While it’s easy to point and laugh at people whose grand predictions about the future turn out to be less-than-accurate, we rarely stop to mention those rare individuals who seem to scry the shape of tomorrow. Congratulations, then, to Scottish musician and artist Nick Currie (aka Momus) who penned the most prescient line about our modern age way back in 1991: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.”
Currie was talking specifically about what he imagined would be the impact of the then-nascent world wide web on the music industry. He predicted a world in which cultural monoliths no longer existed, and where an infinite garden of creative flowers could flourish, sustained by a small fandom who could pay them directly for their artistic labour.
He spoke of “a democratic technology, a technology which can help us all to produce and consume the new, ‘unpopular’ pop musics, each perfectly customised to our elective cults.”
Fast forward 35 years and it’s clear first of all that he was right, and second that this model has escaped the narrow confines of pop music. The “creator economy” is everywhere, and think pieces abound about the brave new economic world in which the middlemen are gone and anyone with an idea and a phone can find an audience and an income. All you need, received wisdom states, is a product and a small audience of people willing to pay for it, and you too can be free to create your way to financial freedom!
Whether it’s kids dreaming of being Minecraft streamers, teens making Reels on Insta in the hope of becoming a breakout star, the recent boom in “thoughtfluencers” explaining the Big Issues with borrowed arguments and handheld Lav mics, or every single middle-aged man you know starting a fucking podcast (or, latterly, a Substack) in the past 24 months, it seems everyone wants a slice of the creator economy pie.
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You can perhaps see why. With seemingly every single white-collar job in existence imperilled by AI, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the prospect of earning a living from “making content” has never been more appealing. More than 1 million 16-24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training (NEET) at the start of 2026, the highest level since 2013.
The ONS put unemployment among 16-24-year-olds at 16.2% as of this spring. Adzuna recorded just 8,383 graduate vacancies advertised in July, down 45% year on year.
Ten years ago, there were more than 50,000 vacancies. Against this backdrop, “creating” sounds like a viable career.
Every major social platform now has a variant on the “creator fund”, which incentivises people to post in the hope that they will attract enough views to trigger a payout. Substack promises that you’re only a few spicy takes away from a meaningful income as a newsletter writer; how hard can recording a hit podcast really be?
Oh, and if writing or talking isn’t your thing, there’s always OnlyFans. A recent spate of articles has spoken of the “emergent middle class” of the creator economy and suggested that it really could be a viable route to sustainable income for a swathe of people. But do the numbers add up?
Bluntly – no, they really don’t. The relatively new nature of “creator” as a job title means hard numbers are thin on the ground, but recent survey data of 5,095 self-described “creators” across 100 regions worldwide suggests that over two-thirds earn less than $10,000 a year. Only 4% of “creators” earned more than $100k.
Despite that, according to the digital advertising industry body the IAB, the value of the “creator partnerships market” is set to grow to over £1.2bn this year; Steven Bartlett recently announced “a strategic venture designed for the world’s most ambitious and consequential creators” which, the press release says, will pour $400m into the space in the coming years.
Leaving aside the uncertainty as to what those words actually mean, there’s definitely money there, but it’s probably not going into the bank accounts of smaller creators.
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Look at the top 100 podcasts list on Spotify; realistically, the only ones with enough listeners to make decent income from ads. How many of them are hosted by people who weren’t already famous thanks to Old Media? Look at the top-selling UK newsletters on Substack and marvel at the number of names on there who were fixtures on TV, papers or radio before showing up in your inbox. The illusion of a level playing field is just that – an illusion.
The issue with the concept of the “creator economy” is at heart one of supply and demand, coupled with limited (and diminishing) resources: it turns out, paying individuals directly for their creative labour gets pretty expensive beyond a certain point. Survey data from March this year showed that the average Brit spends £65.50 per month on subscriptions, of which £27 is entertainment – that includes streaming services.
Meanwhile, data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that only 10% of UK consumers pay for news of any sort, and 80% of that money goes to traditional publishers. Which means that roughly 2% of UK adults are paying any independent writer, creator or digital-born outlet anything at all, and that constitutes the entire British market for paid independent writing. Every person launching a newsletter on Substack this month is competing for a slice of that not-particularly-big pie.
The concept of the “creator middle class” was born from a 2026 report analysing 1,000 self-selected US creators. It pegs the “middle class” band at $10,000 a year or roughly £7,400, a fairly radical redrawing of class boundaries and perhaps not the aspirational figure suggested by the headlines.
The fundamental issue with the premise of the “creator economy” is that it peddles a lie – that the simple act of “making” a creative work (be that newsletter, podcast, artwork or “sexy video stream”) will somehow also magically result in a market for said creative work; sadly, as anyone who has ever tried to get someone to pay for their art can attest, this is very much not how things operate.
The barriers to entry for making have never been lower, and there have never been more people creating at any point in human history. At the same time, we have never faced more demands on our time (whither the leisure class?), and we have never had so many different things on which to spend our dwindling incomes.
Even OnlyFans, often held up as the big creator success story (after all, what’s more democratic than nudity), only pays an average of £1,860 a year to “creators” on the platform, according to its latest filings (and, as with all mean averages, this is very heavily skewed by earners at the top end – half of all OnlyFans creator accounts were inactive in the last financial year). The maths doesn’t really maths.
It turns out Nick Currie was only partially correct – in future, everyone really is famous for 15 people, but that’s not quite enough to make a living. By all means make your podcast, write your newsletter or get naked on camera if it makes you happy: just don’t expect the “side hustle” to become your main gig anytime soon.
You can’t have a middle class of 100,000 paid writers (or podcasters, or videomakers, or camboys) when the paying public is only 2% of the country.
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