Social media creators are turning to monthly subscription services to generate revenue directly from their followers in an attempt to find a stable source of income in an increasingly competitive and volatile market.
The creator economy peaked in September 2021, according to research published this month by the Bank of America Institute. While the average monthly income for content creators has increased over the past three years, a typical, full-time U.S. employee makes five times as much in monthly income on average.
“This suggests that it’s rare to earn a full-time wage in content creation — let alone get rich,” said the research, which was also conducted by the Bank of America Institute, a think tank that conducts its research using Bank of America customer data.
Analysts at the Bank of America Institute attribute this to a slowdown in paid partnerships, a more competitive market for creators, a decline in online viewership since the pandemic and a concentration of paid partnerships among the top creators.
While internet virality is unpredictable, turning content creation into a full-time career requires meeting certain financial needs, like the ability to pay monthly bills, content creators told CNBC. As a result, creators are looking to diversify their revenue streams, and in addition to paid partnerships, many content creators are increasingly looking to monthly subscription platforms like Substack and Patreon for consistency in their monthly income.
Substack and Patreon have emerged as attractive options because they enable creators to charge their followers directly for their content. Creators can offer their followers different tiers of subscriptions for monthly fees, with each tier including different perks. Since its launch in 2013, Patreon has paid creators over $8 billion, while Substack claims to host more than 4 million paid subscribers.
On TikTok and Meta’s Instagram, creators have to navigate algorithmic models that control when their content is shown, making income from those apps highly volatile. Earnings can fluctuate dramatically, spiking or plummeting based on how these platforms choose to promote their content.
“I can’t rely on that to be what pays my bills,” said Molly Burke, a creator with more than 4 million followers across her social apps. “As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a creator, I have to figure out how I’m going to sustain this as a career for as long as possible.”
Molly Burke, a creator known for her videos about living with blindness and navigating daily life.
Social media platforms increasingly rely on algorithms to decide what content users see, based on their past interactions and preferences. These algorithms analyze user behavior to create personalized content feeds, which often prioritize posts that are likely to generate engagement, such as likes or shares.
As a result, many creators feel pressured to make content that caters to the algorithm, even if they believe it lowers the quality of their work, content creators said.
“It ebbs and flows,” Burke said. “Sometimes my TikToks are popping and I’m getting all the views, and then that algorithm just dips for a bit.”
While nearly half of creators work full time, most rely heavily on brand deals for income, with more than two-thirds having brand partnerships as their primary revenue source, according to a separate study by influencer marketing agency NeoReach. The study found that more than 48% of creators earn $15,000 or less annually, even as the global influencer market reached $21 billion in 2023. There are more than 50 million content creators worldwide, Goldman Sachs said in April 2023.
Burke, a creator known for her videos about living with blindness and navigating daily life, has been producing content on the internet for five years. While it’s not her biggest income stream, she uses her Patreon revenue to help cover essential expenses, including rent.
“I feel extremely lucky and grateful that it is a revenue stream that I can rely on, that I know at the bare minimum I can get my rent covered this month,” she said.
Subscription platforms like Patreon address this by allowing creators to bypass the algorithm entirely, connecting directly with their most loyal fans who are willing to pay for exclusive content.
“Membership alone is a huge business for creators,” Patreon founder and CEO Jack Conte said in an interview with CNBC. “It’s creating predictable, reliable, huge sources of revenue for creators at a degree in scale that we’ve never seen before.”
Zach Kornfeld and Keith Habersberger of the Try Guys
JD RENES
The Try Guys, a comedy group known for their challenge-based videos, have 8 million subscribers and 2.7 billion views on YouTube, but in May, they announced the launch of their own streaming service called 2nd Try. The group moved most of its new videos behind a $5-a-month paywall, where subscribers can watch the new content without ads.
French accounting software firm Pennylane has doubled its valuation to 2 billion euros ($2.16 billion) in a new 75 million euro funding round.
Pennylane told CNBC that it raised the fresh funds from a host of venture funds, with Sequoia Capital leading the round and Alphabet’s CapitalG, Meritech and DST Global also participating.
