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I know that I say I’m equally excited for each weekly newsletter, but some weeks just have a little something extra, you know? No shade to weeks that are not this one, but we have ourselves a particularly exciting Monday, folks.
After all, it’s not every week that we get to unpack findings from what is quite literally the MOST COMPREHENSIVE CREATOR SURVEY OF ALL TIME. That’s not just a marketing boast, or true because I put it in all-caps just now. It’s literally, verifiably accurate!
The Top Brand Report of All Time (of the Week): The State of Creators
Before we dive in, a word on our methodology.
From Cherline Bazile, the amazing mind behind our State of Creator Marketing series, comes another absolute banger. You’ve heard us talk about the creator economy once or twice. Now, how about you hear it straight from the source?
To better understand how creators are building their businesses, CreatorIQ partnered with Influencers.club to survey over 5,000 global creators, making this the most comprehensive creator study ever conducted. We quizzed our trusty creators for feedback on compensation, platform strategies, AI, burnout, audience trust, and so much more. The result is a thorough cross-section of where the industry stands right now, with insights you can’t get anywhere else.
This report is chock full of goodies, and comes complete with an interactive website to help you slice and dice the data however you so choose. Here are just a few of the findings that stood out to yours truly, but I strongly advise you to check out the report and the website and choose your own adventure.
Finding #1
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Annual Creator Compensation Breakdown
Folks, it’s hard out there for creators. For every crazy brand deal we hear about, most creators are scrapping and hustling to share their craft with the world. It’s not all private jets and caviar.
These findings, which we drew from nearly 4.3k creators all around the world, confirm that the creator economy, much like the regular economy, is going K-shaped: some prominent high-earners at the top, a whole bunch of lower earners slipping toward the bottom, and relatively few people carving out a middle-path.
We discussed this in our Creator Compensation Report, another standout Cherline Bazile production, but now we have even more data backing it up, and even more down-the-line insights, including:
Finding #2
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Primary Income Results for Creators
Now, math is not my strong suit, but if roughly two-thirds of creators are making under $10k per year, and about 40% of creators are doing the whole social media thing as a full-time gig, you’re going to have at least some overlap there, which speaks to the precarity that many creators face. Additionally, this finding serves to underscore that for all the discourse to the contrary, creators aren’t some rarified class. Most of the time, they’re regular folks with a side-gig.
That should inform how brands operate, and the incentives they offer. In order to build truly equitable partnerships that can provide mutual benefits as they grow, brands need to invest in their creators’ professional growth, offering tangible opportunities to help these creators earn more income and go from part-time to full-time.
Finding #3
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Factors by which brands select creator partners
One way that creators can help meet brands halfway, and build some serious income of their own, is by better understanding what brands are looking for in their partners. Compensation doesn’t correlate with the same factors across every social media platform—in fact, the picture ends up looking a little different depending on what you’re trying to do.
Follower count (or subscriber count for YouTube) is important across all three major platforms, but this importance is most pronounced for Instagram and least pronounced for TikTok, where the algorithm allows for a better chance at virality for smaller-scale creators. Views and plays are similarly important everywhere, but to varying degrees. Finally, engagement isn’t nearly as correlative with compensation as it should be, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change soon.
Finding #4
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How creators use AI
And now we come to one of the elements of this report that I was most curious about going in: how are creators using AI?
Survey says: more sparingly than you might think!
If creators do use AI, it tends to be on the back-end: brainstorming, forming or editing copy, and doing basic editing tasks. Like many in the workforce, creators see AI as an efficiency boost, rather than a wholesale replacement of the creative process. When it comes to setting the tone or strategy of their content, or automating themselves entirely, creators still prefer to do the work themselves. Just 5% are using AI to generate images or visuals, demonstrating that most audience-facing content emphasizes human connections.
Finding #5
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How creators use TikTok
When it comes to the platform that creators favor right now, TikTok is the clear winner, sweeping a plurality of the results across preference for branded content, lucrative returns for creators, and general content performance on an engagement/views level. However, the margins are close, and in what I find to be one of the most interesting takeaways from the report overall, the future is still very much up for grabs:
Finding #6
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How creators rank platforms' future potential
Creators gave Instagram the nod as the platform with the greatest long-term potential for the creator business—and business is booming. According to our survey respondents, nearly 6 in 10 creators have launched, or plan to launch, their own brand, making the stakes even higher for the platforms and brands trying to make the most out of this lucrative market.
I for one can’t wait to see what the future holds for the creator economy. But I do know one thing that should be in every creator marketer’s immediate future: reading this report!
Here’s the link to our interactive data website with all the report details. Check it out, and we’ll be back with more insights soon.
*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.
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