5 Revenue Stream Options for Content Creators
In today's digital landscape, content creators are presented with a myriad of opportunities for monetization. From social media platforms to membership programs and affiliate marketing, let’s explore the key strategies and considerations to help you transform your creative efforts into a sustainable source of income.
1. Social Monetization
Social media monetization is the first and most fundamental revenue stream for content creators. In fact, more and more online creators are becoming influencers on social media sites rather than building through their websites because of the monetization opportunities now available on most social media platforms.
YouTube is the big one for social monetization. Once you reach a certain subscriber count, you can start putting ads on your videos and profiting the more people view them. How much money you make from YouTube depends on how many people are watching your videos and the ads attached to them, the view and subscriber counts are a big deal for making money on YouTube.
X and TikTok also allow to profit from posts on their platform. On X, you must have an active subscription and at least 500 followers before you can start earning revenue from posts. While on TikTok, you have to sign up for the TikTok Creator Marketplace.
You can still make money off posts on social media platforms that don’t. For example, Instagram used to have an affiliate program where users could partner with brands and make sponsored posts, but the platform shut that program down in August 2022. However, you can still create sponsored content on Instagram. You just have to find the brand you want to work with yourself rather than going through Instagram and making money directly through the platform.
When You Can Start
YouTube is the easiest platform to track when you can start monetizing your posts since they have concrete monetization benchmarks. You need either 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 total watch hours over a 12-month period to be eligible to put advertisements on your videos or 10 million total views on YouTube Shorts over a 90-day period. After that, you can start profiting from your YouTube content.
As for other social media platforms, profiting from your posts is more difficult and less direct. For the most part, it involves becoming an affiliate partner with whatever platform your content is on, which you won’t be able to do until you have a large enough following, as we’ll look at later.
2. Memberships + Patreon
Monetizing your social platforms is a great way to profit from your content, but it's rarely a reliable source of income. That’s why we recommend looking into different revenue streams as you look into ways to monetize your content creation, and setting up a membership should be one of the first things you look into.
Patreon is the biggest monetization platform for content creators, and if you follow creators yourself, you’ve probably heard a few of them promoting their own Patreon platforms. But if you don’t know anything about it, Patreon is a free-to-use platform for creators to upload content behind a subscription wall. Of course, Patreon won’t gain nearly as much traction as your free content since people have to pay to access it. But the platform is a win-win overall, giving creators an extra revenue source and their audience a more in-depth way to connect with the creator.
You can put content behind different pricing tiers on Patreon as incentives for your audience to subscribe to the more advanced tiers. For example, for $1 a month, subscribers could access your Patreon page, where you can share updates about your content and what’s coming next - similar to a newsletter. But with a higher priced subscription, you could allow fans to access the page as well as extra content you post only to Patreon. The platform is also pretty flexible with what you can use it for, so the specific perks you offer your audience are up to you.
When You Can Start
You can technically set up a Patreon or membership platform as soon as you start making content. And some creators do approach these revenue streams in that way. The rationale is that you can begin making money quickly by having the platform ready to go immediately rather than waiting until you have an established following and missing the window when your content is fresher and more exciting.
However, we feel it won’t make much sense to set up a membership page until you have an audience with fans actually interested in becoming members. These revenue streams are more for creators who have been working for a while and feel they’ve cultivated enough of an audience to start making money from their content. And if you don’t already have the audience, you’ll just be working harder than necessary producing membership content for fans that haven’t arrived yet.
The rule of thumb for Patreon is that you can expect roughly 5% of your dedicated fans to sign up for your Patreon, provided you’ve created a community worthy of paying to be a part of. That means if you have 500 active subscribers on YouTube that all watch your videos, you can anticipate 25 of them to sign up for your Patreon, give or take a few. Notice that we said “active” subscribers here, too. Because if you have a million subscribers but only 1,000 of them are watching your free videos, you can’t expect 5% of that high subscriber count to want to pay for content.
With all that in mind, you should start putting effort into a Patreon page whenever you feel your active audience is big enough to make decent money from monthly Patreon subscriptions.
3. Affiliate Income
Affiliate income is the next step in expanding your revenue sources as a content creator, and it starts by applying for affiliate programs on whatever platforms you use. Affiliates of a website or social media platform can share ads or links for that platform in their content, and every time a member of their audience uses that ad or link to purchase whatever the ad was for, the affiliate receives a share of the profit.
