A rising number of young workers in the United States are leaving office jobs to earn money through social media brand deals, affiliate links and daily-life videos, drawn by an influencer economy that no longer requires massive followings to generate a livable income.
The growth of TikTok, Instagram Reels and Amazon storefronts has opened a new path out of corporate life, one that industry observers are calling the middle-class creator economy.
Small audiences, real money
Abi Platock, 25, spent last year balancing a marketing job at a New York company with content creation in her spare time. She built her audience by posting one or two videos a day covering career tips, beauty recommendations and daily-life vlogs.
Platock said her first four-figure brand deal, with deodorant brand Secret, was a turning point. At the time she had just 8,000 followers on TikTok. She said a creator does not need hundreds of thousands of followers to make a viable living from the work.
Platock now has around 25,000 followers across all her platforms. She said she has signed brand deals worth about $25,000 so far this year and expects to close the year with roughly $50,000 in creator income.
Brands shift toward microinfluencers
Her experience reflects a broader shift in the advertising industry. Brands are directing more budget toward microinfluencers, defined as creators with fewer than 100,000 followers.
Ali Grant, co-chief executive of creator representation firm The Digital Department, said brands are hiring large numbers of micro-creators rather than paying a small group of macro-creators for what might be a similar overall cost.
Engagement rates are a key reason. Grant said a 3 percent engagement rate is considered strong, and some microinfluencers exceed 10 percent. Microinfluencers post a mean engagement rate of 3.2 percent, nearly three times the 1.1 percent recorded by macro-influencers with more than one million followers, according to marketing agency ATTN. Although macro-influencers generate roughly six times more revenue, their costs can run 18 times higher, according to a study by the American Marketing Association.
Grant said a single TikTok post from a creator with around 50,000 followers can cost a brand more than $3,500. With ten times the audience, that rate can triple to around $10,000.
Doubling a year’s salary in two months
Bonsa Nemera, 28, spends his working days on 12-hour shifts at a public dental clinic in New York. In his spare time he posts content on TikTok and Instagram ranging from oral hygiene tips to food reviews for around 100,000 followers. He earns $76,000 a year in his dental residency and said he has signed commercial deals worth about $180,000 so far this year through his creator work.
Nemera said that in two months he had nearly doubled what he would have earned in a full year at his day job. He attributed part of his appeal to professional credibility, saying his followers respond especially well to personal finance content covering money management and investing, even though he has no specialized training in that field. That content has led to deals with financial technology companies including Credit Karma, owned by Intuit Inc., and Cash App, owned by Block Inc. He said he plans to gradually reduce his dental hours as his online presence grows.
Nemera said he approaches content creation with the same seriousness as dentistry, or even more so. He expects to surpass $450,000 in content income this year, with a strong jump expected during the holiday season, but said he has doubts about the industry’s long-term future and plans to stay in it as long as it remains viable.
A booming but volatile industry
The influencer marketing industry is projected to reach an estimated value of $33 billion in 2025, up from $1.7 billion in 2015. The sector gained momentum after the covid-19 pandemic, when growing dissatisfaction with traditional employment led many people to reconsider their career paths, according to Brooke Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University. Duffy said many workers concluded that the time, energy and human capital they were investing no longer justified sacrificing a large part of their personal lives.
Success online can offer greater freedom and pay that rivals or exceeds the U.S. median office salary of $69,000, according to Glassdoor. But maintaining that middle-class creator lifestyle demands constant effort with no guarantees. Unlike traditional workers, creators have no fixed salary or labor protections.
About 57 percent of 3,000 full-time content creators surveyed earn less than minimum wage from the work, according to a report published last year by Influencer Marketing Hub. Income can also swing sharply from month to month due to algorithm changes, sponsorship cycles and platform trends. Platock said a creator can earn nothing in one month and $10,000 in the next.
That volatility explains why Grant, whose agency represents more than 300 influencers, typically works only with creators already generating at least $200,000 a year, a level she considers indicative of a stable business.
Hidden labor and platform risk
Despite its appeal, the work is more demanding than it appears from the outside. A single post can involve hours of planning, scripting, video editing and brand negotiation that audiences rarely see. Major brands including Starbucks and Charlotte Tilbury have worked with Florida-based influencer Anna Fenstermacher, who said those campaigns pay well but often require multiple rounds of revisions before content can go live.
Fenstermacher, 30, has around 33,000 TikTok followers and said she earned about $140,000 last year from content about home decor and fashion while keeping her full-time job in the hotel industry. She said that job provides a stable salary, health insurance and retirement benefits. Outside her work hours she spends about 30 hours a week planning, producing and editing content. More than $90,000 of her income came from Amazon’s influencer affiliate program alone, with another $30,000 from brand deals, she said.
Creators also face platform risk. A roughly 12-hour TikTok outage in the United States last year, linked to a potential federal ban on its Chinese parent company, exposed how fragile the system can be. Duffy noted that platforms constantly change their algorithms, monetization systems and visibility rules, and that the platforms themselves go through cycles in their ability to attract and keep users.
That uncertainty is enough to keep Fenstermacher in her traditional job. Platock, despite having a manager and seeing her social media income approach her monthly salary before she left full-time work, still supplements her earnings with a part-time marketing role and pilates instruction.
