How do people afford these crazy luxury lives? You see it on your feed, you scroll by, there's all these kids with Lambos, McLarens, a couple in a mall who are going every summer. How do they own a house? There's a shared collective experience from millennials and Gen Z that involves sharing that content with a spouse or a friend and being, how do they afford this? And then developing theories—maybe they're levered to the gills, money laundering at the cash for gold establishment, family money. But it's almost always a hack or a cheat, not that they work to get there, because that would be too straightforward.
So today we're going to do the actual math. Because one of the luxuries of being a creator with a team is we can just dive deep into this. And that's exactly what we did. We took a dozen research papers, built a calculator and mapped five key factors for how people afford things, insights on each that are worth understanding. We're going to go through each of those and how much of the percentage of the pie in America that it holds. We're going to talk about why we see so much of this content, how feeds are curated towards it, and then break down a bit of the new economies that are coming out of this, that are emerging in this world today, and what you can do to understand them and participate in.
Get the abacus out and let's lock in. And quick reminder, community calls are coming back if you want to do workshopping live and go through a bunch of this. Now that I'm done traveling for the summer, we're going to be back on it every month. The link to sign up is below. We're going to be doing some training on creative direction, and then just get into Q&A and workshop. So let's start with some math. There are 4 to 5 million millionaires under 45 in the United States. The U.S. generates 1,000 new millionaires every single day. More on the average month. The rest of the world cannot comprehend the wealth creation that's happening here.
Now, let's take it to your feed. Of the people that you see who have this type of money, who are doing these type of things, what are they broken into?
And the first one to talk about is debt. Buy now, pay later is extremely popular with younger people. 21 to 25% of people under 45 have used it. More than half of them regularly use it. And so people who make a good baseline living, even at that millionaire net worth, but tap into a ton of debt to live this lifestyle. By the numbers, it looks at about 16% of the 100% of people that are operating in this millionaire class. This may mean that they are at the bottom, but they are spending like they are at the top. And this becomes a keeping up with the Joneses, a content creation trap. People become addicted to shiny object content, posting things themselves and showcasing a certain life or if their spouse is into the same thing, or they want to keep up appearances for their business, et cetera. Or if they're just doing that for the people around them, the people next door who may have other backing or backgrounds we'll get to.
The hardest part about this is once you've established a foundation of this, it becomes increasingly hard to get out. So on the second class, we're going to talk about the most common assumption for people. That is the idea of family money. So 46% of Gen Z adults and 24% of the millionaires here have gotten significant assistance. That's going to be a term we'll come back to from parents or family.
Now, if you cut it all the way down to the people who are just really nearly living their lives and their parents are actually paying for the entire thing, that's only about 3% of this class. It is actually very infrequent. But the remaining 21% encompassed inside of this is people that just got slight help.
So when we say that stat that 46% of Gen Z has this, the family money rarely buys the Lamborghini or the Amalfi vacation directly. What it does is it removes early expenses. This is people paying for college. This is help with your first apartment. This is simply not having a bunch of debt. And all of that becomes a risk if you actually have it that prevents you from doing anything that puts you down the road to getting that Lamborghini. And especially at the lower level, there's a slight involvement. But the barrier to have that be counted inside this is so slight. A couple thousand dollars of help that most people would never even consider them inside of that class, but they are just as much. They just didn't take the outsized risks that it enabled. But we're talking about this entry-level class here. The higher up you go, the more prominent the inheritance is.
But it's funny, everyone talks about those first two categories. But the third and by far the most prominent is earning that money from work. In particular, dual-income work. One high-paying career with a mid-level second career or two high-paying careers. Of these, tech employees, especially those with stock compensation, which there are far more in the U.S. than any other country in the world. Salespeople, commissioned salespeople and senior salespeople, and finance. It's not just doctors, lawyers, et cetera. In fact, they, on a dollar-per-dollar ratio, have fallen behind the compensation of these other niches.
But the important thing to consider here is dual. Wife and husband, two partners. This is 2.6x as common as in previous generations, as before the 2000s. So it's a significant shift from what people were used to seeing or lives you grew up with because it's way more likely that both people have these jobs that are generating income for them.
