A complete guide to the creator economy
The best niches and monetization options for creators, and how brands should tap in, a complete guide
Oren here, hope you’re enjoying some end of May. You’ve probably seen anti-optimization content going viral all the last few weeks, giving people what they want… an excuse to start tapping out for summer. I cannot encourage you enough to resist, because we continue to be at a unique time of absolute creative leverage unlike any in history. Don’t let the influencers psyop their competition away, stick with us.
This week… we talk about the creator economy, and in typical HYPER fashion it is ultra tactical.
To start,
More and more people have been hitting me up asking to hire creative directors… and it’s a marked change from last year.
In 2025 people wanted the elusive creative strategist. They wanted people to get them more ads, to help with their brand social strategy. I still get a handful of those.
In 2026 there has been a far more decisive shift.
The people looking for these creative directors are personal brands looking for people to help them script and elevate.
This is a combo of creators, influencers, and executives, whether they’re posting on LinkedIn or Instagram. More and more people realize the efficacy of the core brand account is an uphill battle (that’s a separate newsletter by itself).
This is another one of those job shifts where there isn’t really a playbook. This didn’t exist five or six years ago beyond ghostwriting for text posts.
I’ve begun putting together a pretty thorough set of resources based on everything we’ve learned educating thousands of creators and Cut30, and the formats I developed with myself and with clients that have experts.
I’m going to go through a bunch of this in our June community call next Sunday if you’d like to join, sign up here.
WHY CARE ABOUT THE CREATOR ECONOMY
Today I want to talk about the state of the creator economy.
All of the “economy” terms: taste economy, creator economy, attention economy on one side feel overused but on the other hand… for people that aren’t directly participating in them it’s easy to lose sight of just how expansive some of these conversations are that are happening and how they impact us in real life as people and businesses.
The creator economy in particular is an interesting one, starting with that statistics show that more than half of Gen Z consider themselves to be content creators.
An emerging part of the workforce that would be unthinkable to anyone 40 or older to deal with that dynamic of people that create content about their work, outside of their work, or mastering a particular internet skill set.
At the same time there is an ongoing talent siphon, you will find that a lot of the most prominent people across fields from marketers to scientists are choosing to prioritize content creation over their actual careers because it’s more lucrative and they have more control, which is creating a genuine talent gap. Try to hire a marketing or organic hitter full time right now… their probably making content or prefer four clients over a job.
It’s a real thing.
At the same time more and more people are concerned about corporate layoffs in technology and the consistent lack of regard from companies like Webflow for when they do get rid of them.
This has shown up that in the back of their head they’re always wondering: should I have that thing lined up? That content I can easily activate to get attention, to get a new job, or to get money. This has led to more creators than ever, with the algorithms so heavily weighing new creators and new faces, and continued success on the part of people who are starting the journey.
What we also have now are people who have been in the game from three months to five years and are trying to figure out what are the ways to REALLY make money with content. Did you pick the right niche? What are you working through?
In this video below I put together a complete guide ranking all of the niches and the ways to monetize so that you can understand completely what this creator economy landscape looks like and if you’re a brand how you’re able to tap into this to use it to your advantage from creators to affiliates to influencers.
Now, the breakdown.
HOW CREATORS MAKE MONEY
There are six core models. Most creators use more than one.
1. Platform Payouts
The floor of creator monetization. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube all pay based on content performance. TikTok’s Creator Fund pays meaningfully in strong niches — education, auto, beauty — and some creators pull $7,500–$10K/month off views alone. The incentive structure matters: TikTok only pays on content over a minute, which is why free product mailers flood the platform. If you’re a brand wondering why creators are posting about your competitors unprompted, TikTok is funding it.
This is not a real income model, but it helps people get started.
2. Affiliate
The most underrated path to real money. TikTok Shop leads here, higher commission rates than anything else (25-40% is common), and the reason entire categories of creators now live comfortably without a single brand deal. ShopMy and LTK allow catalog-style passive linking of products you mention without formal relationships or programs. Brands running structured affiliate programs through Social Snowball are building armies of thousands of affiliates, not dozens. Cowboy Colostrum, Gruns, Dad Gang are running programs at scale most people don’t realize exist. I cover this here:
If you’re a creator in a lifestyle niche and not running affiliate, you’re leaving money on the table before your first brand deal ever comes.
