I 100% agree, and I'll go a step farther: the "creator economy" is a scam on par with MLMs. If you look at the business model, it's exactly the same (ditto for "influencer economy" and "gig economy"). All of these scams depend on the same thing: you front the time, effort, and money to produce the product, you do all of the sales and marketing of the product, and they take a percentage of the sale (far outsized to the effort they did). You take on all of the risk while they take on all of the reward.

They all hold up a group of 1%'ers who look just like you who made big bucks to make you think "if they could do it, I could do it". They all dangle the same promise in front of you: you will have financial independence, control your work/life balance, work on your own schedule, no bosses, you will get to do all the "fun stuff" like marketing and sales on your own, they will support you every step of the way, if you want to take off you just don't work no big deal.

They use these promises to lure people who don't want to participate in the traditional workforce, or who have circumstances that make that difficult: single parents and stay-at-home parents/spouses, the disabled, people who struggle with background checks, and on and on and on.

And these folks see the gross revenue number they can pull and don't realize how self-employment taxes work, ignore their lack of healthcare, don't care about 401(k) matching, business taxes, licensing, insurance, and so on, and think they are getting "great deal".

I can't stand seeing how these companies are just exploiting people. It's disgusting.

J.Ja