators, the strategic implication is straightforward: move as much of your business as possible from rented algorithmic reach to owned or semi-owned monetization. The evidence reviewed here strongly favors subscriptions, memberships, direct fan payments, commerce, and high-intent sponsorships over pure reach-chasing. Patreon’s and Substack’s economics are materially better when a creator can convert loyal followers into paying supporters, and YouTube’s long-form and membership tools are structurally more stable than trying to win a pure short-form volume race. [28]
For platforms, the policy implication is that creators need more transparency, not more aggregate payout headlines. Public claims like “we paid $100 billion” are useful, but they do not reveal median outcomes, decile shares, or how payout rules vary by format and geography. If platforms want healthier creator ecosystems, they should publish richer payout-distribution data, separate follower-feed reach from recommendation reach more clearly, improve portability of audiences, and keep tightening anti-spam and anti-copycat systems without making monetization rules opaque. Meta’s recent originality emphasis is directionally right; the missing piece is significantly better disclosure. [29]
Open questions and limitations
Several core data gaps remain. Exact income distributions by platform are mostly not public, especially for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube outside limited company disclosures or third-party samples. Exact daily post or upload counts for TikTok and Instagram were not available in the reviewed official sources, so the report relies on creator-account counts, ad-reach numbers, and third-party analyses as proxies. And many available income datasets cover only one slice of creator revenue: CreatorIQ focuses on flat brand payments routed through its software; Linktree and Patreon rely on surveys of their own creator communities; TwitchTracker and HypeAuditor are sophisticated third-party measurement firms, but they are still not first-party platform transparency reports. Those limitations mean platform-specific numeric estimates should be interpreted as directional unless directly disclosed by the platform. [30]
The implication is not that the conclusion is weak. The overall pattern is unusually clear: supply has exploded, demand has grown but not evenly or accessibly, platform design allocates value unevenly, and median creator economics have become harder even as top-end outcomes and aggregate platform payouts continue to improve. That is why the most precise answer is: yes, supply growth is probably the primary reason the median creator feels underpaid, but no, it is not adequately explained by simple supply-and-demand alone. [31]
[1] [12] [27] https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IAB_PwC-Internet-Ad-Revenue-Report-Full-Year-2024.pdf
[2] [3] [6] [19] [26] [30] [31] https://www.creatoriq.com/press/releases/state-of-creator-compensation-
[4] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2022/adobe-future-of-creativity-study-165m-creators-joined-creator-economy-since-2020
[5] https://blog.youtube/creator-and-artist-stories/10-ways-to-monetize-on-youtube/
[7] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2025/06/16/forbes-top-creators-2025/
[8] [13] https://blog.youtube/press/
[9] https://hypeauditor.com/state-of-influencer-marketing-2025/
[10] https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-global-overview-report
[11] https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IAB_PwC_Internet_Ad_Revenue_Report_2024.pdf
[14] https://news.patreon.com/articles/state-of-create
[15] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31243/w31243.pdf
[16] https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/creator-economy/
[17] [22] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12504220?hl=en
[18] https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/cracking-down-spammy-content-facebook/
[20] https://www.iab.com/insights/us-podcast-advertising-revenue-study-2024/
[21] https://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/research/small-businesses-take-big-hit-apples-privacy-regulation
[23] [28] https://stateofcreate.co/
[24] https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037607131-How-much-does-Substack-cost
[25] https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-micro-influencers-gain-pricing-power-2026-5
[29] https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/the-future-of-youtube-2026/