Met a creator with 500k followers last month. She does home organization content. Satisfying videos. Millions of views.
She was worried about rent.
Not in a ‘creative suffering’ artsy way. In a ‘my CPM dropped to $1.20 and I can’t cover groceries’ way. Five hundred thousand followers. Can’t pay rent. Let that sink in.
Ad revenue is a scam wrapped in a dashboard. The platforms show you pretty graphs going up while your actual earnings go down. CPMs are crashing across the board because every brand is cutting digital ad budgets and every human is running an ad blocker. The math doesn’t work anymore.
You’re a sharecropper on Meta’s field. They own the land. They own the tools. They set the prices. And if they change the algorithm tomorrow—which they will—you starve. You have zero control over the most important variable in your business: distribution.
The creators who are actually making money in 2026 have diversified. They’re selling courses. Digital templates. Notion dashboards. Lightroom presets. Community memberships on platforms they control.
One guy I follow makes $40k/month selling a $29 PDF about video editing workflows. He has 12,000 followers. Compare that to the 500k-follower creator eating ramen. The difference? He owns the product and the customer relationship. She rents attention from an algorithm.
The smartest move is building an email list. Every follower on Instagram is borrowed. Every subscriber on your email list is owned. When the platform inevitably enshittifies itself—and they all do—your email list comes with you.
If you’re creating content and your only revenue stream is ‘wait for the Google/Meta check,’ you’re building on quicksand.
Diversify or die. That’s not dramatic. That’s arithmetic.