A couple making $200,000 each or even averaging out to that, the $400k household income can afford luxury cars, take multiple luxury trips, and eat everywhere while not even being real millionaires. They may have no liquid wealth after taxes, housing, education, but it can finance luxury consumption much earlier than it creates wealth if you choose to use that versus invest it. But when we look at the majority of people that are actually engaging in these that you see online, it comes from this phenomenon, the act of work.
Now, 18%, in addition to this, it's a uniquely American thing, comes from entrepreneurship. Mostly deeply unsexy. For anyone who's been involved in entrepreneurship, it is down and up and down again. But it's found that this category is actually much bigger amongst wealthy young people than the overall population. And worth noting how prominent entrepreneurship is. About 20% of American families own a private business or have a self-employed member of that family. Nearly half of families in the top income decimals own a business. And families owning businesses with more than five employees have a median net worth of 1.25 million, even excluding the business itself.
And again, these are not comprehensive tech companies, some huge bet, some huge moonshot. Just local businesses, services businesses, stores that enable people to take home significantly more in its up years than a single person on a traditional income. Now let's get to the interesting one. 11% internet and creator wealth. Side money that people didn't have before that turns into a real thing that has an entire huge economy around it. And there's two levels to this. This is where this is going to get interesting.
There's the people you'd expect to be on. People who have built successful creator businesses or businesses based off TikTok or Instagram or Lite Ecom. It's very much focused on them and has not gone into a bigger, more entrepreneurial business. But then there's what we're going to call the illusion class. Actually spans beyond these millionaires. The hybrid earners. A hybrid earner is counted as someone who has a traditional job or other income sources, but makes more than $40k per year in the internet economy, in and around content. There are almost as many of these as there are millionaires under 45.
So much so that you're looking at a high single digit percentage of 18 to 45 year olds overall. Somewhere between hybrid and millionaire. Now this is where it gets important. And then we're going to talk a bit about all the ways this works in a minute. Is these people spend disproportionately on what we see online? That's why we see it so much. Because this class that makes money in and around the internet economies, posts about all the things they consume, posts about their use of the extra money, is actually good with it. We see it perpetuated.
When you have that extra funds, is it being spent on more creation? Is it being spent on trips for more content? Photo shoots for your brand? Promotion to get you to the next level? Unboxing of new things? Documenting the house that you're doing? This is the stuff that comes up with a disproportionate amount inside your feed versus what it actually is inside your real life. It may be a single digit percentage, but it comes across as 40% of your feed? 60% of your feed? Depending on how much you view?
Which brings that expectation that you see so much of it, you forward so much of it because it's a highlighted use case? Not only are there significantly more young people achieving any of this than generations ago, but now it's in front of your eyes.
Posts about all the things they consume, posts about their use of the extra money, is actually good with it. We see it perpetuated. When you have that extra funds, is it being spent on more creation? Is it being spent on trips for more content? Photo shoots for your brand? Promotion to get you to the next level? Unboxing of new things? Documenting the house that you're doing? This is the stuff that comes up with a disproportionate amount inside your feed versus what it actually is inside your real life. It may be a single digit percentage, but it comes across as 40% of your feed? 60% of your feed? Depending on how much you view? Which brings that expectation that you see so much of it, you forward so much of it because it's a highlighted use case?
Not only are there significantly more young people achieving any of this than generations ago, but now it's in front of your eyes, and those are the people that also happen to be good at those platforms. So it perpetuates this cycle of never quite feeling good enough. And I had that video about the boy algorithm versus the girl algorithm from a couple months ago, talking about how this really gets inside of people's heads. Because you constantly go, I'm not good enough. I'm not as successful as these other people. What can I do to hack or cheat or find my way there the same way these other people are?
But when in reality, you actually go look at what the majority of this is, is the number one category is just people that had two incomes in their household, or were being presented this other more forward-facing class that's a smaller percentage of it. And in fact, a huge amount of which don't even cross into the millionaire class. They're just the ones getting this hybrid income. It becomes overwhelming in your head. And it plays out in real life too, because we see these things in our neighborhoods, in the world around. It's not merely a social media phenomenon.
