It’s a tough time to be a creator.

Between Elon Musk running Twitter into the ground, Instagram pivoting away from its original image-based ideal toward a more video-based future, and governments worldwide hell-bent on banning TikTok over fears about its links to China, the quicksand on which creators build their businesses is particularly sucky at present.

“Being a content creator in 2023 is inherently a very unstable and insecure career,” says Abbie Richards, a TikTok disinformation and extremism researcher, who also posts on the platform. “Beyond platform bans, you could lose revenue because your views start dropping. The platform you’re on might become less popular. Or a billionaire could buy the platform you’ve spent years building an audience on and run it into the ground—hypothetically.”

Which is why forward-thinking creators are diversifying their content across multiple platforms and pushing audiences to places where they can own the connection with their fanbase.

“For most creators the goal is to control more—more revenue, more ways to reach their audience,” says Brendan Gahan, a partner and chief social officer at creative advertising agency Mekanism, who’s also a TikToker with more than 120,000 followers. Gahan points to data showing creators are keen to promote their own businesses beyond brokering brand deals.

“This is why you see so many creators investing in platforms like Discord and newsletters,” says Gahan. “It gives them a protective moat—an arena to reach their audiences that aren't solely at the mercy of changes in the platforms.”

Being adaptable has always been a key part of the creator lifestyle. Creators with long memories might remember the dark days of 2017, when Vine was shuttered by its ultimate owners, Twitter, around the same time big brand advertisers started pulling ads from YouTube when it was discovered that they were being shown against terrorist recruitment content (an event dubbed the “adpocalypse”).

The 2020 attempt to ban TikTok in the United States prompted Dr Alicia Jeffrey-Thomas, who posts as The Pelvic Dance Floor, to diversify her digital presence and take her near-million-strong TikTok user base elsewhere.  “When they first started threatening TikTok bans during the Trump administration, I set out to make sure that I wasn't having all of my eggs in one basket,” Jeffrey-Thomas says. “I spent a decent amount of time building my Instagram presence as well.” But two years on, she’s not convinced even that is enough, so she’s claimed her username on other platforms including Lemon8 and YouTube, and is building her own website. 

Jeffrey-Thomas hasn’t yet tried to port her TikTok audience onto Instagram or YouTube because she doesn’t have content for them there. Creating that content requires different thinking, different strategies, and a different approach—all of which take brain space she doesn’t have at present. “It’s frustrating, because as much as I love the community that I've built, and I really want to continue to see it growing, you reach the point of exhaustion,” she says.

Gahan is feeling the pressure, too. “Keeping up with one platform is incredibly taxing, let alone multiple,” says Gahan. “Feeding that content beast is a grind. I've got about 150,000 followers across multiple platforms. As soon as you take your eye off of one [platform], the others falter.”

It’s notable that wider conversations about burnout in the creator community coincided with the last significant era of churn when it came to making a living, around 2018. 

Beyond the stress and work that comes with trying to serve so many different masters with so much content, doing so can also cause creators to dilute the thing that makes them unique. “With the system as is, creators are forced to endlessly chase views—often resulting in clickbait content that misinforms the public or plays to negative emotions,” says Richards. “After all, nuanced healthy content just doesn’t get clicks like angry or scary content.” It can often rob a creator of their authenticity.

Given the maturity and scale of the creator market, Richards suggests it should be incumbent on the platforms to provide more security, rather than requiring the individual creators to come up with solutions to the problem. “Building an ‘anti-fragile’ business model is great—and you’ll definitely find some creators who have had the time, resources, and forethought to do so,” she says. “But I worry it’s still putting the onus on individual creators to go above and beyond to protect themselves. 

“Imagine how much better digital spaces would be if being a content creator were a stable job that gave creators the time and space to make content that actually felt meaningful to them,” she says. “That would be so lovely. We simply can’t create healthy online spaces if creators perpetually feel insecure.”