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Content from YouTube
Meet the Creator
Middle Class
Here’s how a new generation of entrepreneurs is wielding YouTube in hopes of replacing the nine-to-five — and modernizing the career of creator.
Young people who grew up in the era of the Internet are coming of age with aspirations of making a career on YouTube. But to a new generation of YouTube creators, success looks different than one might expect.
David Craig, who teaches communications at the University of Southern California Annenberg, has been studying the world of YouTube creators for upwards of eight years, and he has only seen the allure of this dream job grow stronger. “Even when I first started this research in 2014, young people were already listing ‘influencer’ and ‘creator’ as their number-one ambition in life,” he said. “It was replacing ‘astronaut’ and ‘fireman’ worldwide.”
Creators are organizing communities around sets of values, identities or passions, making the work even more gratifying, according to David Craig.
He understands the fervor: The job of professional content creator comes with a great deal of creative satisfaction, autonomy and sometimes “tremendous, huge amounts of money,” Craig explains. And then there are the social and cultural benefits: Creators can organize communities around sets of values, identities or passions, he added, making the work even more gratifying.
For hugely popular creators, managing a channel can be a lot like running a large business, requiring long hours and teams of support. Instead, some creators are taking a less intense approach, building a channel that provides reliable income and an opportunity to share their passions.
In the age of the Great Resignation, a question is percolating throughout the creator ecosystem: What does a creator career look like if the goal isn’t to make millions or be a superstar? What’s the path for creators who are just looking to earn a decent living while working for themselves?
David Craig
Clinical Professor of Communication, University of Southern California Annenberg
David has been researching the effects of YouTube creators on politics, the economy and culture since 2014.
Enter: the creator middle class
Enter: the “creator middle class” — a new generation of entrepreneurs with a fresh take on success. This burgeoning middle class knows they don’t need millions of followers or endless days of content creation to bring home a slice of that pie. Instead of unicorns, they’re aspiring to be YouTube’s nine-to-five’ers.
Click or tapSwipe to learn what makes a middle-class creator, according to experts surveyed by Morning Consult on behalf of Washington Post Research
Audience
Audience
Middle-class creators have around 100,000 subscribers.
Content
Content
Middle-class creators’ content usually covers niche audiences’ interests, like a certain type of food or art.
Partnerships
Partnerships
Middle-class creators are sought after for brand sponsorship deals because of their ability to connect with highly targeted, niche audiences.
Work-Life Balance
Work-Life Balance
Middle-class creators have the freedom to create content they enjoy, without the weight of superstardom.
During the pandemic, this class has come into its own, according to Kinsey Grant, journalist and host of the “Thinking is Cool” podcast. Grant also works with creators, and since the covid-19 pandemic began, she’s seen a change in the landscape. In the past couple of years, she said, she has observed: “people creating more content; people starting to second-guess the assumptions that they had about the careers they wanted,” and at the same time, “the platforms becoming more hospitable” to newcomers who want to generate income on platforms like YouTube as a day job.
In early 2022, a creator came to Grant looking for help with their ads, content strategy and operational needs. The creator, a science podcast host and author of a newsletter, was hoping to sustain themselves, full-time, through content. Grant found that consistency was the key to her client’s success. “The truth is that the audience cared about what the writer was saying,” Grant said. “He managed to enmesh himself in the audience.” A consistent content plan helped turn the creator’s audience into a community that regularly engaged with him.
“There is room to carve out a career that fits your life, that fits your needs, that fits your lifestyle without becoming these giant names that have blown up.”
Watching — and helping — other creators grow their audiences through the agency she works with, Smooth Media, Grant herself decided to make a go of it on YouTube earlier this year. Her first impressions: “It's not quite as difficult as people tell you,” she said, “because the expectation is not that I'm going to become super famous — that's not my ambition, and it’s not my reality — but that doesn't keep me from building a community, from building engagement.”
In 2023, YouTube will launch new ways for creators to monetize their videos and earn money from consistent engagement, including a revenue-sharing model for YouTube Shorts and paid courses for content creators with skills to teach.
Kinsey Grant
Host of “Thinking is Cool”
Grant started her own YouTube channel earlier this year. She says the platform offers her room to carve out a career that fits her lifestyle, passions and needs.