Now we're going to get into a few things. Why so much of this is a US phenomenon, what that means around the world? And then she break down a bit of this creator economy. It's becoming increasingly important. What is actually made up of? How do people actually make this money? Okay, we say all these people have these funds. What do they actually do?
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So now let's get into the fun part, the US phenomenon international. This is something I experienced a lot of this summer, hanging out with friends in Europe while I was around, in Greece and in Italy, is even the creative types are. They make less at their core jobs by an order of magnitude for the same roles, but they're also less likely to start these freelance and service businesses. There's a couple of factors at play here.
First, it is actually significantly harder to start a business. So when I started my second or third LLC in Texas, it was literally a submit of a form, paid like $400, and boom, there's a business. Now you pay your taxes every quarter or every year. Articles of organization, template from the internet, statement of information, and you're there. The barrier for US people to start a business is extremely low, especially now with stuff like Stripe Atlas and whatnot. There's literally a couple hundred dollars if you want to be able to actually have all the benefits of doing this as a business entity.
But then to do this in a lot of European countries, it's significantly more expensive and complicated and comes with more requirements, basically makes it harder, especially creative people, don't want to deal with any of this, to do it. I think that's a huge cultural difference. A lot of creative people can figure out, I'm going to pay my couple hundred bucks to Stripe Atlas. I'm going to submit this thing. I'm going to be done. I can probably do it for cheaper, but I'm just going to do it through a streamlined way. Then even doing your taxes in that regard on a simple freelance business is not extremely complicated. But then all the requirements around this and posting inside, whether it's the UK, Italy, etc., I learned was prohibitively hard, especially for that early tranche, which basically means that you get started later if you do choose to do it.
But in addition to that, there's also just the regulatory environment in general. So you see things like TikTok shop. We're going to talk through all the ways people make money in the creator economy in a second. And one of them is from these incentives the platforms give, which are innately more complicated. You don't have TikTok shop in some of these other countries. You don't have the same programs that pay people for making content in other places that ends up leading to a richer group of those folks that are inside the US.
Then last, there is the cultural response. This is a really interesting one. There is something prideful in the US about being on monk mode, about not going out with your friends while you lock in. It's a cultural thing. You'll be like, we're not even asking if he's going to go out. He's locked in. That's a different case in places where the expectation is people are spending time with family or being out and about. And where there's almost a critical eye on, oh, this person's working on their business or on their other thing. There's a bigger cultural more, it feels like, against it. And this is the first time I've had those little conversations with people really digging into it and was surprised at how much they have to navigate around doing that and also how, especially in the UK, it's regarded almost negatively.
But all of this gets a benefit as well. One thing I've noticed in Cut30 where we train a lot of creators is that international ones, if you get some degree of success, it's almost like a smaller algorithm. If you're in Denmark or you're in Norway or some of these smaller countries and you start to get some hits in your country, you begin to hit mass saturation, a million view video. A significantly smaller country gets your brand or your personal brand or your offering known significantly more than having multiple of those in such a big market with so much consumption. So there's an outsized opportunity for those to go ahead and do it as well.
But jumping into this next part, how do people actually make this money in their creator economies? When we look at that 11% of people that are in the millionaire class doing something related to this, when we look at all of those millions of hybrid earners, what do they actually do? And I'm going to start with a thing that happens the least. I'm going to go kind of backwards or maybe jump all over. We'll see.
So first, everyone assumes it's brand deals. Brands are paying big money for people to make content. When that is actually, that's a feast or famine. The top 1% of creators control that. If you are not in the top 1%, it is not a great outlet for you. It may be okay, but that is actually one of the least frequent ways that these people make money, but it's the one that people think the most of. Because again, it's the bias of having seen it. The really big creators you watch are doing that stuff all the time. I do multiple brand deals a week, but most of the people in my niche maybe do one a month if.
So while that is available for the top class of that, that is not how most of this happens. Comparatively, on the other side of this, on the lower end, one of the most people do is affiliate. We'll see.
