For most creators, the career remains a side hustle: report

While the creator lifestyle can appear glamorous, most creators are not making the big bucks.

According to a new State of Creators report from the influencer marketing platform CreatorIQ, a survey of more than 5,000 creators found that the majority (about 67%) make under $10,000 a year from content creation, while less than 5% made more than $100,000. Content creation also continues to be a side hustle for most creators, with 63% of respondents saying it is not their primary source of income.

And for those that do strike higher-paying contracts, it’s not their engagement rate that’s bringing in brand interest. According to the report, higher creator pay still most often correlates with higher follower numbers, despite some brands reporting that creator fit and suitability is the most important factor when selecting creators to work with. Views, or content performance, is also more closely associated with creator pay than content engagement, according to the report.

Jennifer Cho, chief customer officer at CreatorIQ, said that brands have been looking more closely at engagement rates as creator measurement programs have evolved, but the figure may still not represent the ROI they’re looking for, especially depending on the goals they have in working with creators in the first place.

“[With] engagement rate as a standalone, if you look at the audience makeup of a creator, it might not be the audience that you actually want to engage with your brand. There’s also sentiment analysis that comes into it,” she said. “[There are] different KPIs and metrics and selection criteria to be able to convert your brand at that final stage [of the marketing funnel] versus…broadening your reach.”

CreatorIQ’s State of Creators report surveyed content creators on topics like pay, AI usage, and the relationship between audience and brand trust, and the resulting data surfaced some other gaps in understanding between creator needs and workflows and the brands looking to work with them.

“When I talk to brands and customers, they all have questions on how to engage better from a metrics perspective,” Cho told us. “I think there needs to be more of an understanding of the humans behind the creators in this creator economy that we talk about, and I think brands, in order to be successful, need to respect that and understand the perspectives of creators from all different sizes.”

We highlighted some other key insights from the report below.

In the toolbox: AI is becoming part of how creators work, but its role isn’t nearly as significant as it may be in more corporate industries today, according to Cher Bazile, insights lead at CreatorIQ. While 72% of creator respondents said they have used AI tools, that’s mostly to support creative and administrative tasks like brainstorming content ideas or writing captions rather than strategic work, the report found.

“I was surprised by the small amount of creators who were using AI for standardizing their workflows or automating them versus those who are using it to create more,” Bazile told us. “It creates this element of creators becoming more mature looking quite different than what we would actually expect, and it’s going to look different than brands becoming more mature, so brands shouldn’t enforce that sort of bureaucratic view onto creators.”

Living in tension: As brands continue to court the authentic connections to audiences that creators command, about 4 in 10 creators report that there is tension between the types of content that audiences crave and to the content brands are asking them to create.

An even bigger portion of influencers with more than 500,000 followers agree, with 53% feeling the tension, per the report. Cho attributes that tension to the fact that bigger deals with these creators may lead to more pressure on the brand side to show leadership that creators are delivering on exactly what the company wants.

But the way forward isn’t in strong-arming branded creator content, she said.

“The creator knows their audience much better than the brand,” Cho said. “I think the brands that are winning are the ones that are less prescriptive.”