Content creator economy is everywhere, but labor data and protections are sparse

For millions of people, creating videos for TikTok and YouTube is a full-time job, and the global industry is valued at $250 billion. Yet the U.S. government doesn’t seem to be tracking data on the world of content creation, and that lack of data could be linked to a lack of regulation.

“At this point, Facebook is 20 years old. YouTube is old,” said Drew Harwell, a technology reporter at The Washington Post. “Yet we don’t really have a sense of how big this market is. We don’t have any kinds of great labor protections for them in the U.S.”

Harwell, along with WaPo columnist Taylor Lorenz, reported on the lack of federal data on the content creator economy. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Harwell about why it matters.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kai Ryssdal: Could you define a term for me, just so we all have a baseline here: “creator economy.” What is that?

Drew Harwell: It is the business of online influencers. It’s the people, many of them young but not all, who use their phones and computers to make the content that fills our internet. And, you know, we used to sort of pooh-pooh them as just influencers, that they just did fashion and makeup, but they cover basically every genre now, and they are a giant industry in the U.S. A $250 billion industry that, that touches a lot of culture and politics and also just business.

Ryssdal: And the reason we got ahold of you is because of this piece that you and your colleague Taylor Lorenz wrote, which basically says the government doesn’t really know much about this industry. How big it is, what it does, who’s in it, all of that.

Harwell: Yeah, which I find really interesting because at this point, you know, Facebook is 20 years old. YouTube is old. This is a market of millions of people around the world who work as creators or influencers. And yet, we don’t really have a sense of how big this market is, we don’t have any kinds of great labor protections for them in the U.S. And yet, [it really is] a job. But also a lot of young people are seeing this as a career path. You have lots of young people who say, I don’t want to be an astronaut or rock star anymore. I want to become a YouTuber or a streamer. And I just find that really interesting. You have this huge market of young people wanting to become this thing that the government keeps zero track of.

Ryssdal: We should point out here that although the high-profile influencers obviously get all the high-profile stuff, most people in this industry are not making a bazillion dollars.

Harwell: Yeah, it’s a huge 1% economy. You have the stars, like you know, MrBeast, who are at the upper crust, who make millions of dollars. And then there’s a giant creator middle class that try and sort of professionalize it and, and sort of make it a career. There’s a lot of also people on the flip side who pour a ton of blood and sweat and tears and time into it, and basically stream to no one and get nothing out of it. So it’s a very precarious job, it’s a very demanding job. You’re basically working for the internet, and [on] the internet, you are very easily replaced.

Ryssdal: That’s a great way to put it, working for the internet. Because, boy, that’s brutal, I’ll bet you, right?

Harwell: I mean, yeah. You’re working for these platforms that can change the algorithm at any time. And so it’s shifting sands.

Ryssdal: Well, so look, so that actually gets to something else. With lack of government data comes lack of government regulation and oversight, and not that the government’s going to tell companies how to run that algorithm, but one would imagine there would be some more kinds of protection for people who are giving this a go.

Harwell: Yeah. I think back to Hollywood 100 years ago, when we started to see child actors. There were laws passed, the Coogan laws, maybe one of the more famous ones, where it said young people who are under 18, the money they make from their work in motion pictures, some of that has to be saved into a trust that they can start using on their own when they become adults. That is a law that has been enshrined in the American code for 100 years, and we still don’t have anything like that for child creators on a federal level, even though a lot of these young YouTubers are very young. And you know, at the Washington level, nobody is even really taking them seriously. I think it should be sort of a big labor issue we take seriously.

Ryssdal: Right? Well, so there’s the whole “Hey you kids, get off my lawn” thing, right? That, you know, organized, bureaucratic Washington is slow to change and slow to sort of get on the uptake of, of what’s going on out there. Is there even a whisper of paying more attention to this, do you think?

Harwell: It’s interesting that you’ve seen some of this at the state level, some sort of proxies of the Coogan Law, where it would be, you know, protections for young people, but these are a state here and there. At the federal level, there’s just no conversation. And part of that, I think, is like you said, this is frivolous stuff, right? This is TikTok and YouTube. This is kids being silly on their phones. And it is that, but there is also, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans who see this as a job. And it’s not just the people on the camera, but these are editors, writers, accountants. There’s a whole sort of cottage industry that’s grown up to support this. If this is something people are going to be devoting their lives to, shouldn’t they have that kind of baseline labor protection we’ve given everybody else?