So first, everyone assumes it's brand deals. Brands are paying big money for people to make content. When that is actually a feast or famine. The top 1% of creators control that. If you are not in the top 1%, it is not a great outlet for you. It may be okay, but that is actually one of the least frequent ways that these people make money, but it's the one that people think the most of because again, it's the bias of having seen it. The really big creators you watch are doing that stuff all the time. I do multiple brand deals a week, but most of the people in my niche maybe do one a month if that.
So while that is available for the top class of that, that is not how most of this happens. Comparatively, on the other side of this, on the lower end, one of the most ways people make money is affiliate.
So what is that and how does it work? Affiliate is when you make content, you recommend things, you get a percentage of people to buy from the things that you recommend. This happens in a few ways. The most known, especially in the US, is TikTok Shop because they basically tied it together in a really streamlined platform. You make a video in TikTok Shop, you tag the product, people order from it, it is automatically connected. The percentages go right to you. There's no separate links. There's no thing in the bio. It happens in platform, becomes really easy. People consume a lot of products on there. Now it's online, it's similar to the size of major chains. It's a huge force. And creators make high percentages of money. It's not uncommon to see 40% commissions, 20% commissions, incentives on top of that.
So this changed things entirely because it began meaning that creators would ask for more when they're doing other types of deals. We'll get to in a second. But it also meant that you could just sign up, opt into those programs, and get started once you had your first, I believe it's a thousand and now 5,000. I haven't been in the trenches for a minute on it. Followers. And you're off to the races.
Now that was the most streamlined version. There's lots of other versions. Using LTK or ShopMy or Amazon Affiliate that allows you to curate different links, get percentages or see what's available to get percentages on, and just link those in your bio, in your newsletter, et cetera. You may only get small percents—3%, 10%, 15%—but as you get a following and putting out a bunch of that content, especially in the newsletter economy and recommendations around that, and in categories like camera, family, a lot of people make that casual living there.
We start talking about those hybrid earners, the 40K plus a year, a couple thousand dollars a month between affiliate or maybe affiliate and one of these other categories together becomes this casual income level. And this is all the extra money that gets spent on more creation, right? I'm going to use that to go to Coachella where I can make great content. I'm going to use that to buy more things I can make content about. I'm going to use it to redo my house that gets DM'd. How would she afford this house? Or how are they redoing it? Because it allows me to make better content inside of it is a self-perpetuating economy that spends on itself, especially when it's not that creator's full-time job.
So in addition to affiliate, we have the actual funds from the platform. There's the TikTok creator fund, which a lot of people will get a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars off of if they're popular creators. There's the YouTube fund. It doesn't pay a ton, but again, pays a little bit consistently. Snapchat has the same thing. And this is a small amount. You add that on, most people are getting a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand dollars. And you add that on to whatever you're doing with affiliate, et cetera. It's pure extra. You would not rely on that in any way, shape, or form to be the income source of this. Platform payments are not a way to sustain yourself. It's just an extra.
And for context, if I was doing this and I was doing nothing else, I was just relying off my YouTube, the combination of shorts and here, I get $1,500 to $2,500 a month that comes from the YouTube fund at my current size. And the next category that's becoming almost equal to the affiliate category, it's a really interesting one, is making advertisements in UGC for brands, separate from brand deals.
So affiliate is interesting because it goes wide, right? All the newsletter writers, think of how many people have Substack or a newsletter or email newsletter or a blog or a YouTube channel where they're just recommending things. It is so many, incomprehensibly many. And if they're making a couple thousand extra dollars, they're participants in this economy from affiliate.
But the ads in UGC for brands is a hiring thing. So let me call out how this works. You may have seen a bunch of these ad campaigns. If you're not familiar with this type of stuff, you can go to Social Growth Engineers. There's a website that breaks a bunch of these down. But you'll look at Beefread, Poke, Aura App, Clue. There are hundreds of brands and products that employ creators to make organic content. They say, make us 30 videos a month, make us 50 videos a month, make us five videos a month, whether it's on their channel, on their feed, or it's on your own feed that's promoting the product. There are hundreds, if not thousands of these businesses employing large volumes of creators that they hire. They get paid flat fees just to make content for the brand.
