Richard Florida Wants to Talk About the “Creator Economy”
As many of us in the content-production world know all too well, it’s not easy getting people’s undivided attention. And it’s even harder, in turn, to earn the trust and respect of a sizable following. Urbanist, educator, and author Richard Florida managed to pull off that neat trick in 2002 with the publication of the best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class. Though it had its detractors, I thought the book was a valuable lens through which to view cities at the turn of the century, as the nature of work was changing and the ability to attract talent to urban places became increasingly important. While his subsequent books didn’t land with the same impact, Florida used his notoriety to create a thriving consulting practice. Recently, I received an intriguing email from Florida’s group that detailed the results of a recently completed survey of “digital creators.” As one who works in this space, I was understandably interested and so reached out to Florida, who happened to be in Nashville for a semester as a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. What follows is an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
RF: Richard Florida
:
Your research piqued my interest because I am one of those millions of people that do a website from my dining-room table and put out content on a regular basis. I was interested in this report, especially coming from you. What was the impetus for it?
Several years ago, I got an email from people in the Meta research group. They’d read The Rise of the Creative Class and asked, “Would you be interested in doing work on the creator economy?” “Honestly,” I said, “what do you mean?” “The digital online people who are producing content, making videos.” I asked, “You mean the guy making ‘Unboxing Toys’ on YouTube?” The Meta people said, “Sort of … but not really.” I didn’t get it at all. And this is important, because what I’ve found is that lots of people still don’t get it. Twenty years ago I was able to make the case for the creative class, but it’s been much harder to talk to people, whether they’re in the business, urbanist, or university communities, about the importance of the creator economy. Most still don’t get it.
Why do you think it’s been so hard to convince them?
I think it’s generational. My kids live in this world. When my then-6-year-old daughter said to me, “Dad, I know what I wanna do when I grow up: I want to make videos on YouTube,” I thought: Holy shit, what’s going on? This is not a world I was familiar with. So we did two reports. The first one was the kind of work we do well: reviewing the literature, doing a synthesis, pulling together data. That report was called The Rise of the Creator Economy, and it was published in November 2022. After completing it, I realized there was a lot more work to be done. So I asked Meta, “Would you be willing to support a larger effort?” and they agreed to support a survey of roughly 10,000 creators around the world.
I reached out to Todd Gabe, a terrific economist, and we pulled together a research group of sociologists and survey researchers and worked with a company called Fact Works to sample the universe of creators across 20 countries, including the United States. We got a much better read on the number of creators, the scope of their economic impact, how they work, what they do in addition to being creators, what their primary or secondary motivations are, their characteristics, gender, ages, education levels. That report, The Creator Revolution: Results from a Global Survey, was published in November 2024.
What jumped out at you?
The sheer size of it. We were very conservative in our estimates. Still, we estimate there are more than 350 million creators across 20 countries, including nearly 40 million in the United States. And we’re only talking about creators with more than a thousand followers, so it’s not everyone online. We estimate that those online creators generate about $350 billion in direct economic impact, with $30 billion in the U.S.
When I started this research, I had a distorted view of the creator universe. I thought it was driven by the Kim Kardashians of the world. But the majority of creators are people who are intrinsically—not extrinsically—motivated. They aren’t out to make a lot of money. Those people exist, but far, far less than 1% of creators have more than a million followers. Most are people who care deeply about what they do, want to share it with others, consider it a deep part of their identity, and want to build community. And, yes, if there’s extra money, that’s great, but it’s not their main priority. What we also found is that a large share of creators were in the civic and social-advocacy space, where they were using online tools because they cared deeply about a political or social issue. The other thing is, creators span every age bracket. There’s a bunch of teenagers, but they constitute just 16%. The majority are older.
I looked at the demographics, and about 55% are under 35, so it does skew younger.
It’s not all young, though. And for most creators, this is not their primary occupation. Less than 10% own their own business or are self-employed. The preponderance of them come from what we labeled as “arts, design, and creative occupations”: 14% of U.S. digital creators work in them, compared to just 2% of the overall workforce. But interestingly, 14% work in blue-collar occupations, and 36% work in service jobs, office work, food service, personal care, and gig work.
I do a lot of economic development consulting in cities, and if I go to a place that has a vibrant music scene, I say to them, “Maybe in the future you should be thinking about the digital creator economy, not just the old analog music scene and venues.” Leadership looks at me like I’m from the moon. When I talk to people who lead MBA programs, I say, “In the future, understanding how to be a digital creator and make podcasts and develop scripts and choreograph and create videos will be really important.” And they look at me like I’m insane. I don’t think cities have caught up to the importance of this.
Photo by Jaime Hogee, courtesy of Creative Class Group.
And yet you can almost understand their confusion, because the nature of digital technology is placeless, or at least holds the promise of it, rendering geography less important.
That is an issue I’m grappling with. There is no doubt in my mind that digital technology releases some of the geographic constraints. It enables creators to participate in the entertainment/creative economy from remote locations. That said, the hosting platforms and startups are massively concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and London. And when you talk to successful creators, they will tell you that it is important to be in a creator hub to make it. So I think it releases some geographic constraints, but doesn’t overcome them.
If you were speaking to a conference of mayors, how would you frame the importance of the creator economy for them?
I would say that you need to take the creator economy seriously, you need a strategy for this: How do you build communities of creators? What kind of support systems do they need? How do you protect them from online harassment? How do you develop workspaces and special districts for them? I went to Los Angeles earlier this year right after the devastating fires to talk about the city’s rebuilding challenges. And I told them, using our creator economy data, that L.A. is one of the two large creator economy startup hubs, second only to the Bay Area. I said to them: The future of the entertainment industry is not so much the traditional filmmaking and television-making platforms. It’s all of these new streaming services and YouTubes and shorts.
Most mayors don’t understand what the creator economy means for their economy. They don’t understand the importance of this digital online entertainment and arts and culture and writing. People don’t fully appreciate the Substack phenomenon, the fact that Paul Krugman left the New York Times to create a Substack account, the fact that most people I read today, I read on Substack, not in a major newspaper.
Nashville has done a good job of developing a broader entertainment industry strategy. But whether it’s L.A. or Nashville or Cleveland, I would think that a big part of that has to be enabling a digital infrastructure, developing more communities of collaboration and cooperation among creators, and trying to build as robust a creator economy strategy as you can. Because if you look at this thing for more than a minute, you realize that we just elected a president in large measure because of social media.
Featured image courtesy of the Creative Class Group.