Money
Creator Pay Rose 59% in 2025. The Top 1% Took 21%.
Aggregate creator pay grew 59 percent in 2025, but the top 1 percent now capture 21 cents of every ad dollar. CreatorIQ’s data is the clearest challenge yet to the idea that a booming creator economy pays everyone.
The top 1 percent of creators earned 21 cents of every dollar brands and agencies paid in 2025, up from 15 cents in 2023, according to CreatorIQ’s State of Creator Compensation report published in January. Aggregate creator payments grew 59 percent over the same year.
Both numbers are true at once, and that is the story. The market is booming. The money is pooling.
Read as a market signal, this is the clearest data-backed challenge yet to the idea that a rising creator economy lifts every creator with it. Brand and agency spend on creator marketing grew 171 percent year over year in 2025, the report found, exceeding the growth of the previous four years combined. Payments to creators grew 59 percent. Brand investment expanded nearly three times faster than the pay that reached creators, which means the gap between what platforms spend and what most creators earn is widening inside the boom, not despite it.
The concentration is measurable across the ladder. CreatorIQ reported the top 10 percent of creators earned 62 percent of total payments in 2025, up from 53 percent in 2023. The top decile now takes nearly two thirds of the money.
The Median Falls While The Average Climbs
The middle tells the harshest version. Creators earned an average of $11,400 per campaign in 2025, but the median creator earned just $3,000, down from a $3,500 median the prior year. When the average rises while the median falls, the new money is landing at the top.
Median pay is the more honest figure here. The average gets pulled upward by a small number of large deals; the median is the creator standing in the exact middle of the distribution. That creator earned less in 2025 than in 2024, even as the total pool grew by more than half.
The Barbell Squeezes The Middle
The distribution matters because most creators now run their work like companies. CreatorIQ found 62 percent of creators use operational support such as teams or outsourced services, yet their revenue stays episodic, driven by one-off campaigns rather than repeatable programs. They carry the fixed costs of a business on the income of a gig.
The demand for creator content is not in question. The report found creator-produced content featuring Fortune 100 brands now outnumbers brand-produced content about those same brands by roughly 33 to 1. Brands need creators. They are just paying a shrinking share of them well.
Brit Starr, CreatorIQ’s chief marketing officer, framed the split plainly in the report. She said creator marketing is driving meaningful growth for brands, “and while creators are earning more in aggregate, most aren’t building momentum or predictable income.” She added that “that gap is creating real instability in the creator ecosystem.”
Why The Money Clusters At The Top
The pooling is not evidence of a broken market so much as a maturing one. As creator marketing turns into a measured, contracted media channel, budgets flow to the creators who can guarantee reach and clean measurement. Those capabilities cluster at the top, and money follows them.
The report drew on a payment dataset of 14,400 creators globally who received brand or agency payments in 2025, paired with a Sapio Research survey of 300 creators across eight countries conducted in July 2025. Among those surveyed, only 11 percent reported a six-figure annual income, per NetInfluencer.
CreatorIQ pegged the global market value of creator marketing at an estimated $32.6 billion in 2025. The next report will show whether the top 1 percent’s share climbs past 21 cents.
Money
Forbes 2026: Podcasting’s $638M Ceiling Moves
Forbes’ 2026 podcaster ranking puts the top 20 at $638 million. An AI acquisition set the ceiling, and a reality-TV duo set a floor.
Forbes put a $638 million price tag on podcasting’s top tier this week, its estimate of what the 20 highest-paid hosts earned between June 2025 and June 2026. Joe Rogan led at $82 million, driven largely by his Spotify deal. The full ranking, compiled by Matt Craig, published on the Forbes site on July 30.
Two entries at opposite ends of the list explain how that money now gets made. At No. 2 sit John Coogan and Jordi Hays of TBPN, at an estimated $70 million. At No. 20 sit Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo of Giggly Squad, at an estimated $18 million.