This has turned into a significant side hustle for a lot of people. A lot of folks that we spit out at Cut30 end up going and doing this on the high end. They'll make eight videos a month on a brand's feed. We have a lot of that kind of thing. Four videos a month, the anchor is a pillar. And some of them will actually go and be on a retainer to do 30, et cetera.
So there's the organic side, and there's the ad side of that, where brands are looking for more things to put in their Meta, and their TikTok, and their Snapchat ad accounts. And they hire creators to make those ads for them. This has gotten more and more popular. And there's two ways it works. One is they just make an ad and it goes right in the account. The other is if they have an organic presence, they're allowed to whitelist it. Whitelist means it shows up as an ad from the other person's account. The gold standard of this right now, and I'm operating inside this, obviously. With Darkroom, we do tons of these, what's called partnership ads, with whitelisting. All the top strategists I know are really shooting for 30% or more partnership ads in their Meta account. These are more important than ever. They work really well. They have higher returns. They're an anchor of video ads. So it's worth considering.
Now, this was happening in this kind of chaotic fashion all around the internet. People are hiring. They're posting job listings. They're in Discord, they're in communities looking for this work. But now it's becoming systematized the way it did for TikTok Shop. So a couple players there. First is Sideshift. Sideshift is the place where you actually hire creators to do this kind of thing. A lot of brands that hire off them. No affiliation there. Tribe is another one with a Y.
So what Tribe does is kind of like TikTok Shop where you get a percentage of sales, but instead you get a percentage of ad spends. What do I mean by that? If you're a creator and you want to make ads about stuff, whatever it is, you sign up on the platform, you opt into campaigns, there are brands thirstily hiring on there. You send them test content. If your content's bad, no one's going to hire you. If your content's even decent, you will get a lot of work. But you're paid on how well those ads perform.
So if I spend $5,000 on an ad and there's a 10% payment to the creator, if I spend $5,000 in my ad account, they're going to get $500. So a lot of creators make a lot of money on that. Similar to TikTok Shop, but instead of on final sales, it's on ad spend because of attribution. So on TikTok, you actually see directly how many sales were made since there's a step in between on Meta. And since different advertisers are comfortable with different return rates, one might be happy with a 1.7 return, one might be happy with a 4 return. It's probably a separate video. It's easier to just pay on that percentage of spend.
And there are thousands of creators, if not tens of thousands of creators that are on there doing this and they're hiring more. I'm calling this out because at Darkroom, how well those ads perform. So if I spend $5,000 on an ad and there's a 10% payment to the creator, if I spend $5,000 in my ad account, they're going to get $500. So a lot of creators make a lot of money on that. Similar to TikTok Shop, but instead of on final sales, it's on ad spend because of attribution. So on TikTok, you actually see directly how many sales were made since there's a step in between on Meta. And since different advertisers are comfortable with different return rates, one might be happy
with a 1.7 return, one might be happy with a 4 return. It's probably a separate video. It's easier to just pay on that percentage of spend. And there are thousands of creators, if not tens of thousands of creators that are on there doing this and they're hiring more. I'm calling this out because at Darkroom, we run ads for all these brands, right? Go look at our website. Nasser, Tem, Olipop, Amazon, who's who of brands and the clientele. And we are hiring all the time for creators to be inside these ads and for creators to just be organic and UGC. The hardest part is having to be good enough to make something decent.
I'll put opt-in links down here. We're always looking for more of that. That is you. I'll have a spreadsheet down below as well. But those are huge mass plays. People do not cover how many thousands to tens of thousands of people participate in this economy. Meta is so big because of how many ads are run on Meta. Those ads often require people to make those videos as people end up being these smaller creators and people make a great living or side hustle from. And then we get into the more typical. There's being able to do that as a creator for brands on their feed, working for brands to do it. There's the selling of digital products and courses and PDFs and templates.
