The Silent Collapse of the Creator Middle Class

Way to sound dramatic…

My Medium friends can read this story over there as well.

Photo by Kit (formerly ConvertKit) on Unsplash

We talk a lot about creators these days. I do.

The viral ones. The broke ones. The newsletters making 200K a year. The YouTubers who bought a house from AdSense.

Also, the quiet strugglers who publish for years with no traction. The blogger who wrote for 5 years before earning a dime.

These two extremes dominate the conversation.

But there’s a whole other group in the middle. They outnumber everyone else. The creator middle class.

The people earning something like 50 to 1000 bucks a month from their writing, newsletters, digital products or a mix of everything.

Not glamorous money. No “I made 200K in two months” money. Just a steady trickle that never makes it onto charts.

And this middle class might be collapsing. Not because the work is bad, but because the ecosystem changed.

We should talk about it.