Social media creators turn to subscription apps due to increasingly competitive, volatile content economy
Patreon CEO Jack Conte
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.
In the three months since launching 2nd Try, the company said it is on track to reach profitability.
“We needed to build something that we could at least have some more consistency with,” Try Guys co-founder Keith Habersberger told CNBC.
In this photo illustration a Huawei logo is displayed on a smartphone with a Chinese flag in the background.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Beijing has banned semiconductor research firm TechInsights from working with or receiving data from Chinese entities, in a move that could add to the opaqueness of the country’s chip industry.
China’s Commerce Ministry, citing national security concerns, announced Thursday that TechInsights was designated an “unreliable entity,” which prohibits Chinese individuals or organizations from sharing information with the Canadian-based company.
TechInsights is well known in the global tech space for its in-depth coverage of Chinese-made chips and was among the first to report breakthroughs by companies like Huawei Technologies.
Beijing’s crackdown on TechInsights came less than a week after the firm revealed that a breakdown of Huawei’s latest artificial intelligence chips found components sourced from outside mainland China.
TechInsights didn’t respond to a request for comment from CNBC outside normal office hours, while Huawei didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry about TechInsights’ report.
The findings by TechInsights about Huawei’s latest “Ascend” AI chips were consistent with those from other research firms like SemiAnalysis, which said that the Chinese company relies on technology from memory chipmakers like Samsung Electronics and contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC).
These companies are under U.S. export controls, restricting them from selling their most advanced technologies to Chinese customers. Moreover, Huawei has been on a U.S. trade blacklist since 2019, barring chip makers that do business with the U.S. from working directly with it.
In response, Beijing and its chipmakers have stepped up efforts to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain.
Huawei, one of China’s leading players in these efforts, has been developing alternatives to U.S. chip giant, Nvidia, though TechInsights’ latest findings may be seen by some as a knock on such efforts.
Despite its prominence in China’s chip space, few details are disclosed about Huawei’s chipmaking efforts outside of what third-party research firms uncover.
For example, reports have said that Huawei works closely with China’s leading chip foundry SMIC — a competitor of TSMC — though both companies have been silent about any collaboration since Huawei was placed on the U.S. trade blacklist.
Last year, TechInsights reportedly found that a Huawei product contained a chip component from TSMC, triggering questions about the effectiveness of U.S. export controls. The research firm’s latest findings on Huawei’s AI chip could further fuel such concerns.
Analysts say Chinese chip companies have exploited loopholes in U.S. restrictions and drawn on stockpiles of imported chips and components before certain restrictions kicked in.
Demonstrators hold a banner reading “Liberated Zone” during a protest at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, on Aug. 19, 2025. Microsoft Corp. employees rallied at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters in an effort to ratchet up pressure on the software maker to stop doing business with Israel over its war in Gaza.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A Microsoft engineer is resigning after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza.
Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues at Microsoft on Thursday that this will be his last week at the company.
“I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time,” he wrote.
In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said the Israeli military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Sutfin-Glowski’s announced departure comes a day after President Donald Trump said Israel and Hamas committed to the first phase of a peace plan two years into the latest conflict. The AP reported on Thursday, citing government officials, that the U.S. is sending roughly 200 troops to Israel to help support the ceasefire deal.
The conflict has been a matter of ongoing tension at Microsoft.
For months, employees have protested the company’s cloud business from the Israeli military. Five employees were fired.
In September, Microsoft said it had stopped providing certain services to a division of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, though it didn’t provide specifics. That decision came after Microsoft investigated an August report from The Guardian saying the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200 had built a system for tracking Palestinians’ phone calls.
Sutfin-Glowski said the company cut off communication systems that allowed employees to bring up their concerns regarding the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft products.
Outside a building at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Thursday, employees and community members opened up banners calling on the company to drop ties with Israel, according to a statement from No Azure for Apartheid. The group has been asking Microsoft to listen to the more than 1,500 employees who petitioned the company to endorse a ceasefire.
“Today, the ceasefire in Gaza finally takes effect after two years of genocide, but the atrocities, human rights abuses, war crimes, apartheid, and occupation continue,” Sutfin-Glowski wrote.
WATCH: Microsoft is trending toward a $5T market cap, says Wedbush’s Dan Ives
The tablet of the new Tesla Model 3.
Matteo Della Torre | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Tesla is facing a federal investigation into possible safety defects with FSD, its partially automated driving system that is also known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Media, vehicle owner and other incident reports to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that in 44 separate incidents, Tesla drivers using FSD said the system caused them to run a red light, steer into oncoming traffic or commit other traffic safety violations leading to collisions, including some that injured people.
In a notice posted to the agency’s website on Thursday, NHTSA said the investigation concerns “all Tesla vehicles that have been equipped with FSD (Supervised) or FSD (Beta),” which is an estimated 2,882,566 of the company’s electric cars.
Tesla cars, even with FSD engaged, require a human driver ready to brake or steer at any time.
The NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation opened a Preliminary Evaluation to “assess whether there was prior warning or adequate time for the driver to respond to the unexpected behavior” by Tesla’s FSD, or “to safely supervise the automated driving task,” among other things.
The ODI’s review will also assess “warnings to the driver about the system’s impending behavior; the time given to drivers to respond; the capability of FSD to detect, display to the driver, and respond appropriately to traffic signals; and the capability of FSD to detect and respond to lane markings and wrong-way signage.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on the new federal probe. The company released an updated version of FSD this week, version 14.1, to customers.
For years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised investors that Tesla would someday be able to turn their existing electric vehicles into robotaxis, capable of generating income for owners while they sleep or go on vacation, with a simple software update.
That hasn’t happened yet, and Tesla has since informed owners that future upgrades will require new hardware as well as software releases.
Tesla is testing a Robotaxi-brand ride-hailing service in Texas and elsewhere, but it includes human safety drivers or valets on board who either conduct the drives or manually intervene as needed.
In February this year, Musk and President Donald Trump slashed NHTSA staff as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce, impacting the agency’s ability to investigate vehicle safety and regulate autonomous vehicles, The Washington Post first reported.
Read NHTSA’s Tesla FSD traffic safety violations investigation filings here.
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