Read together, they mark a shift in what a podcast is worth and to whom. The ceiling here was not set by an advertiser or a platform. It was set by an AI lab writing an acquisition check, a different kind of buyer with a different reason to pay.
Start with the number that jumps. Forbes estimates Coogan and Hays netted close to $70 million, and it attributes most of that to a single event: OpenAI’s purchase of their 11-person company. The show launched in October 2024. The deal closed roughly a year and a half later.
An AI Lab Set the Earnings Ceiling
OpenAI acquired TBPN in April 2026 for an estimated $150 million in cash and stock, its first purchase of a media company. Forbes notes the show grew from about $5 million in advertising in its first year to a projected $30 million in its second. Rockwater analyst Chris Erwin called the deal an acqui-hire.
That is the mechanic worth understanding. In an acqui-hire, the buyer pays for the team and its position more than for current revenue. The cash flow is secondary to the asset the company can become.
Hays framed the sale as a bet on the buyer. “While we’ve been critical of the industry at times, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and commitment to getting this right,” he wrote in a statement when the deal was announced.
Reality TV Now Has an Earnings Benchmark
The Giggly Squad entry works differently and matters for a different reason. Berner and DeSorbo met on Bravo’s Summer House. Their $18 million debut is the clearest public figure yet for what reality-TV fame converts to as podcast revenue.
That number is a benchmark, not a one-off. It gives every reality alum with a microphone a price to point at when a deal comes up. Forbes reports Giggly Squad is eyeing a large new deal in fall 2026.
Forbes counts minimum guarantees, revenue sharing, platform fees, and live events paid to talent or their companies, before taxes and fees. It excludes TV, endorsements, investments, and YouTube-only shows. So these are podcast earnings narrowly defined, which makes the $18 million floor more striking, not less.
The rest of the list fills in the middle. Ashley Flowers and Steven Bartlett both placed among the 20. Their presence rounds out a cohort where true-crime and business formats now sit beside comedy and reality talk.
The collective figure tells the market story. A $638 million top 20, anchored by an acquisition rather than an ad deal, signals that podcasts have become assets a strategic buyer will purchase outright.
Giggly Squad’s next contract is already in motion for the fall. The floor its $18 million set is the number that deal will be measured against.
Money
Ashley Flowers Tops Podcasting’s Women at $42 Million
Forbes just crowned the Crime Junkie founder podcasting’s highest-paid woman, a title long pinned on Alex Cooper. The number rests on a $150 million Tubi deal and a network Flowers still controls.
Ashley Flowers earned an estimated $42 million from her podcast work over the past year, ranking fourth on Forbes‘ Highest-Paid Podcasters of 2026, published Thursday. That places the Crime Junkie co-host and Audiochuck founder above every other woman in the medium.
The figure retires a persistent misconception. The title had long been pinned on Alex Cooper, who ranked eighth at $32 million for Call Her Daddy. Flowers cleared her by $10 million, and she did it without a major platform on her cap table.
That distinction is the whole story for the creator economy. Cooper’s number runs through a SiriusXM deal. Flowers built and still controls Audiochuck, the Indianapolis network she founded in 2017 and grew across audio, and that ownership is what put her ahead of platform-signed talent.
The earnings sit on top of a distribution deal. Audiochuck signed a $150 million agreement last October with two Fox subsidiaries, Tubi for video distribution and Red Seat Ventures for ad sales, Forbes reported. Flowers keeps the shows; the partners pay to distribute them and sell the advertising against them.
That structure is the mechanic worth understanding. Podcasters generally retain the intellectual property in their shows, so a network licenses distribution and ad rights rather than buying the content outright. The creator collects a guarantee plus a share, and keeps the asset.
The deal’s terms trace the next frontier. Fox and Audiochuck announced the pact on October 30, 2025, and it covers Crime Junkie, The Deck, So Supernatural, Dark Downeast, Park Predators, and more. It also builds a Crime Junkie FAST channel across Tubi and Fox One, pushing an audio network into free ad-supported streaming video.
