The Death of the Creator Middle Class

It’s starting to look a lot like income inequality

Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

I’m somewhere in the middle.

A few hundred, maybe 1 or 2K dollars a month from writing. A newsletter. Then a handful of products that bring in money. Affiliate links. Partner. Things like that. Not nothing. It’s great. But not a true living either. At least in Germany, where I live.

For a few years that place felt like a fine place to be. Keep publishing, keep getting a little better, and the number creeps up.

That part is getting harder I feel like. The work didn’t get worse. But the middle itself is thinning out. Don’t you think?

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The creator middle class gap

The creator economy as a whole is huge now.

Something north of $200 billion. More than 1.5 million Americans call themselves full-time creators, roughly seven times as many as in 2020.

So you’d think there’s more money to go around. There is. It just isn’t spread the way you’d hope.

One report said: the top 10% of creators took 62% of all payments in 2025, up from 53% two years earlier. The top 1% alone grabbed about a fifth of it.

And here’s the number that actually says it. Average creator earnings went up. The median went down, from around $3,500 to $3,000.

When the average rises while the middle falls, you know exactly where the money went.

It’s the same shape as the wage gap. A few people way up top. A lot of people at the bottom making close to nothing. And the part in between getting squeezed from both ends.

There’s almost no middle class anymore.

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Brands skip the middle

For a lot of creators, the money was never the platform alone. It was brand deals. And brands changed how they spend.

When budgets are tight, they go in two directions. Up, to the big names with the reach. Or down, to the nano and micro creators who are cheap and come in bulk.

The middle gets skipped. Again. Too expensive to be a bargain. Too small to be a headline.

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Then there’s AI

The other squeeze hits writers and bloggers, creative creators harder than anyone.

Search used to be a great equalizer. A small site could rank, get found, and pull in readers for years. That’s how a lot of the middle class survived.

Google’s AI Overviews are eating that. AI chats are eating that. They answer the question right there, so nobody needs to click into the article or content source. When that summary shows up, something like 1% of people click through to the source. 1%…

Traffic to news sites dropped about a quarter in the year after AI Overviews rolled out. Some small publishers lost 60%. A few lost more.

AI competes with us for attention. And it changes the reader too. I wrote a whole piece on how AI isn’t replacing writers, it’s replacing readers. People skim a summary and move on. The slow, careful stuff the middle class is good at gets compressed into three bullet points by a machine before a human ever sees it.

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Platforms reward extremes

Substack tells a similar story. Gross writer revenue keeps climbing, past $450 million. Sounds great.

But the median writer there makes something like $4,000 a year. A few dozen people make over a million. Most make a few hundred bucks, if that.

Algorithms don’t help the middle.

They reward whatever gets a reaction. Outrage, drama, big claims, short bursts. The steady writer publishing twice a week with no theatrics is exactly the kind of work that gets buried…

Good used to be „good“ enough. Publish consistently, build trust, help people. Now the rules are about hooks and funnels and being loud.

The market rewards spectacle.

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It wears you down

When someone at the top posts “I made $35K this week,” it’s meant to inspire (often). For people at the bottom, it may.

For the middle, it stings.

Because you’re closer to them than it feels, but the distance looks enormous. And the questions start. Is my niche wrong? Am I not hustling enough? Should I be louder, more extreme, less thoughtful?

I don’t think it’s jealousy. It’s the tension of working hard and watching the chart pretend you don’t exist.

The middle works. Top creators automate. The bottom dabbles. The middle edits the post, answers the comments, builds the actual community. And then gets told that wasn’t the right content format.

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There is another side

The middle is dying in one place and holding in another. It’s dying in short-form, the cheap interchangeable stuff a brand can reassemble out of fifty micro creators. It’s holding in long-form, where a real following is something nobody can buy back.

That’s the thing the middle still owns. Trust. A reader who actually reads. Brands and readers both lean on the people who aren’t only chasing virality. They want credibility.

We can’t lean on one platform.

The deals dry up, the algorithm change, the search traffic goes down, and if all your eggs are in one basket you go down with it.

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The Bottom Line

The creator middle class is getting pressed from every direction at once. Brands, algorithms, search, AI, and a culture that only points the camera at the extremes.

I’ve written about this creator middle class problem before, and I keep coming back to it, because it’s personal… I am in there.

The people in the middle are the ones who do great work. But can’t survive on it.