Laid-off workers turn to content creation
People hope to make money off brand deals, ads
With a compact mirror in one hand and an eyelash curler in the other, Grace Xu told her roughly 300,000 TikTok followers she was likely about to be laid off.
She was right, she tells them in a subsequent clip. But she was planning to pursue a different career anyway: as a content creator.
“I guess the decision has been made on my behalf,” she tells viewers in the video posted earlier this year. “The universe has spoken.”
By all accounts, the U.S. job market is holding strong, with employers adding 303,000 workers to their payrolls in March. The jobless rate has now remained below four per cent for 26 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.
But that’s of little comfort to the thousands of people who have nonetheless found themselves out of work. Hiring has largely been concentrated to a few industries, while tech and finance have only added a small number of jobs in the last 12 months.
Rather than trying to return to traditional employment, however, people like 26-year-old Xu are carving a new path for themselves through online content creation, where they can make money from brand deals and advertising by producing social media videos ranging from educational to entertaining.
“I think most employees look at employers now and no longer think that they are going to find security — permanent security — in a job,” said Sarah Damaske, who studies labour and employment relations, and sociology at Penn State. “I think it makes it less risky to do something like go and be a content creator because employment with a traditional employer is so much riskier.”
In an estimated $250-billion (U.S.) industry, four per cent of global content creators pull in more than $100,000 annually, according to Goldman Sachs Research. YouTube — considered by creators to be one of the more lucrative platforms — has more than three million channels in its YouTube Partner Program, which is how creators earn money. A spokesperson said the platform paid out more than $70 billion in the last three years.
Meanwhile, TikTok — which faces the threat of a national ban that could cost many creators an income stream — has seen a 15 per cent growth in user monetization, according to a company spokesperson.
Many people turn to full-time content creation only after they’ve see a payoff from putting in the work, said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communication at Cornell University. Or they are forced into it, as an avenue back to employment.
For Xu, the pandemic allowed her to rediscover her hobbies. She started making content at that time as @amazingishgrace on TikTok. Her thrift flips — all sewn by hand — went viral and steadily built up a following. Even when she left her banking job to move into the tech sector for a better work-life balance, she kept on making content.
“You just have to have this belief that, like, once your life is wide open for something, it will come,” she said, “otherwise you’ll drive yourself crazy thinking about it.”
Cynthia Huang Wang tried her hand in full-time content creation after she was laid off from her brand marketing job in February 2023. In January, she posted a TikTok about returning to the workforce, taking her 164,000 TikTok followers along as she updated her resume.
With the job market improving, Wang said she sees the appeal of returning to a stable income. Maternity leave at a corporate job also has pull as she and her husband consider starting a family. There are limitations, though. “Going back to the office every day would be a non-starter for me,” she said.