What are the top startups in the creator economy?
In our creator economy deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Whatnot is the top startup in the creator economy today, with OnlyFans and LTK immediately behind it on economic scale and Whop, Patreon, Substack and ShopMy forming the strongest second group.
The ranking is increasingly shaped by who controls the economic relationship, not who attracts the most creators or the most traffic. Checkout, subscriptions, payments, customer ownership and repeat purchases matter more than raw audience size.
Whatnot stands out because scale and momentum are arriving together. Its marketplace is already huge, but buyer growth, category expansion, revenue expectations and its jump to a $20 billion valuation all point in the same direction.
OnlyFans is the clearest reminder that creator count can be misleading. With roughly 2.5 million active creators, it sends about $6.2 billion to creators annually and produces nearly $1.6 billion in revenue, making it one of the most economically dense platforms in the market.
Creator commerce is becoming the most competitive part of the sector. LTK remains the scale leader with more than $6 billion in annual creator-driven retail sales, while ShopMy is already running at an annualized pace of roughly $2.4 billion based on recent monthly volume.
Whop may be the most strategically interesting company below the top three. It is moving beyond storefronts into payments, cards, advertising, treasury tools and AI-agent infrastructure, effectively trying to become an operating system for internet-native businesses.
Patreon and Substack still control important direct-to-audience networks, but both now need discovery and broader monetization to keep growing. The older model of simply giving creators a place to charge subscribers is becoming less differentiated.
Kajabi, beehiiv and Stan show a second path to scale: sell software to creators rather than take a large cut of every transaction. These businesses are smaller than the biggest marketplaces, but their recurring software economics can be unusually efficient.
Linktree has extraordinary distribution but weaker ownership of the final transaction. Its 70 million-plus users keep it strategically relevant, yet a click that leaves the platform is worth less than a payment, subscription or purchase completed inside one.
Creative AI companies such as Suno, Runway and ElevenLabs sit near the boundary of the market rather than inside the core ranking. They are increasingly important to how creators produce, but much of their growth now comes from consumers and enterprises that are not building audience-driven businesses.
The broader pattern is clear: the creator economy is turning into small-business infrastructure. The companies moving up fastest are the ones helping creators sell, get paid, own customers, finance activity and run more of the business without leaving the platform.
This market map, featured in our creator economy deck, highlights top companies and startups in the creator economy
What actually makes a creator economy startup “top” today?
The top creator economy startups today are the private companies that already control meaningful creator spending, income or customer relationships, while still growing fast enough to change the market.
That definition gives us a more useful ranking than simply sorting companies by valuation or user count. Creator economy companies now do very different jobs. Whatnot runs a marketplace. Patreon and Substack sell access to audiences. LTK and ShopMy connect creators with retail purchases. Whop helps people build digital businesses. Kajabi and Stan sell business software. Linktree mainly controls traffic.
Comparing those companies requires looking at what happens after somebody creates content. How many people pay? How much commerce flows through the platform? Does the company own the transaction or simply refer the customer elsewhere? Are creators building businesses there, or merely maintaining another profile?
Scale also needs context. Linktree reaches more than 70 million users, according to the company, while Stan is far smaller. Yet Stan currently generates about $41 million in annual recurring revenue by selling software directly to creators. OnlyFans has around 2.5 million active creators but produces nearly $1.6 billion in annual revenue. A smaller creator base can therefore produce a much larger business.
We also keep AI creation companies at the edge of the definition. Suno, Runway and ElevenLabs are heavily used by creators, but their businesses increasingly reach consumers and large enterprises that have little to do with earning a living from an audience. Including every creative AI company would quickly turn this into a generative AI ranking.
For us, the creator economy starts where an individual turns content, expertise, influence, entertainment or taste into an economic relationship with an audience. The strongest startups are increasingly the companies sitting closest to that relationship.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest creator economy report.
Where is the creator economy money moving right now?
Creator economy money is currently moving toward companies that own transactions, subscriptions and customer relationships rather than tools that simply help creators publish.
The scale is already much larger than the old image of creators collecting small monthly memberships. Whatnot sellers generated more than $8 billion of gross merchandise volume during the first half of its latest reported year. OnlyFans paid creators about $6.2 billion in its latest financial year. LTK says creators drive more than $6 billion in annual retail sales, while Whop says businesses on its platform generate roughly $4 billion a year.
ShopMy has also entered this group surprisingly quickly. The Financial Times recently reported that purchases flowing through ShopMy had passed $200 million per month. If that level held for twelve months, it would represent roughly $2.4 billion of commerce.