And there's the services, right? Every trainer, every interior designer, every person that has some light program that they have that they're using their internet presence to push and sell all the way up to making your own brand. But all of this comes together in the creator economy in a world where more attention is paid to your phone and social media than is paid to TV and the big media industrial complexes we grew up with. And that money goes more than ever to these individuals participating in it. And there's still a hugely outsized amount of value being given to a very small amount of people creating on those platforms that end up perpetuating this how do they have
so much money list way more than you'd expect. So I'm going to end up with two things. First, the internet always shows you the excuses you want to see. If you put a video out there and explain one thing and people have a misconception that it's different and someone comments the misconception, it's going to get a ton of likes because people want to believe it. They want to say it. The internet promotes cope at every level. If it sees you have an excuse or something is a high mind mentality, it rewards that incredibly. It's a natural function of algorithmic process. But fundamentally, if you are a creative, there's absolutely no era like the present
where we are so incredibly in demand. There were no social media managers. There weren't nearly as many copywriting, art direction, illustration jobs. Even with all the conversation around modern technology, there's still just so much more of that than 10, 20 years ago. It's in any point or period in history of desire for it. The ability to have a career in it or to be able to have some sort of freelance thing inside of it. And you layer onto it the content creation side of it. There's no excuse that is worth the size of the opportunity. And I want, if I take anything away from my contents, because I want so desperately for you to feel the potential of that.
And also to be excited even at the smallest amount, even that $500 a month that helps support your passion or allows you to build a stronger financial future. This is a time, and especially in America, but also all over the globe. Even my team and the people I work with are all scattered across the globe. Australia, Canada, the Philippines, Brazil, Spain. That to lean into excuses is just a fundamental fallacy that I really hope you listen to me and don't engage. Anyway, community calls are back. Find info on the next one down there if you want to be in there for some Q&A and doing a bunch of this live, which is one of my favorite things.
I appreciate y'all so much for watching. which are innately more complicated. You don't have TikTok shop in some of these other countries. You don't have the same programs that pay people for making content in other places that ends up leading to a richer group of those folks that are inside the US. Then last, there is the cultural response. This is a really interesting one. There is something prideful in the US about being on monk mode, about not going out with your friends while you lock in. It's a cultural thing. You'll be like, we're not even asking if he's going to go out. He's locked in.
That's a different case in places where the expectation is people are spending time with family or being out and about. And where there's almost a critical eye on, oh, this person's working on their business or on their other thing. There's a bigger cultural more, it feels like, against it. And this is the first time I've had those little conversations with people really digging into it and was surprised at how much they have to navigate around doing that and also how, especially in the UK, it's regarded almost negatively. But all of this gets a benefit as well. One thing I've noticed in Cut30 where we train a lot of creators is that international ones,
if you get some degree of success, it's almost like a smaller algorithm. If you're in Denmark or you're in Norway or some of these smaller companies and you start to get some hits in your country, you begin to hit mass saturation, a million view video. A significantly smaller country gets your brand or your personal brand or your offering known significantly more than having multiple of those in such a big market with so much consumption. So there's an outsized opportunity for those to go ahead and do it as well. But jumping into this next part, how do people actually make this money in their creator economies?
When we look at that 11% of people that are in the millionaire class doing something related to this, when we look at all of those millions of hybrid earners, what do they actually do? And I'm going to start with a thing that happens the least. I'm going to go kind of backwards or maybe jump all over. We'll see. So first, everyone assumes it's like brand deals. Brands are paying big money for people to make content. When that is actually, that's a feast or famine. The top 1% of creators control that. If you are not in the top 1%, it is not a great outlet for you. It may be okay, but that is actually one of the least frequent ways
that these people make money, but it's the one that people think the most of. Because again, it's the bias of having seen it. The really big creators you watch are doing that stuff all the time. I do multiple brand deals a week, but most of the people in my niche maybe do one a month if. So while that is available for the top class of that, that is not how most of this happens. Comparatively, on the other side of this, on the lower end, one of the most people do is affiliate. So what is that and how does it work? So affiliate is when you make content, you recommend things, you get a percentage of people to buy from the things that you recommend.
This happens in a few ways. The most known, especially in the US, is TikTok Shop because they basically tied it together in a really streamlined platform. You make a video in TikTok Shop, you tag the product, people order from it, it is automatically connected. The percentages go right to you. There's no separate links. There's no thing in the bio. It happens in platform, becomes really easy. People consume a lot of products on there. Now it's online, it's similar to the size of like major chains. It's a huge force. And creators make high percentages of money. It's not uncommon to see 40% commissions, 20% commissions, incentives on top of that.
