The creator economy, measured

Two research organisations published a figure for how much money American brands put into creators in 2025. One said $37 billion. The other said $10.5 billion. Same country, same year, and neither of them is wrong.

That gap is the most useful thing anybody can tell you about this industry, and it is almost never printed, because a headline that says half a trillion travels further than a paragraph explaining what is inside it. This piece prints the disagreement first and the numbers second.

Everything below carries a publisher and a year. Where two publishers contradict each other, both are here.

Five published estimates, and no two agree

These are the figures that get quoted. They are not versions of one measurement with different error bars. They are five different measurements wearing the same name.

What each number is actually counting

The American gap has a clean explanation and it is worth understanding because it repeats everywhere. eMarketer's press release of 13 March 2025 defines its $10.52 billion as revenue generated by US-based creators from payments brands make to promote products on social and video platforms, and says plainly that paid media is excluded. It is measuring money that lands in a creator's account.

IAB's methodology, published with Advertiser Perceptions on 20 November 2025, measures ad dollars brands intentionally invest in creators through direct partnerships for sponsored content, amplified sponsored content, and planned creator adjacencies. Amplified is the load-bearing word. When a brand pays a creator $5,000 for a reel and then spends $40,000 putting media behind that reel, IAB counts $45,000 and eMarketer counts $5,000. Both are honest answers to different questions.

Goldman Sachs is doing something wider again. Its April 2023 note, written by Eric Sheridan, sized a total addressable market of about $250 billion, growing to roughly $480 billion by 2027, and that total bundles three separate flows: brand deals, the creator's cut of platform advertising, and money fans hand over directly through subscriptions and tips. A figure that includes YouTube's revenue share is not comparable to a figure about marketing budgets, and quoting them in the same sentence, as a great many articles do, produces a number that describes nothing.

Nobody agrees how many creators there are either

Adobe's Future of Creativity study, published in 2022 from a survey of roughly 9,000 people across nine countries in May of that year, counted 303 million creators worldwide, and said more than 165 million of them had joined since 2020. Its definition is broad on purpose: professionals and non-professionals making original content for work or for pleasure, including designers, photographers, filmmakers and hobbyists.

Goldman Sachs, a year later, worked from 50 million global creators. Six times fewer, and both figures are still in circulation, often on the same page.

The reason is the same one as before. Adobe counted people who make things. Goldman counted people an advertiser could plausibly pay. If your uncle posts woodworking videos to 400 followers he is one of Adobe's 303 million and he is not one of Goldman's 50 million, and any statement about what percentage of creators earn a living depends entirely on which of those two denominators somebody used.

Try it: when a source says X% of creators earn under $Y, find out what it is a percentage of. If that is not stated, the percentage cannot be read.

The median and the mean tell opposite stories

This is the part of the industry that headline figures hide, and there is one dataset that states it cleanly. CreatorIQ published its State of Creator Compensation report in January 2026, drawing on payments made to creators through its own platform during 2025 alongside a survey of 300 creators run by Sapio Research in late 2025.

The mean is nearly four times the median. That only happens when a small group at the top is pulling the average up hard, and it is why the mean is the figure that gets quoted in industry decks and the median is the figure that describes what happens to a person.

The same report's survey found an average self-reported annual income of $44,293 across its 300 respondents, with 11% saying they made six figures. That average is a different measurement again: it covers everything a creator earns from every source, and it comes from people who agreed to answer a survey about creator income, which is not a neutral group. Goldman Sachs, working from its narrower 50 million, put the share of creators who are professionals earning above $100,000 a year at about 4%.

The money is growing and concentrating at the same time

Both things are happening, and they are usually reported separately, which makes each one read as better news than it is.

On growth, IAB's November 2025 figures show US creator ad spend rising from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024 to a projected $37 billion in 2025, a 26% year on year increase against 5.7% for the media industry as a whole. CreatorIQ reported aggregate creator payments through its platform up 59% year on year. There is no serious argument that this is a fad.

On concentration, the same CreatorIQ report tracks the top 10%'s share of payments rising from 53% in 2023 to 62% in 2025, and the top 1%'s share from 15% in 2023 to 18% in 2024 to 21% in 2025. So payments through CreatorIQ's platform grew by more than half in a year while the top tenth's share of them rose to 62%, because the growth went somewhere specific.

Where the money actually comes from

Goldman Sachs put brand deals at roughly 70% of creator revenue in its 2023 work, with the platform advertising share and direct fan payments splitting the rest. The platform numbers are the ones that come straight from the source, since the platforms announce them.

Read those two platform figures carefully, because they are cumulative and they cover very different populations. YouTube's $100 billion, announced at its Made on YouTube event in September 2025, covers four years and includes payments to media companies and rights holders as well as to individuals. Patreon's $10 billion, announced in August 2025, covers twelve years and goes to a much smaller group: the company said around 3,00,000 creators are paid through it.

The practical reading for anybody deciding where to spend their evenings: the largest pot by a distance is brand money, the platform pots are real but shared with rights holders and thinned by revenue splits, and the direct-from-fans pot is the smallest and the most reliable, because it does not depend on a ranking system's opinion of you this quarter.

How to read the next creator economy number you see

Four questions. They take about a minute and they will retire most of what circulates.

1. What is being counted: money creators receive, money brands spend, or the whole chain including platform revenue?
2. Which geography, and is it stated? A great many global figures are American figures with the word global attached.
3. Which year, and is it a measurement or a projection? Half the numbers quoted as fact in 2026 are forecasts made in 2023.
4. Who paid for the study, and does the answer help them? A platform sizing the market it sells into is not disqualified, it is just worth knowing.

Run those four on the figures in this article and they hold up, which is the only reason they are here. Run them on the next chart somebody posts about the half-trillion dollar creator economy and watch how quickly it becomes a projection made three years ago about a definition that includes YouTube's advertising business.

Questions people ask about these numbers