There are 7.5 times as many "full-time creators" now as 5 years ago in America. It then talks about median earnings - $3,000 per year. That would mean that >50% are earning $2xx per month. Probably not "full-time" in America. No source links, so I found them, but it seems to be measuring different populations:

* https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Measuring-the...

* https://www.creatoriq.com/blog/creator-compensation-report-h...

But even the author’s own claims may prove the opposite of their conclusion:

> 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. …

> 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.

If the number of nanoinfluencers is exploding in quantity, the existing middle might be growing or earning more, but the median can still go down.

But without any such claimed data or sources about middle vs bottom it’s not possible to say whether middle or bottom are getting impacted.

It really is just a hamster wheel at this point. If you want to create content the content has to be modern day clickbait, and then there is no time or energy left to make good content. So why bother in the first place?

These days I actively avoid any website of app that uses an algorithm, because simply it doesn't have anything on it I actually want to consume.

For my own music that I make, I share it on WhatsApp/Signal with my friends and family. No point putting it anywhere else.

Look at Seattle in the 90's, NYC, early San Fran, etc., the before real estate prices skyrocketed or 17th and 18th century enlightenment post-plague, when massive amounts of the rich died and the wealth became more evenly distributed.

I feel like real estate prices, inequality, and inflation truly squander the intellectual wealth of the poor and middle classes and it hurts the human race as a whole.

That's only "middle class" in the sense that your middle class lifestyle allows you to have this as a hobby, and a few lucky people doing it make a few bucks.

The activity didn't even exist before the Internet. If you wanted to reach people with a newsletter or talk, you had to join the staff of some widely circulated publication, or get into broadcasting. Those were then middle class jobs.

And yet this is itself AI text.

That is why the top gets heavier and the bottom spreads out.