This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on November 1st, 2021.

Influencer. Streamer. Podcaster. Jobs in what is now called the creator economy. But new numbers show that the chance of breaking through is, to put it mildly, slim. The platforms are doing nothing to change it.

In February 2004, Chris Anderson, then editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, stepped onto what was at the time the most influential stage in the world – the TED conference in Monterey, California.

Against a wine-red and purple backdrop, Anderson presented his thoughts on how to predict tech trends. In the talk, he didn’t yet name the concept that would later lay the foundation for a new kind of economy: “the long tail”.

The thesis is simple. As the supply of both products and internet users grows, you can find new markets in the niches. Many obscure books, taken together, can sell more than a single bestseller – provided there are enough obscure books and enough buyers.

Finding your own niche of followers in the world is also what underpins what’s now called the creator economy. Being an influencer, streamer or podcaster – sometimes all three at once – is a job centered on producing content and entertainment for an audience.

It sounds great. But in the creator economy, the long tail is starting to look more and more like a long “hockey stick” with very few winners.

When the Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch was hacked earlier in October, the data on how revenue is distributed became public. So far this year, 1 percent of all streamers have taken in more than 50 percent of the revenue, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Three quarters of everyone who earned anything at all on the site brought in less than $120, around SEK 1,000.

The same pattern can be found across other parts of the creator economy.

Data compiled by the news site Axios shows that 1 percent of podcasters take the overwhelming majority of all advertising revenue. In the fast-growing market for newsletters, the ten biggest collectively bring in more than $20 million in subscription revenue, while the majority of the newsletters reviewed make tens of thousands of dollars per year (often considerably less). Numbers from 2019 show that 1 percent of all apps account for 80 percent of all downloads, and 93 percent of all revenue.

So why does this pattern keep repeating? Is the top 1 percent that much better than everyone else on their respective platforms? It’s part of the explanation. But by the theory of the long tail, there should also be room for many more people to actually earn a living.

That leads us to look at how the marketplaces themselves work.

When Apple and Google halved their app-store fees for developers earning under $1 million a year, it was framed as a concession to the political pressure they had been under. But a closer look showed that cutting from 30 to 15 percent would, in practice, make little difference. The lost revenue for Apple and Google amounted to less than 5 percent.

For the platform companies – Apple, Google, Amazon – the distribution of revenue between developers does not matter. They make the same money regardless of how it’s split. They do, however, have a clear incentive to project a sunshine view of how much money there is to be made, because that is what brings in new content. Apple often talks about how much money they have paid out to developers in total – but they never mention what the median developer can expect to earn.

A tactical move, of course. Showing the median, while at the same time luring in new content creators who dream of big money, doesn’t add up.