3. UGC
You make the video, it never goes on your feed, the brand runs it as an ad. Platforms like Minisocial and Insense match creators to briefs for $50–$300 per asset. Brands test these in Meta and TikTok ad accounts constantly. If you have the skill to make content that converts and you’re not registered on at least one of these platforms, that’s a quick fix.
4. Brand Deals (Influence)
The most talked about and the least common. You need views, audience affinity, and a niche brands want to buy attention in. The bar is higher than most think and lower than most fear, but you have to be making content in the right category first. Brands find creators through platform search. If you haven’t made content about their category, you won’t come up (the biggest reason people dont end up with deals).
5. Creator-on-Brand Feeds
Underutilized. A brand retains a creator to post recurring content on the brand’s own channel. Monthly retainers with predictable income. If you’re a strong creator in a niche and brand deals haven’t materialized, pitch for a spot on their feed or a new dedicated account instead.
You saw me do a mini-series with CashApp like this
6. Info Products
Courses, guides, calls, cohorts. If you have knowledge worth $30, charge for it. Most lifestyle creators resist this the longest and benefit from it the most. The creators who scale past brand deals almost always have an info product doing real volume in the background. We run Cut30 on Kajabi for this for a number of reasons.
NICHE RANKINGS
Not all categories are equal. Here’s how they tier by brand deal ceiling.
D Tier — Don’t bank on it News, politics, sports commentary, music, gaming, comedy, AI-generated content, faceless accounts. The content is everywhere... but the money is not. If you’re here, love the game or go find a secondary income stream.
C Tier — Lifestyle Fashion, fitness, travel, food, motherhood, pets, interior design, local content. You can make money here. It’s competitive and the floor is low, but the ceiling is real for the top 20% that can’t make it to the top 1%. Info products are your best bet, build affinity, then sell direct. Local content is notably undervalued because local businesses are desperate for reach and there are far fewer creators going deep on specific markets.
B Tier — Business Adjacent Marketing, email, paid ads, design, AI in business, HR tech. This is where brand deals start paying real money. Brands here are selling to decision-makers who operate on software budgets. The content doesn’t get massive view counts, but the views it gets are worth significantly more per impression. New creators can realistically hit $10K/month in brand deals in this tier. Established creators regularly cross $500K–$1M a year without a huge audience. Infoproducts have massive value too (albeit less scale)
A Tier — Finance and Medical Personal finance, investing, credit, health, medical devices, pharmaceuticals. The highest CPM on the internet. You need the fewest views to generate the most revenue. Hard to build credibly, nearly impossible to lost at monetization once you have the attention.
HOW BRANDS SHOULD BE USING CREATORS
Get a creator on your main feed. Four to eight videos a month. If your social media underperforms, this is the single fastest fix. Someone who can explain your product with depth and personality will outperform anything your internal team is posting. Most brands still haven’t done this, and you just need to search for people in the niche who post regularly with sub 50k followers and make an offer. You can go higher too, just expect to pay a premium.
Run UGC through your ad account. Test it against in-house creative. Add voices: ASMR, vlog, long-form, short-form, demographic variety. The brands scaling ad spend fastest are doing it by expanding creative volume and formats, not just budget. Recruit just for this at a percent of adspend on Instagram with Tribe.
Build an affiliate program. Fifty affiliates is not a program… a thousand affiliates is a program. The brands winning on affiliate are in constant recruitment mode, top performers get paid extra for assets that convert, then pulled into ads. Your existing customers are recruited at checkout and through Outer Signal, that is where you start, then plugin Social Snowball for search.
Anchor + micro structure for campaigns. Any influencer campaign should have a few large creators to put up numbers and signal legitimacy, then A wide bench of 50k-200K creators as shots on goal while he anchors build momentum. Then more micros and new accounts find your next star.
WHERE TO FIND YOUR FIRST CREATOR
Search your customers with Outer Signal. Minisocial for UGC. Social Snowball for affiliate. Euka for TikTok Shop. Tribe for Instagram affiliate. Later for full-service discovery and campaign management. Aligned Growth for influencer programs with performance integration. Darkroom if you’re a larger brand running creator content alongside paid.
REMINDER
82% of people 18–44 posted content online last month. 64% of Gen Z consider themselves creators. The media dollars are still sitting in programmatic blocks no one clicks, managed by agencies with no idea what they’re doing.
The alpha is still enormous, act accordingly.
If you want to workshop any of this live… I’ll do extended Q&A and workshopping on our June community call next Sunday if you’d like to join, sign up here.
Oren