Erin McGough has She has 3 million followers on social media, but with the money she makes from Instagram and TikTok, she won’t be able to pay for the plate of mozzarella sticks we shared at a Baltimore bar.
“On Instagram, I’ll get 900,000 views on a video and make $6,” McGough said. “It’s an insult.”
Like most content creators, McGough makes a living off of brand deals, sponsorships and subscription products, not the platform itself. But this reality is emblematic of the dilemma creators find themselves in: They are pushing social platforms to new heights, but those platforms could betray them at any time with a slight change in algorithm or an unwarranted pause.
Creators face the same pressures as any self-employed person, but at the same time, they are completely dependent on the whims of large social platforms that don’t compensate them enough, or at all, for the huge value they create. When it comes to brand deals and partnerships, there are no standards to ensure creators are paid fairly.
“TikTok and Instagram make a lot of money from advertising, but they don’t share that money with creators,” McGough told TechCrunch.
The creator economy has a sustainability problem. Matt Koval, an early creator who later served as YouTube’s first creator liaison, said a creator’s career typically lasts five to seven years.
“If creators don’t take advantage of their fame and turn it into some kind of sustainable business, they might find themselves in a very difficult position of, ‘Okay, what do I do now?'” he said in the YouTube video said.
McGough has been making more and more money every year since opening her social media account in 2021, but she still worries that her job could disappear at any time. What if her TikTok account is deleted? What if her followers get tired of her? Outside of a small elite group, there’s really no blueprint for a content creator’s career over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years.
“You have to act like your influencer money is going to disappear tomorrow,” she said. “A lot of creators just think, ‘I’m going to make videos online and make a lot of money,’ but unfortunately that’s not sustainable. You have to have a business mindset and understand how to make the money work for you.”
These anxieties are not unique, nor are they unfounded. While creators try to build multifaceted businesses, they’re also starting to consider whether they can work together to advocate for more transparency from platforms and brands, which might help make their careers more solid.
Last year, creators watched as Hollywood’s Writers and Screen Actors Guilds picketed under the unforgiving Los Angeles sun, finally winning contract changes with studios that would help them get better treatment and pay. Some creators even pledged not to cross picket lines during the strike. Gen Z has entered adulthood, and workers at Amazon, Starbucks, REI, Trader Joe’s, Home Depot, UPS and more are launching high-profile strikes and union campaigns for better working conditions. And this generation – which spends so much time on social media – is the most pro-union generation today.
Is it time for content creators to get their due?
lack of transparency
As a creator who builds videos and resources around career advice, it makes sense that McGough thinks so intently about her career trajectory. The same goes for Hannah Williams, founder of Salary Transparency Street (STS), which has amassed more than 2 million followers across platforms.
In her video, Williams asks people on the street to share their wages as a means of promoting pay transparency—and since she opened her TikTok account in 2022, STS has grown into a broader resource center that helps People get paid fairly.
“I started my TikTok in 2022 and I just talked about how much money I was making at each job because I was like, this is the only way I can fight back,” Williams told TechCrunch. At the time, she had recently discovered that she was underpaid as a data analyst in Washington, D.C. “A video of me went viral on TikTok and it had all my paychecks on it, so I realized that salary transparency was a real issue and people were concerned about it,” she said. That. So I came up with this idea: go out on the street and ask random people how much they make.”
Williams is living the content creator’s dream. In 2023, her business’s total revenue exceeded $1 million, more than double what it did in 2022, and she paid herself a salary of $125,000. But as Williams helps people in other industries achieve greater salary transparency, she’s been reflecting on issues in her own career field.
“We absolutely need a union because we need standardized rates,” Williams said. “We need rules that all companies follow. We need help. We need publicity. We need people who support us.”
Because America’s film and television industries are unionized, workers in every aspect of the production process are afforded a number of workplace protections and minimum wage guarantees.
“If we look at it from a SAG and studio perspective, Creator Studio is the social media platform. They’re the ones who host our content. We make them money,” Williams said.
Without any industry oversight, brands can pay creators whatever they want — or nothing at all — for their work.
Some advocates are trying to change that. After repeatedly losing money on underpaid brand deals, Lindsey Lee Luurgin founded Fuck You Pay Me (FYPM), a repository where creators can share which brands they work with and who they work for. How much was paid for these deliverables.
“Someone said, ‘Thanks to your website, I paid my rent this month because I was going to get a free t-shirt from this brand, but I joined FYPM and found out I could charge them two big bucks . ”,” Lurgin told TechCrunch.
Creators also want the social platform itself to be more transparent. Since much of a creator’s business is mediated through these platforms, any arbitrary algorithm changes, disciplinary actions, or updates could mean lost revenue.
“I once reported someone on TikTok for a homophobic comment and I responded by saying ‘ugh,'” Williams said. “My account was restricted for 48 hours and I appealed but nothing happened… It hurts me as a creator because I can’t engage or engage with my audience.”
In the worst-case scenario, an account being suspended or hacked can have a real impact on a creator’s business. Let’s say a creator gets paid $5,000 from a brand for posting a promotional Instagram post; if the creator doesn’t have access to their account to post the post, they won’t get paid. These concerns are so widespread that new startups have sprung up to offer creators insurance in case their accounts are hacked.
“Instagram has no customer service at all, so if you have a problem with your account, no one can help you unless you know someone,” McGough said.
Williams said the platforms also didn’t do enough to prevent retweets.
“There’s not enough policing of people copying your content — they’re going to go out of their way to download your video and repost it and make money from it,” she said. “I can’t report it and have them take it down. Instagram is happy because they make money, but as a creator, I’m not happy because what else can I do but post on Instagram? My hands are tied. “
Can content creators form a union?
Over the years, several leaders in the creator economy have floated the idea of a creators union. In 2016, long-time YouTuber Hank Green tried to form an Internet Creators Association, but the idea may have come too soon; the project lacked the funding and motivation to keep it going, so it shut down in 2019. Since then, with the rise of TikTok and the boom in social media use during the epidemic, more and more people have relied on the Internet to make a living.
Now, industry veteran Ezra Cooperstein is working on a project called Creators.org, a nonprofit that aims to provide a unified voice for creators. A similar organization, the Creators Guild of America, was formed in August. In 2021, SAG-AFTRA opened membership to creators, but the union will not negotiate with brands; instead, this special agreement allows creators to qualify for the union’s benefits, such as health insurance. But none of these organizations have become popular enough to attract a large enough community of creators—at least not yet.
“It’s hard to find common ground with everyone because everyone wants something different,” Williams said. “Depending on the type of creator you are, you may have different priorities.”
At the same time, platforms can still make changes to better support their creators.
“I think what we can do is give creators a say on the platform, such as a say in how the algorithm changes, and provide more legal protection to recognize this work as a legitimate work,” Lukin said. “Those who make the rules at the top are so disconnected from the rules. If your page is stolen, it’s like deleting someone’s work.”
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