“There is room to carve out a career that fits your life, that fits your needs, that fits your lifestyle without becoming these giant names that have blown up,” Grant said. “[In] this ‘middle class of the creator economy’ route, I can do what I want to do.”
Rene Ritchie, creator liaison at YouTube, agreed the landscape is shifting — and that the idea of starting a YouTube channel as a means of earning income has never felt more inviting. “Shorts are like a rocket engine for discovery: easier to get into and make, and powerful for reaching new audiences. Long-form video is still the best way to make money and build your business as a creator anywhere, ever,” he said.
Smaller creators, stronger communities
As attractive as this new attitude is to first-time creators, it’s appealing to audiences, too. According to Craig, creators aren’t just finding better work-life balance at this middle tier; they’re generating the kind of content — and the kinds of communities — the public seems to want more of. For example, the tiny house and small living community can find design inspiration through middle-class creators, and marathon runners can find motivation through creators’ training journeys.
According to Craig, creators with smaller audiences may be bringing in revenue via advertising along with a diversity of other sources, from merchandise sales to paid content subscriptions — just like big creators. And even more than big creators in some cases, creators with smaller audiences may be able to be more responsive to their viewers, boosting engagement. As these smaller-profile, middle-class creators are forming strong bonds with their audiences, brands are taking notice.
The prevalence of the creator middle class
More than 45,000 US YouTube channels had at least 100,000 subscribers as of December 2021, compared with the 5,500 channels with at least one million subscribers1. Creators with smaller, yet substantial, followers are valuable to brands looking to reach niche and engaged audiences.
1 Source: Oxford Economics 2021 YouTube US Impact Report
10,00020,00030,00040,00050,000
NUMBER OF U.S.
CHANNELS IN 2021
CHANNELS WITH
100K SUBSCRIBERS
CHANNELS WITH
1M+ SUBSCRIBERS
Where audiences go, brands follow
Quentin Langley, who teaches public relations, marketing and journalism at the Fashion Institute of Technology and at Fordham University, says he is indeed seeing brands make this leap from the über-creator to the middle class. Sure, a small creator is a less intimidating investment, but they offer another advantage, he says: one that taps into something primitive about the way humans connect with one another.
“We all think because we were born in a time of mass communication, that it’s normal; It’s not,” Langley said. As recently as 100 years ago, there was no broadcast news, he explained. Newspapers were locally focused. People communicated within their communities. In a way, platforms like YouTube are restoring those smaller communities that reflect their members’ values or interests. This is exciting for users, he said. It’s also exciting for the marketers who want to reach them.
“It’s like advertising,” he said: An ad during a big game or a celebrity product endorsement could help a brand get their message in front of an audience of tens of millions. But to drive sales, most brands don’t really need to reach tens of millions. Rather, they need to reach “a small number of very relevant people,” Langley explained. “A content creator might be extremely relevant.'' Beauty brands, for example, compensate hundreds of middle-class creators who post about their products.
At a lower cost per partnership, Langley said, “the other advantage is that you're putting your eggs in a whole range of different baskets.”
Not just the future of YouTube, but the future of work
“It’s an entrepreneurial cheat code, and it’s available to everyone.”
With a rising middle class of creators, content platforms like YouTube have even more to offer to both brands and audiences. According to Oxford Economics, in 2021, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed more than $25 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product and supported more than 425,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States alone.1
At the same time, Craig said, content creation is becoming “the future of work” even outside of the creator economy: People are taking more normative, traditional career paths only to discover their employers expect them to incorporate content creation into their job, he explained. For example, early childhood educators can share their students’ days on parent-facing apps and general contractors can post their finished projects to attract future clients.
If the broader professional world is asking workers to use the same platforms, and the same skills, making that transition to a career in the creator middle class like Grant did may increasingly feel like less of a leap.
According to Ritchie, there’s never been a better time to start a career on YouTube. “You can start a channel, work smart, make a better life for yourself and even start building your own empire if that’s what you want to do,” he said. “It’s an entrepreneurial cheat code, and it’s available to everyone.”
1 Source: Oxford Economics 2021 YouTube US Impact Report
According to Ritchie, there’s never been a better time to start a career on YouTube. “You can start a channel, work smart, make a better life for yourself and even start building your own empire if that’s what you want to do,” he said. “It’s an entrepreneurial cheat code, and it’s available to everyone.”