So this changed things entirely because it began meaning that creators would ask for more when they're doing other types of deals. We'll get to in a second. But it also meant that you could just sign up, opt into those programs, and get started once you had your first, I believe it's a thousand and now 5,000. I haven't been in the trenches for a minute on it. Followers in this. And you're off to the races. Now that was the most streamlined version. There's lots of other versions. Using LTK or ShopMy or Amazon Affiliate that allows you to curate different links, get percentages or see what's available to get percentages on, and just link those in your bio,
in your newsletter, et cetera. You may only get small percents, 3%, 10%, 15%, but as you get a following and putting out a bunch of that content, especially in the newsletter economy and recommendations around that, and in categories like camera, family, a lot of people make that casual living there. We start talking about those hybrid earners, the 40K plus a year, a couple thousand dollars a month between affiliate or maybe affiliate and one of these other categories together becomes this casual income level. And like we saw in terms of having people see it, this is all the extra money that gets spent on more creation, right? Oh, I'm going to use that to go to Coachella
where I can make great content. I'm going to use that to buy more things I can make content about. I'm going to use it to redo my house that gets DM'd. How would she afford this house? Or how are they redoing it? Because it allows me to make better content inside of it is a self-perpetuating economy that spends on itself, especially when it's not that creator's full-time job. So in addition to affiliate, we have the actual funds from the platform. There's the TikTok creator fund, which a lot of people will get a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars off of if they're popular creators. There's the YouTube fund. It doesn't pay a ton,
but again, pays a little bit consistently. Snapchat has the same thing. And this is kind of a small amount. You add that on, most people are getting a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand dollars. And you kind of add that on whatever you're doing with affiliate, etc. It's a pure extra, would not rely on that in any way, shape, or form to be the income source of this. Platform payments are not a way to sustain yourself. It's just an extra. And for context, if I was doing this and I was doing nothing else, I was just relying off my YouTube, the combination of shorts and here, I get $1,500 to $2,500 a month that comes from the YouTube fund at my current size.
And the next category that's becoming almost equal to the affiliate category, it's a really interesting one, is making advertisements in UGC for brands, separate from brand deals. So affiliate is interesting because it goes wide, right? All the newsletter writers, think of how many people have Substack or a newsletter or email newsletter or a blog or a YouTube channel where they're just recommending things. It is so many, incomprehensibly many. And if they're making a couple thousand extra dollars, they're not participants in this economy from affiliate. But the ads in UGC for brands is a hiring thing. So let me call out how this works.
You may have seen a bunch of these ad campaigns. If you're not familiar with this type of stuff, you can go to Social Growth Engineers. There's a website that breaks a bunch of these down. But you'll look at Beefread, Poke, Aura App, Clue. There are hundreds of brands and products that employ creators to make organic content. They say, make us 30 videos a month, make us 50 videos a month, make us five videos a month, whether it's on their channel, on their feed, or it's on your own feed that's promoting the product. There are hundreds, if not thousands of these businesses employing large volumes of creators that they hire. They get paid flat fees
just to make content for the brand. This has turned into a significant side hustle for a lot of people. A lot of folks that we spit out at Cut30 end up going and doing this on the high end. They'll make eight videos a month on a brand's feed. We have a lot of that kind of thing. Four videos a month, the anchor is a pillar. And some of them will actually go and be on a retainer to do 30, etc. So there's the organic side, and there's the ad side of that, where brands are looking for more things to put in their meta, and their TikTok, and their Snapchat ad accounts. And they hire creators to make those ads for them. This has gotten more and more popular.
And there's two ways it works. One is they just make an ad and it goes right in the account. The other is if they have an organic presence, they're allowed to whitelist it. Whitelist means it shows up as an ad from the other person's account. The gold standard of this right now, and I'm operating inside this, obviously. With Darkroom, we do tons of these, what's called partnership ads, with whitelisting. All the top strategists I know are really shooting for 30% or more partnership ads in their meta account. These are more important than ever. They work really well. They have higher returns. They're an anchor of video ads. So it's worth considering.
