Creator Economy Faces $44bn Boom and a Burnout Reality Check

Advertising spending backing the US creator economy is expected to reach almost $44bn in 2026, according to the trade body IAB, as brands shift budgets from institutional media toward popular individual voices. That is the headline number opening a new Financial Times series on the creator economy, and it frames a market where massive inflows sit alongside volatile, algorithm-dependent incomes for the people actually making the content.

The scale is measurable beyond the US. Oxford Economics research puts the UK's creator economy on YouTube alone at £2.8bn in 2025, supporting 60,000 jobs. Global employment estimates stretch into the hundreds of millions. Last year, a UK parliamentary group launched to recognise the sector's growth.

At the top of the market, the numbers are extraordinary. Hew Moran, who started filming comedy skits based on computer games as a teenager on Long Island, was gaining 1 million subscribers every month by 2023. His videos now regularly exceed 100 million monthly views. "It just kind of worked, which was kind of crazy," he says of the period when he juggled college, a part-time job and his channel. He eventually quit the job and dropped out of college. "My parents were like, what the heck is this?"

Jimmy Donaldson — MrBeast — now runs Beast Industries, an empire spanning TV shows, soft drinks and snacks. Speaking to the FT at a Disney event in Los Angeles this year, he said he increasingly feels like a data scientist, spotting and riding trends in popular content, rather than a simple creator.

What the income volatility looks like in practice

Official growth figures come from IAB and Oxford Economics. The volatility claims come from creators themselves, and they are worth treating as anecdotal rather than benchmarked data. Levy Rozman, the chess creator known as GothamChess — 2 million Instagram followers, 8 million on YouTube — says his earnings fluctuate by 20 to 50 per cent year to year, largely due to algorithm shifts. His strategy: "You have to be the thing that people want to watch rather than watching their limited series, rather than a movie, a documentary, listening to music, listening to podcasts."

The implications for practitioners are direct. Algorithm changes, not audience preferences alone, drive revenue swings of up to half a creator's annual income. Rozman's response is aggressive diversification — "Everything I do, I think, can I make content out of it? Cooking, building a house, doing your taxes, immigration law."

What talent scouts and agencies actually screen for

Molly McDonald, founder of London-based Blue Door Productions, looks for individuals with "a sharp, distinguishable point of view . . . If people can't explain who you are succinctly, the algorithm won't pick up on it." She identifies the essential skills as "story structure, business literacy, and burnout management . . . The algorithm only favours your platform more if you distribute more content but there also has to be quality. If they stop posting, users drop."

Oren Rosenbaum, co-head of UTA Creators, notes that format boundaries have collapsed: "The podcasters are making content for YouTube. YouTubers are making podcasts. Everyone has TikTok, everyone has Instagram." He pushes back on the perception of easy entry: "I think too many people are like, well, it's so easy, anybody can do it . . . it's a very challenging job."

The workload numbers behind the output

The FT's reporting documents workloads that make the burnout claims concrete. Moran films from 11am to 5pm most days, producing roughly five minutes of content, then spends until the early hours writing and editing multiple clips — with a camera person and an editor on staff. Lucy Edwards, blind since birth, started posting on TikTok during lockdown after losing journalism work; her video "blind girl does her own make-up" drew 20 million views and she went from 27,000 subscribers to a million followers. She now targets four or five pieces a week. "You have to feed the beast."

Romany Henry, who shares cooking content drawing on her Asian heritage with 460,000 Instagram followers, describes "constant exhaustion" from "creating the recipe, to shooting it, to speaking" — and took time out to work in kitchens to reignite her passion for cooking. Jamie Laing, with 1.7 million Instagram followers, says burnout is "rife" and the pressure is to "constantly be creative and different from someone else. You can't be boring."

Structural headwinds are compounding. Dom Smales, who founded and sold creator agency Gleam Futures, says attention available to creators "is waning as the proliferation of creators and brands [has grown]." AI influencers — digital avatars competing for audience and income — add a newer competitive threat, alongside online abuse reported disproportionately by female creators.

Shira Jeczmien, founder of viral marketing agency Screenshot Media, describes the trend-chasing alternative: using social listening to spot "content that might have a disproportionately high view count relative to the volume of videos being created on that topic" — citing a cucumber-eating trend brief enough to cause supermarket shortages.

The mum behind Mum Bum, a parenting influencer now earning similar to a graduate job, captures the ambivalence: "It feels like somebody has just handed me a golden ticket sometimes. But as time goes on, I can feel this is not sustainable. I need to be present for my children, and I don't want them to see mummy with a phone in her hand all the time."

The FT series will continue examining how top creators monetise, which businesses benefit, and how traditional companies are racing to catch up — the open question being whether an industry built on algorithm-fed attention can convert its billions into careers its participants can sustain.