Creator economy

The phrase covers everyone earning from an audience they built themselves, plus the industry that grew up to serve them: platforms and their payout programmes, editing and analytics software, agencies, marketplaces, payment rails and the brands buying attention. Estimates of its size vary enormously because nobody agrees on who counts, and a figure that includes every part-time seller of a digital download looks nothing like one counting full-time professionals. Useful as shorthand for the market, much less useful as a number. When someone quotes a headline valuation, the first question is which definition produced it.