When You Can Start
Affiliate marketing is primarily for content creators with a growing or medium-sized audience. Theoretically, you could set up a Patreon when you have 100 subscribers and move five or ten of them to your paid content for a small monthly revenue stream. But you need to hit a certain follower threshold to join affiliate programs, so you’ll likely need to wait until after you’ve grown your audience and Patreon following before you start applying.
Some platforms don’t have affiliate programs, and others have different requirements on what it takes to join, so it can be difficult to estimate precisely what benchmarks you need to hit to qualify. But once you’re in, affiliate marketing can be a great way to supplement your income.
4. Sponsorships + Partnership
Once you’ve set up revenue streams through memberships, affiliate partnerships, and monetizing your videos and social media posts, you can start reaching out to companies and brands about sponsorship opportunities. For a content creator, a sponsorship is when a business pays you to promote their products in your content. For a YouTube creator, that might look like doing an ad read in a video or making an entire post about using the product. While the specifics will look different depending on your platform, the basic idea is that you’re paid by a company to promote their work to your audience.
Similarly, you can start reaching out to companies and hearing offers for partnership opportunities once you reach this point. Partnerships are a bit different than sponsorships, with the key difference being that a partnership between a company and creator is typically an endeavor they’re both responsible for creating and promoting rather than an exchange where a company pays a creator for advertising. So rather than being paid for an ad read like you might in a sponsorship deal, a partnership might look like you and a company putting on an event for your audience.
When You Can Start
There isn’t really a number of followers you can hit that automatically brings in sponsors. Some creators will hear from brands with sponsorship offers after gaining a few thousand followers, while for others, it can take a few tens of thousands. Regardless, you will need to have some kind of dedicated following before you can start thinking about sponsorships.
Sponsors won’t just hand anyone a check. They want to know that the creator they are working with has a big enough following to reach enough people for their advertising investment to pay off. They also want to work with creators with a brand voice and focus similar to their own. In other words, companies that sponsor content creators want to know that the creator’s audience has some overlap with the demographics they’re trying to reach.
You’re probably safe to start inquiring about small sponsorship opportunities once you have a few thousand followers, but again, your success here will vary from creator to creator.
5. Merch/Products
The final revenue stream content creators should consider is selling merchandise and products from their website. As we’ll look at in a second, this is one of the last sources you should try to profit from, but if you have the means, it can be a fun and enriching way for your audience to connect with you.
Many popular content creators have their own branded merchandise with their logo or slogans on them, typically in the form of apparel, bags, and sometimes home goods like cups to members of their audience who are proud supporters of the content. Some content creators with specialized skills might also sell products like educational courses where they teach beginners in their audience the tricks of the trade they used to improve their craft.
When You Can Start
Selling branded products and merchandise is similar to setting up a Patreon or membership page. If you want to ensure your investment is worth it, you have to wait until you have enough of a following that people will be willing to pay extra for your content. But with products and merchandise, you’re better off waiting until you have a large, long-established audience that you comfortably feel is dedicated enough to your content that they would be willing to pay for your goods. You can start thinking about merchandise and products once you have a few tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Still, our big recommendation is to wait until you feel entirely comfortable with the investment.
A product purchase is a larger commitment than a $1 or $5 monthly Patreon subscription that provides regular rewards. Something like a branded t-shirt will cost more money to purchase and has a one-time benefit. And, let’s be honest, you really have to like a creator to wear their merchandise. All these factors put together mean you can anticipate a much smaller portion of your audience will be willing to pay for your products than they would for your Patreon or membership platform.
For merchandise specifically, it can cost a lot to produce branded apparel like t-shirts, hats, tote bags, and all the other stuff you see in your favorite creator’s stores. So, if you’re going to start selling products like these, you want to make sure that you have the audience to sell those goods.
On the other hand, there are products you can sell that aren’t merchandise. For example, if you feel you have a particular skill people want to learn, you could write a book or film a series of courses teaching people that trade. These can have a bit better return on investment since they can theoretically appeal to people outside your audience. For example, if you have a cooking YouTube channel and write a recipe book, that could feasibly appeal to aspiring chefs or people looking to try out new foods. In contrast, branded merchandise will only appeal to your fans.
Of course, there are other ways to make money as a content creator beyond these five revenue streams. And as content creation continues to sustain its popularity, there are even more ways to profit from your content becoming available. But as it stands today, these are the five most reliable ways to turn content creation into a profitable business.
Have any questions about how to market your content? Book a consultation and schedule a time to strategize your social media growth.