Now, this was happening in this kind of chaotic fashion all around the internet. People are hiring. They're posting job listings. They're in Discord, they're in communities looking for this work. But now it's becoming systematized the way it did for TikTok Shop. So a couple players there. First is Sideshift. So Sideshift is the place where you actually hire creators to do this kind of thing. A lot of brands that hire off them. No affiliation there. Tribe is another one with a Y. So what Tribe does is kind of like TikTok Shop where you get a percentage of sales, but instead you get a percentage of ad spends. What do I mean by that? If you're a creator
and you want to make ads about stuff, whatever it is, you sign up on the platform, you opt into campaigns, there are brands thirstily hiring on there. You send them test content. If your content's bad, no one's going to hire you. If your content's even decent, you will get a lot of work. But you're paid on how well those ads perform. So if I spend $5,000 on an ad and there's a 10% payment to the creator, if I spend $5,000 in my ad account, they're going to get $500. So a lot of creators make a lot of money on that. Similar to TikTok Shop, but instead of on final sales, it's on ad spend because of attribution. So on TikTok, you actually see directly
how many sales were made since there's a step in between on Meta. And since different advertisers are comfortable with different return rates, one might be happy with a 1.7 return, one might be happy with a 4 return. It's probably a separate video. It's easier to just pay on that percentage of spend. And there are thousands of creators, if not tens of thousands of creators that are on there doing this and they're hiring more. I'm calling this out because at Darkroom, we run ads for all these brands, right? Go look at our website. Nasser, Tem, Olipop, Amazon, who's who of brands and the clientele. And we are hiring all the time for creators to be inside these ads
and for creators to just be organic and UGC. The hardest part is having to be good enough to make something decent. I'll put opt-in links down here. We're always looking for more of that. That is you. I'll have a spreadsheet down below as well. But those are huge mass plays. People do not cover how many of this, how many thousands to tens of thousands of people participate in this economy. Meta is so big because of how many ads are run on Meta. Those ads often require people to make those videos as people end up being these smaller creators and people make a great living or side hustle from. And then we get into the more typical. There's being able to do that
as a creator for brands on their feed, working for brands to do it. There's the selling of digital products and courses and PDFs and templates. And there's the services, right? Every trainer, every interior designer, every person that has some light program that they have that they're using their internet presence to push and sell all the way up to making your own brand. But all of this comes together in the creator economy in a world where more attention is paid to your phone and social media than is paid to TV and the big media industrial complexes we grew up with. And that money goes more than ever to these individuals participating in it. And there's still
a hugely outsized amount of value being given to a very small amount of people creating on those platforms that end up perpetuating this how do they have so much money list way more than you'd expect. So I'm going to end up with two things. First, the internet always shows you the excuses you want to see. If you put a video out there and explain one thing and people have a misconception that it's different and someone comments the misconception, it's going to get a ton of likes because people want to believe it. They want to say it. The internet promotes cope at every level. If it sees you like an excuse or something is like a high mind mentality,
it rewards that incredibly. It's a natural function of algorithmic process. But fundamentally, if you are a creative, there's absolutely no era like the present where we are so incredibly in demand. There were no social media managers. There weren't nearly as many copywriting, art direction, illustration jobs. Even with all the conversation around modern technology, there's still just so much more of that than 10, 20 years ago. It's in any point or period in history of desire for it. The ability to have a career in it or to be able to have some sort of freelance thing inside of it. And you layer onto it the content creation side of it. There's no excuse
that is worth the size of the opportunity. And I want, if I take anything away from my contents, because I want so desperately for you to feel the potential of that. And also to be excited even at the smallest amount, even that $500 a month that helps support your passion or allows you to build a stronger financial future. This is a time, and especially in America, but also all over the globe. Even my team and the people I work with are all scattered across the globe. Australia, Canada, the Philippines, Brazil, Spain. That to lean into excuses is just a fundamental fallacy that I really hope you listen to me and don't engage. Anyway, community calls are back.
Find info on the next one down there if you want to be in there for some Q&A and doing a bunch of this live, which is one of my favorite things. I appreciate y'all so much for watching.