The Death of the Creator Middle Class

https://letters.byburk.net/p/the-death-of-the-creator-middle-class

by spking • 8 days ago

46 17 8 days ago

letters.byburk.net

I think there is a flaw in thinking that "Creators" have some intrinsic value. The reason the middle gets pushed out is correct in this article but it is missing an important point: there are too many creators.

That is why the top gets heavier and the bottom spreads out.

ajb• 8 days ago

The problem with this line of thinking is that the more humanity succeeds at becoming efficient at providing for its essential goods and services, the more the economy rests on unnecessary ones. Should we really accept that the more successful we are, the less individuals can expect to be valued?

fouc• 8 days ago

That's true.

Although I think the article is really hinting at a larger problem than just creators. The problem of the power law distribution - few winners taking all vs the losers in the long thin tail. Sometimes it's not an entirely meritocratic distribution, quality doesn't always rise to the top.

harimau777• 8 days ago

The problem is that creating is what most people want to do. So "creators" does have intrinsic value.

jambalaya8• 8 days ago

Same thing is happening with pay and remuneration as with content. I abhor the whole 1% crap, but it sorta seems like a thumbtack, forgive the analogy...

kayo_20211030• 8 days ago

Super piece. Well worth reading. I keep wondering if there's some structural economic fundamental that disperses money the way it does. Is the dispersion purely a consequence of the attention economy? Probably, but I'm guessing. Engagement and outrage always sell, but so does visibility, and how one becomes visible. I guess that's come down to advertising, brand, and the platform algorithms that present the content and create or amplify the brand. I get why OC finds it tiring and depressing.

n2d4• 8 days ago

Content, like software, is easy to copy and distribute. Traditional supply-demand diagrams no longer apply; content doesn't get more expensive to produce if it reaches more people.

This creates a monopolistic economy where top content creators can create slightly "better"/more viral content at a multiple of the cost, and starve out smaller creators.

the_real_cher• 8 days ago

I have no proof of this but I suspect that when rent is cheap enough the middle and lower classes can work a single job or a part time job with roommates, they will have enough time pursue their artistic passions, you get great art and technology breakthroughs.

Look at Seattle in the 90's, NYC, early San Fran, etc., the before real estate prices skyrocketed or 17th and 18th century enlightenment post-plague, when massive amounts of the rich died and the wealth became more evenly distributed.

I feel like real estate prices, inequality, and inflation truly squander the intellectual wealth of the poor and middle classes and it hurts the human race as a whole.

Isamu• 8 days ago

I guess I object to defining “creator” as specifically “online content creator”. Maybe there was some golden age in the past, but I think that was always aspirational and there was always a nearly power-law distribution of success. Making a living from online content was always a struggle except for the winners that made it look easy.

onetokeoverthe• 8 days ago

will not post creative works online so it can be scraped by altman/musk/gates et al.

antonymoose• 8 days ago

That definitely killed my own desire to engage. Stoped blogging, most open source, and given up on StackOverflow, sadly.

kazinator• 8 days ago

What is this person's definition of creator? They mean writing shit online for some blog or something?

That's only "middle class" in the sense that your middle class lifestyle allows you to have this as a hobby, and a few lucky people doing it make a few bucks.

The activity didn't even exist before the Internet. If you wanted to reach people with a newsletter or talk, you had to join the staff of some widely circulated publication, or get into broadcasting. Those were then middle class jobs.

coldtea• 8 days ago

AI competes with us for attention. And it changes the reader too. I wrote a whole piece on how AI isn’t replacing writers, it’s replacing readers.

And yet this is itself AI text.

pimlottc• 8 days ago

What makes you say that? It did not jump out as obviously AI generated to me.

no-name-here2• 8 days ago

Lots of claims but zero sources mentioned.

But even the author’s own claims may prove the opposite of their conclusion:

More than 1.5 million Americans call themselves full-time creators, roughly seven times as many as in 2020.
So you’d think there’s more money to go around. There is. It just isn’t spread the way you’d hope. …
When budgets are tight, they go in two directions. Up, to the big names with the reach. Or down, to the nano and micro creators who are cheap and come in bulk.
The middle gets skipped. Again. Too expensive to be a bargain. Too small to be a headline.

If the number of nanoinfluencers is exploding in quantity, the existing middle might be growing or earning more, but the median can still go down.

But without any such claimed data or sources about middle vs bottom it’s not possible to say whether middle or bottom are getting impacted.

tim-projects• 8 days ago

I was looking at creating blogs and YouTube content years ago, but I concluded that because of the way algorithms work, good content is actively buried. And where it does find people, the people are trained not to want it.

It really is just a hamster wheel at this point. If you want to create content the content has to be modern day clickbait, and then there is no time or energy left to make good content. So why bother in the first place?

These days I actively avoid any website of app that uses an algorithm, because simply it doesn't have anything on it I actually want to consume.

For my own music that I make, I share it on WhatsApp/Signal with my friends and family. No point putting it anywhere else.

no-name-here2• 7 days ago

OP article is a complete mess - per the article:

There are 7.5 times as many "full-time creators" now as 5 years ago in America. It then talks about median earnings - $3,000 per year. That would mean that >50% are earning $2xx per month. Probably not "full-time" in America. No source links, so I found them, but it seems to be measuring different populations:

* https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Measuring-the...

* https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/creator-compensation-report-h...

The Death of the Creator Middle Class

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