Founded in 2020, Pennylane sells what it calls an “all-in-one” accounting platform that’s used by accountants and other financial professionals.
The platform is primarily targeted toward small to medium-sized firms, offering tools for functions spanning expensing, invoicing, cash flow management and financial forecasting.
“We came in tailoring a product that looks a bit like [Intuit’s] QuickBooks or Xero but adapting it to the needs of continental accountants, starting with France,” Pennylane’s CEO and co-founder Arthur Waller told CNBC.
Pennylane currently serves around 4,500 accounting firms and more than 350,000 small and medium-sized enterprises. The startup was previously valued at 1 billion euros in a 2024 investment round.
In this photo illustration, the logo of TikTok is displayed on a smartphone screen on April 5, 2025 in Shanghai, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Apple will keep ByteDance-owned TikTok on its App Store for at least 75 more days after receiving assurances from Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
This comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to extend the TikTok ban deadline for the second time. TikTok will be banned in the U.S. unless China’s ByteDance sells its U.S. operations under a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.
AG Bondi wrote in a letter to Apple that the company should act in accordance with Trump’s deadline extension and that it would not be penalized for hosting the platform, according to unnamed sources cited in the report.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
After TikTok went briefly offline for U.S. users in January following the initial ban deadline, it remained unavailable for download in the App Store until Feb. 13. Apple had reinstated TikTok to its app store after receiving a similar letter of assurance from Bondi.
The extension comes days after Trump announced cumulative tariffs of 54% on China. Prior to the additional tariff rollout on April 2, the president said he could reduce duties on the country to help facilitate a deal for ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations of TikTok.
“Maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” Trump said during a press conference in March. “TikTok is big, but every point in tariffs is worth more than TikTok.”
Whether to buy cryptocurrency as a long-term holding may be the biggest decision an investor interested in digital assets has to make, but where to store crypto like bitcoin can become the most consequential.
Following the wildfires earlier this year in California, social media posts began to appear with claims of bitcoin losses, with some users showing metal plates intended to protect seed phrases burnt up and illegible or describing the complexity of recovering crypto keys stored in a safety deposit box in a bank impacted by the fires. While impossible to verify individual claims about fires consuming hard drives, laptops and other storage devices containing so-called hard and cold storage crypto wallets and seed phrases, what is certain is that bitcoin self-custody presents a unique set of security issues. And those risks are growing.
Holders of crypto typically use some form of what can be called a “wallet,” and there are a few main features – whether that wallet is connected to the internet, and how much control is directly embedded in the wallet for trades and transfers. There is also the underlying issue of whether a crypto investor uses a third party for custody at all, or maintains total custody and trading control over their holdings.
The standard third-party platform “hot wallet” – think of an offering from a Coinbase or Blockchain.com – is constantly connected to the internet. Cold storage and “cold wallets,” on the other hand, include hardware devices (like a USB stick) that holds private keys offline, or even just a seed phrase (a master recovery code, a collection of 12 to 24 words used to recover access to a crypto wallet) on paper/metal. Hardware wallets or offline backups of seed phrases can be used to access crypto when connected to the internet through another device.
With third-party custodial options, there are steps to help owners remain vigilant against the threat posed by cybercriminals who can gain access to an internet-connected platform, including the use of two-factor authentication, and strong passwords. The U.S. Marshals Service within the Department of Justice, which is responsible for asset forfeiture from U.S. law enforcement, uses Coinbase Prime to provide custody for its seized digital assets.
Many crypto bulls prefer to self-custody digital assets like bitcoin for some of the same reasons they are interested in cryptocurrencies to begin with: lack of faith in some forms of institutional control. Custodial wallets from crypto brokers trade convenience for the risk of exchange hacks, shutdowns, or fraud, as in the case of the high-profile implosion of FTX. And the wildfires are just one example in a recent string of global events that raise more questions about shifts in the crypto custody debate. There is the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war, which has led crypto bulls from overseas to re-think their approach to self-custody.
Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of self-custody company Casa, said physical risks in the world like a natural disaster are an opportunity to revisit how bitcoin security works, and the common security lapses folded into most peoples’ practices. “Most people secure their bitcoin with one private key. If that key is on a single device or written down on paper as a seed phrase, it’s a single point of failure. If you lose that key, your bitcoin is gone,” he said.
It should be obvious that keeping seed phrases on paper offers the lowest level of protection against fire, yet it is common practice, Neuman said. Slipping these pieces of paper into fireproof bags or safes offer some protection, but not much, and even going the extra steps to have the seed phrases on “indestructible” metal storage plates presents a few failure points. For one, they might prove to be not so indestructible, and second, they may be impossible to locate amid the rubble.
“Logically, given the location of the fires in California and the stories being shared on X, it’s highly likely bitcoin was lost,” said Neuman. “Some of them are pretty convincing,” he said.
Some self-custody services, like Casa, offer multi-signature setups that reduce the risks of single-point failure. A multi-key crypto “vault” can include mobile phone keys, multiple hardware keys, and a recovery key that a company likes Casa holds on an owner’s behalf.
The multi-sig custody approach allows an owner to hold a majority of keys while a trusted partner holds a minority of keys. John Haar, managing director at Swan Bitcoin, says that in such a setup, the owner would need to lose all the physical devices and all copies of the seed phrases at the same time. As long as the owner can access at least one device or one seed phrase, they would be able to recover their bitcoin. This approach should significantly limit the potential for all of the devices to be lost in an event like a natural disaster, Haar said.
“You can spread these keys across multiple regions or even countries, and you need any three of the five keys to approve a bitcoin transaction,” Neuman said of Casa’s five-key approach.
Jordan Baltazor, chief administrative officer at Fortress Trust, a regulated crypto custodian, says best practices that we use in other areas of personal life should apply to cryptocurrency. For one, diversification of storage approach and weighing of risks. Digital assets are no different, he says, when it comes to backing up personal and sensitive data on the cloud to ensure data against loss or corruption.
Companies including Coinbase and Jack Dorsey’s Block offer products that try to merge some of these ideas, creating a more secure version of a crypto wallet that remains convenient to use. There is Coinbase Vault, which includes enhanced security steps before a user can access crypto holdings for trading. And there is Coinbase Wallet and Block’s Bitkey, which have mobile apps that work like a traditional wallet making moving bitcoin around easy, but with the ability to pair with hardware wallets and added security more commonly associated with cold storage.
Bitkey hardware requires multiple authorizations for transactions for added security, similar to “multi-sig wallets.” Bitkey also offers recovery tools so one of the biggest risks of self-custody — losing codes or phrases needed to recover a cold wallet — is less of an issue.
Solutions like Dorsey’s may help to solve the tension between convenience and security; at minimum, they underline that this tension exists and will likely be something of a roadblock to more widespread crypto adoption. Beyond the risks out there in the form of wildfires, all kinds of natural disasters, and wars, bitcoin self-custody can be vulnerable to the biggest personal risk of all: unexpected death of the bitcoin owner. There is arguably nothing more complicated than inheritance when it comes to unlocking the crypto chain of custody.
Coinbase requires probate court documents and specific will designations before releasing funds from custody, while physical wallets offer little to no support, potentially leaving all that digital value stuck on a private key. Bitkey rolled out its inheritance solution in February for what a Bitkey executive called, “kind of a multibillion-dollar problem waiting to happen.”
“People who have a material investment in bitcoin absolutely need to be thinking differently about how to protect it,” Neuman said. He says that after disasters like the California wildfires, or when exchanges go bust like FTX, the industry does see more crypto holders taking action to move to more secure storage setups. “I suppose it’s human nature to wait until ‘bad things happen’ to spur action to improve your own personal situation,” he said. “But I think people would be better off if they were more proactive. Otherwise, they risk having that ‘bad thing’ happen to them, and then it’s too late,” he said.