The trade desk for the creator economy.
YouTube has paid $100 billion over four years and Roblox $1.5 billion in one — but YouTube's pool, spread across 3 million channels, annualizes near $8,000 each (modeled), while Roblox's top 1,000 developers averaged $1.3 million.
Kick keeps zero of a streamer's $5 sub and signs nine-figure deals it can't fund from streaming — because its owner runs the Stake.com casino and treats creator pay as customer acquisition.
The court counted the 284 posts the founder submitted as his own and found 206 — nearly 75% — were marketing Bang, then handed the accounts to the bankrupt company.
Spotify's report counts 81,100 artists who cleared $10,000 last year but never sets them against the ~13 million people who have uploaded — a ratio of about 0.6%.
A 2.9% + $0.30 payment fee and a paid-ads layer stack on top of the headline commission, and Whatnot's own $8 billion in 2025 sales backs the math into roughly 12.5%.
A $5/month Substack subscriber nets the writer $4.01 — and an iOS sign-up in year one stacks Apple's 30% on top of that.
Roblox cut 2026 bookings guidance by ~$950M to $7.33–$7.6B, then hiked the DevEx rate 42% on the same call — but only for verified-18+ US spend in R15 games.