The Creator Economy Hasn’t Collapsed Yet - Ep. 11
ZilckSound. You're tuned in to ZilckSound, where business gets real, trends get broken down, and you walk away sharper than when you hit play. Brought to you by zilk.com. Practical news for the modern entrepreneur. Now here's your host, Rob Henley.
Rob:Hello, everyone. Welcome back to ZilckSound. Thanks for tuning in every week. This is our eleventh episode. Tonight, we're doing something a little different.
Rob:We'll shake things up just a little. We're reading an obituary. Yes, that's correct. Because the creator economy has apparently died about six times now. It died in 2022 when the funding dried up.
Rob:It died in 2023 when the think pieces came out. It died last year when AI started flooding the feed. Every year somebody writes the eulogy and every year the body gets up and goes back to work. But this isn't another episode telling you the doubters are wrong and everything is fine. Not at all.
Rob:Because the people predicting the collapse aren't stupid. Perhaps they're just looking at the wrong patient. Let's start with what actually happened. Ground Zero folks. Around 2021 venture capital fell in love with the creator economy.
Rob:Billions of dollars went into startups that were going to serve creators, tools for creators, banks for creators, marketplaces for creators. And the whole economy built on top of the economy. And then in about eighteen months, funding for those startups dropped by more than half. Companies folded. The phrase creator economy went from a pitch deck magnet to a punch line.
Rob:That's the collapse everyone remembers. And here's the thing, it was real. But notice what collapsed. The startups collapsed, the narrative collapsed, the idea that you could wrap software around creators and print money, that collapsed. The creators didn't.
Rob:Hey, we're still here. While the eulogies were being written, the numbers kept doing something inconvenient. They kept going up. The creator economy right now is worth somewhere around $250,000,000,000 Yeah, those are numbers. Analysts, the same people who called the collapse, are now projecting it past a trillion within this decade.
Rob:There are over 200,000,000 people creating content today, and the projections say we're headed toward a billion. So which is it? Dead or a trillion dollars? And here's the distinction nobody wants to sit with. A bubble can collapse.
Rob:The labor market can't. It can only sort. The creator economy was never an asset class. It was never one thing you could short. It's millions of people doing work for attention and getting paid for it.
Rob:That doesn't pop like a stock. That grinds like a job market. And job markets don't die just like that. They just get very honest very fast about who's providing value. About two years ago, I worked with a creator, call her Mary.
Rob:300,000 followers, beautiful content, brand deals coming in every month. And Mary had one business model be visible and invoice the visibility. Then the sorting came for her category. Brands got smarter. Attention got cheaper because there was suddenly so much of it.
Rob:The rate she used to charge for a sponsored post got cut in half and then in half again, not because she got worse, because being seen stopped being scarce. Same year, same industry. I met another creator, 9,000 subscribers, 9,000. He makes videos about commercial kitchen equipment. The least glamorous corner of the Internet you can imagine.
Rob:Sorry, bro. He sells a buying guide and runs a paid community for restaurant owners. He out earned Mary that year. It wasn't even close. Then what happened?
Rob:One of them had an audience, the other one had a business. And for a long time, this economy paid you for the audience and let you skip the business part. That subsidy is what's gone. That's the collapse people are feeling, not the death of the economy, the death of the shortcut through it. Now, the headline stat you always hear is that half of creators earn less than $10,000 a year.
Rob:And that's true. Roughly half do. But headlines love the bottom and the top and they skip the middle because the middle is boring. The middle is just people making a living. And now most creators sit between 10,000 and $100,000 a year.
Rob:Right now, there's a creator middle class forming quietly without a single headline. And middle classes are the one thing collapsing economies never produce. Collapsing economies produce exits. This one is producing salaries. Okay.
Rob:But what about AI? Because that's the new obituary. The feed is filling up with generated content, faceless channels, synthetic everything. A billion creators, most of whom won't be human. Surely that's the flood that drowns it.
Rob:Here's what I think the flood actually drowns. It drowns the value of being merely present. For fifteen years, showing up was a strategy. Post consistently be visible and the algorithm would eventually hand you a livelihood. AI just made showing up free.
Rob:Infinite content means the content itself is worth approximately nothing. You know what AI can't flood? Being the person a restaurant owner calls before spending $40 on an oven. Being a name someone trusts when every face on the screen might be generated. The reality is scarcity didn't disappear.
Rob:It moved. It moved from content to trust. And economies don't collapse when scarcity moves. They just change who gets paid. Keep in mind that distinction.
Rob:Let's go back to the title of the episode. The Creator Economy Hasn't Collapsed Yet. No, that word yet, everyone reads it as a countdown. TikTok, TikTok, get out before it blows. I'd read it differently.
Rob:The yet was never pointed at the economy. The economy is fine. The economy is frankly indifferent. It doesn't care really. The thing is that yet is pointed at you.
Rob:Yeah, you heard me. Because individual creator businesses collapse every single day quietly, one rate cut at a time, one algorithm change at a time, one category like Mary's getting repriced overnight. The macro number goes up while thousands of micro economies go to zero. Both things are true at once and the macro number will not save you, friend. So the question was never will the Creator Economy survive.
Rob:It will definitely. The question is whether the thing you're building is a business inside that economy or a lottery ticket riding on top of it. A business has customers, a lottery ticket has an audience and a prayer. So if you're building right now, here's the honest version. You're allowed to have 9,000 subscribers and a real income.
Rob:You're allowed to be boring and specific and trusted in a niche nobody makes documentaries about. You're allowed to ignore the obituaries and the trillion dollar forecasts alike, because neither one of them is about you. The people who needed the Creator Economy to be a gold rush are gone or leaving. What's left is just work. Real customers, real trust, real products delivered through a camera instead of a storefront.
Rob:TikTok is still there. It's thriving and it will keep growing. That's not a collapse. That's what an economy looks like after the confetti gets swept up and the balloons pop off. That's all I have for tonight.
Rob:Thank you for tuning in. I'm Rob Henley, and this is ZilckSound. See you on the next one.
Sara:ZilckSound. ZilckSound.