Video is where the money compounds. Forbes tied the majority of Flowers’ revenue to Crime Junkie as her flagship, with the new FAST channel set to run several Audiochuck shows on YouTube at once. The company’s shows stay on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Flowers framed the deal as a proof point for independents. She said it “represents the next evolution of what independent media can achieve.”
The network’s scale explains why Fox paid. Audiochuck has grown past 20 weekly and seasonal shows and draws more than 10 million monthly listeners, the company said at the announcement. Before the Tubi pact, Audiochuck ran its distribution through SiriusXM under a deal first signed in 2021.
The Tubi channel is the next milestone to watch. Its build-out determines whether an independently owned audio network can turn free streaming video into the earnings line that platform contracts have long delivered.
Money
Creator Budgets Jumped 171%, CreatorIQ Data Shows
Influencer budgets grew 171% in a year, CreatorIQ found, and most of that money came out of TV. For mid-tier creators, that reallocation is the real signal.
Average annual influencer marketing budgets grew 171% year over year, per CreatorIQ‘s 2025-2026 State of Creator Marketing Report, the headline figure at Creator Economy Live East, the Clarion Events summit that filled the New York Marriott Marquis on July 29.
Read the number closely and the story sharpens. Nearly two-thirds of that increase was not new marketing money. It was reallocated from traditional paid and digital advertising, mostly television and display, the same report found.
For independent and mid-tier creators, that distinction is the opportunity. A budget line that grows by pulling from TV is a budget line that has moved into media planning, where deals get bigger, longer, and harder to cancel. Creator partnerships now compete for dollars that used to buy commercials.
The Money Left TV And Found Creators
CreatorIQ’s report puts hard figures behind the shift. Enterprises now invest an average of $5.6 million to $8.1 million a year in creators, with industry leaders averaging $7.8 million. Those are media-budget numbers, not experiment-line numbers.
The mechanics matter here. When spend migrates from paid media into creator programs, it arrives with paid media’s expectations: measurement, return on investment, and renewal cycles. That favors creators who can show performance data over creators who sell reach alone.
The company also found 71% of organizations reported budget increases. A rising line item across most of the market signals a category that has stopped proving itself and started scaling.
Chris Harrington, the company’s chief executive, framed the maturity plainly.
“Creator marketing is no longer a side tactic,” Harrington said. “It’s become the growth engine where content, community, and commerce converge.”
Who Was In The Room
The attendee list read like a media-buying floor. The event drew more than 500 brands, including The Walt Disney Company, Estee Lauder, American Express, L’Oreal, and the NFL, the event organizer said. Those are companies with nine-figure marketing budgets and boardrooms that scrutinize every line.
Clarion Events built the program around dealmaking. The summit featured more than 50 speakers, 15-plus sessions, and more than 100 pre-arranged brand-to-creator meetings across nine content tracks running in parallel. The pre-arranged meetings are the tell: brands came to sign creators, not to browse.
Clarion is the world’s largest privately owned event organizer, founded in 1947, with a portfolio of more than 125 events. That scale of operator does not build a two-day summit around a category it considers a fad.
The Half-Trillion Figure Needs A Caveat
The event’s own copy pushed a bigger projection. “Influencer marketing budgets are up 171% year over year, and the industry is projected to be worth $500 billion by 2030,” the Creator Economy Live East page states.
That $500 billion figure appears only in the organizer’s marketing language, with no independent source behind it. The widely cited projection from Goldman Sachs puts the creator economy at $480 billion by 2027, a different number over a different horizon. The two are not interchangeable, and the surge in CreatorIQ’s report stands on its own without the larger claim.
For creators weighing whether to chase brand deals or platform payouts, the reallocation is the durable signal. Money moving out of television does not tend to move back.
CreatorIQ publishes its report annually. The next edition will show whether 171% was a one-year repricing or the start of a longer climb.
