Scroll through the talent rosters of the major agencies representing content creators, in Italy or abroad, and chances are you won’t recognize most of the names. Yet these people are neither newcomers nor amateurs. Part of the reason is the algorithm: for years now, platforms have built a personalized stream of content for each user, calibrated around what they watch to the end, pause, rewatch, comment on, or search for. Two people opening the same app at the same time can end up seeing two completely different universes, populated by different topics and different creators. Someone who follows makeup content may never come across creators talking about sport fishing, personal finance, or chicken farming, even when those creators have audiences just as large and loyal.
But there is another fact that many people still overlook. For every creator who becomes an international celebrity, like Chiara Ferragni or Khaby Lame, there are thousands of people with a few tens of thousands of followers who earn a decent living from creating content without ever expanding far beyond their niche. In the United States, this group has come to be known as the “creator middle class.”
The definition is based more on economics than on any maximum follower count. It includes creators for whom content creation is a steady, paid activity that generates an income comparable to an average salary, without depending on sudden spikes in popularity or the multimillion-dollar advertising deals reserved for the biggest influencers. Their income comes from a combination of sources: small and mid-sized brand deals, affiliate marketing, direct sales of products or courses, and platform monetization programs. What makes it work is often a highly specialized audience, which can be particularly valuable to companies trying to reach exactly that kind of consumer.
This segment has existed for as long as content creation has been a profession, but it has only become significant in size in recent years, as platforms have developed tools that allow creators to make money without needing either an agency or a huge audience.
To make sense of this market, marketing agencies classify creators according to follower count. Those with fewer than 10,000 followers are called “nano-influencers”; “micro-influencers” have up to a few tens of thousands; “mid-tier influencers” can reach 500,000; “macro-influencers” range from 500,000 to one million; and anyone above that is considered a “mega-influencer.”
These labels are useful for estimating the price of an advertising deal, but much less useful for understanding how much a creator actually earns. As Xavier de Baillenx, CEO of creator marketplace Ramdam, told Digiday, the creator middle class does not correspond to the middle of that scale at all. It sits further down, among nano- and micro-creators. And in his experience, that group is “huge.” According to influencer marketing company Traackr, there are more than 700,000 creators in the United States alone with between 10,000 and 500,000 followers.
The reason brands have begun favoring these creators over bigger names is largely economic. Micro-creators have an average engagement rate of 3.2%, almost three times the 1.1% recorded by macro-creators, according to growth marketing agency ATTN. Macro-creators generate roughly six times more revenue for brands, but can cost as much as eighteen times more, according to a study by the American Marketing Association.
Alongside brand partnerships, affiliate marketing and tools such as TikTok Shop are among the main things making this kind of career sustainable. The basic model is simple: a creator places a personalized link to a product in their content, and whenever someone clicks on it and makes a purchase, the creator receives a percentage of the sale. It is a system that is accessible even to beginners or creators without a manager: all they need to do is sign up for an affiliate program.
The percentages, however, vary considerably depending on the platform. Amazon’s affiliate program, the most widespread and often the first one aspiring creators join, pays commissions in Italy ranging from 1% to 6% depending on the product category, while some categories offer no commission at all. That means creators need to generate very high sales volumes to earn significant amounts.
On TikTok Shop, where sellers themselves decide how much to pay creators, commission rates generally range between 10% and 20%, and can rise even higher for digital products such as courses and software. In both cases, a small but loyal audience can be more profitable than a huge but disengaged one.
This is also why TikTok is by far the preferred platform among the creator middle class. According to The State of Creators 2026, a report by CreatorIQ and Influencers.club based on 5,095 creators across around one hundred countries, 52% of creators producing sponsored content identify TikTok as their main platform, compared with 43% for Instagram.
Among creators earning more than $250,000 a year, and therefore no longer part of the middle class, the percentages are reversed: 60% identify Instagram as their primary platform, while only 30% say TikTok.
Creator Julia Kong, for example, has been posting beauty- and movie-related content since 2020. Early in her career, she told Business Insider, nearly all of her advertising deals came through TikTok. Now that her following has grown considerably, however, most partnership offers come through Instagram, despite the fact that her audience there is much smaller, because Instagram remains the platform brands prefer.
“TikTok is still a great search engine,” she says, but she finds it less organized and polished than Instagram.
Travis Percy, who creates content about leadership, described much the same dynamic. On TikTok, he says, videos circulate mainly among people who do not already follow the account that posted them. That means the number of views on an individual video reveals relatively little about how solid the creator’s underlying audience actually is.
TikTok therefore remains the best place to get discovered and build a community quickly, but it is also a platform where a creator’s reputation is harder to assess at a glance. Instagram, with its more structured format and profiles that are easier to browse when researching a creator before signing a deal, becomes the place where that reputation is consolidated and converted into more stable income.
Even creators who remain on TikTok with relatively modest audiences can still make a respectable living. Anna Fenstermacher, who has around 33,000 followers and posts about interior design and fashion, told Bloomberg that she made more than $90,000 through Amazon’s affiliate program and another roughly $30,000 from advertising deals in 2025, while continuing to work full-time in the hospitality industry.
Abi Platock, 25, signed her first four-figure deal with a deodorant brand when she had just 8,000 followers. Today she has around 25,000 followers across all platforms combined and expects to reach $50,000 in revenue by the end of the year. “You can absolutely make it without having hundreds of thousands of followers,” she told Bloomberg.
The working conditions, however, remain fairly precarious. Creators should essentially be viewed as freelancers: they have no paid vacation or sick leave, no guaranteed year-end bonus, and no unemployment benefits during months when partnerships dry up. Their retirement savings depend entirely on the contributions they make themselves.
In Italy, since January 2025, the profession has also had its own ATECO business classification code, 73.11.03, designed for people who produce paid promotional content. A VAT registration is required both for contracts with companies and for collecting affiliate commissions.
Registering as self-employed comes with fixed costs, including social security contributions and accounting fees that still have to be paid in months when no money comes in. Creators operating under Italy’s simplified regime forfettario tax system are taxed on 78% of their revenue, compared with 40% for people selling products. In other words, the state assumes that content creation involves very few business expenses, even though equipment, editing software, and products purchased for reviews can add up quickly.
There is another source of instability: the business depends entirely on platforms over which creators have no control. The companies running them decide how widely a piece of content is distributed, which formats are promoted, how much a view is worth, and what percentage they keep from each sale.
When TikTok raised its commission on sales in European markets to 9% in January 2026, none of the sellers or creators affected had any say in the decision. An algorithm change can cut an account’s views in half from one month to the next without any identifiable reason, while the rules governing what can be posted and how creators can get paid are constantly changing.
The result is that income can fluctuate dramatically. It depends on how widely content is distributed, on the times of year when companies spend more on advertising, and on the fact that successful formats and topics can lose momentum quickly.
“In one month you can easily make $10,000, and the next you can make zero,” 25-year-old TikToker Abi Platock told Bloomberg. That is also why she has decided not to devote all of her energy to content creation. Alongside it, she works in marketing and, in her remaining time, teaches Pilates.
Viola Stefanello