More creators, more revenue, more tools
Twenty-five years after the idea of a “new economy” first surfaced, the creator economy has become a measurable business. Stripe, which processes payments for many of the platforms creators use to get paid, analyzed monetization data across 50 such platforms—ranging from Substack to Clubhouse to Teachable—and found aggregate creator earnings are on track to surpass $10 billion. The number of creators on these platforms, 668,000 in total, is up 48% year-over-year, indicating that the pandemic-era surge of new creators wasn’t a one-time event.
Education leads; community grows fastest
By revenue, education is the largest creator economy sector, a legacy of the fact that digital courses were among the earliest ways creators could earn online. Platforms like Teachable, which has helped instructors build paid courses since 2014, anchor the category. But newer sectors are gaining ground quickly. Community-focused platforms such as Luma, which help creators connect with established audiences, saw revenue grow 148% year-over-year—the fastest of any sector.
Funding follows content formats
Seventy percent of the platforms analyzed have raised outside capital to scale. Platforms that enable audio or video streaming received the most funding. Clubhouse is a notable example: it added payments for speakers in April and has raised $110 million in total, including a Series C.
Real incomes are emerging
Data from the US shows the number of creators earning a living wage—more than $69,000 per year—rose 41% year-over-year. That figure tracks sustained monetization rather than one-off successes. Writer Craig Mod, for instance, self-published a book about walking the Japanese countryside, then launched a paid membership newsletter and podcast that attracted over 1,000 subscribers. Newer monetization mechanisms continue to appear; Stripe also powers card payments for Nifty Gateway, a platform for selling crypto art as NFTs.
Global reach, uneven distribution
Stripe is available in 54 countries, while its payments infrastructure supports customers in 185 countries. The creators on the platforms analyzed are heavily concentrated in North America (85%), followed by Europe/Middle East/Africa (11%), Asia-Pacific (4%), and Latin America (0.5%). Growth, however, is fastest outside North America: the Czech Republic (270%), Romania (215%), and Brazil (171%) all saw large year-over-year increases in new creators, coinciding with Stripe’s recent expansion into those markets.
Infrastructure still catching up
As creators become more dependent on the internet for income, the legal and financial frameworks around them are aging. Most creators operate as sole proprietors, and many are reluctant to formalize as LLCs. Tax structures in many countries do not reflect how creators actually start and run their businesses today.
Projecting current growth forward, the 50 platforms analyzed could support more than 15.5 million creators in five years—more than the population of Istanbul, Europe’s most populous city. That projection underscores both the momentum and the relative youth of the creator economy; there is still considerable room to grow. The tools that creators need for full-time online work now exist; the next quarter century will show how much further the sector can go.