Patreon remains substantial at more than $2 billion going to creators each year. The difference is that several of the younger companies are growing around commerce rather than memberships alone.
We see the same pattern in product development. Whop now offers payments, cards, advertising and financial tools. Linktree has been adding bookings and payments. Patreon has added one-time purchases. Substack is pushing further into sponsorships. Kajabi wants creators to sell several products to the same customer instead of relying on one course.
These companies are slowly converging on the same idea: a serious creator increasingly looks like a small internet business, and the valuable platform is the one that controls more of that business.
| Company | Recent economic activity | What the number measures |
|---|---|---|
| Whatnot | More than $8B in half a year | Marketplace GMV |
| OnlyFans | About $6.2B a year | Creator payouts |
| LTK | More than $6B a year | Retail sales driven by creators |
| Whop | About $4B a year | Commerce generated by businesses |
| ShopMy | More than $200M a month | Product sales |
| Patreon | More than $2B a year | Fan payments to creators |
As this chart shows, and as featured in our creator economy deck, search interest in becoming a creator has grown significantly
Is Whatnot the number-one creator economy startup right now?
Whatnot is currently the strongest creator economy startup overall because few private consumer companies are matching its combination of growth, transaction volume and expanding network effects.
The live-shopping company has moved far beyond its original collectibles niche. Fortune reported that Whatnot crossed one billion cumulative orders earlier this year, after adding more than 20 million accounts over the previous twelve months. First-time buyers were up 285% year over year at that point.
A more recent update made the growth even harder to dismiss. Whatnot said it had already processed more GMV in the first half of the year than during all of 2025, while its number of buyers more than doubled year over year. Inc. also reported that the company expects annual revenue to pass $1 billion.
The product itself is broadening at the same time. Whatnot added more than 35 categories last year and another 45-plus during the first half of this year. Fresh food, fashion, art, golf and vinyl now sit beside the trading cards and collectibles that originally defined the app. Its acquisition of recommendation startup Shaped also brought a new applied AI research team inside the company, which makes sense for a marketplace where matching a viewer with the right livestream becomes more valuable as inventory explodes.
Investors have followed that operating growth. Whatnot's latest $545 million round valued the company at $20 billion, compared with $11.5 billion at its previous round and $5 billion earlier in the same growth cycle.
The valuation could outrun the business from here. But today the marketplace is growing almost as dramatically as the headline valuation. That is enough to make Whatnot our number one.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest creator economy report.
Does OnlyFans really belong among the top creator economy companies?
OnlyFans belongs near the top of any serious creator economy ranking because very few platforms send more money directly to individual creators.
The latest accounts make the scale unusually clear. According to the Financial Times, OnlyFans generated nearly $1.6 billion in annual revenue, around 10% more than the previous year, while pre-tax profit reached approximately $715 million. Creators received about $6.2 billion during the year, taking cumulative payouts since launch to roughly $30 billion.
OnlyFans achieved those numbers with around 2.5 million active creator accounts and 132 million active fan accounts. The economics are extraordinary even before comparing them with other creator platforms. Annual pre-tax profit alone is larger than the total revenue of most companies in this market.
There is also a strange valuation gap. Architect Capital recently acquired a 16% stake at a valuation of roughly $3.2 billion. That works out to only about two times annual revenue and less than five times pre-tax profit. A technology company growing revenue by roughly 10% with those margins would normally command a much richer multiple.
Adult content explains much of the discount. It creates payment, regulation, reputation and investor constraints that most creator platforms do not face. That also makes OnlyFans harder to use as a model for the rest of the industry.
Still, the creator economy is ultimately about people turning audiences into income. On that measure, OnlyFans remains one of the biggest private platforms in the world and deserves a top-three position.
This chart, included in our creator economy deck, shows annual VC funding in creator economy startups
Is Patreon still growing, or has it become a legacy creator platform?
Patreon is still growing today, although the company now looks more like a large incumbent fighting for its next growth engine than the startup setting the pace for the whole creator economy.
Patreon's current scale remains formidable. The company says more than 300,000 creators use the platform, nearly 80 million fans participate, and creators receive more than $2 billion per year. Free memberships have climbed above 165 million, almost doubling from early last year.
Patreon has also found more ways to make those users valuable. One-time purchase revenue has tripled year over year, according to the company. More than 80% of those purchases come from people paying that creator for the first time, which gives creators another route to monetization besides converting everybody into a recurring member.
The freshest change is happening around discovery. Patreon spent years behaving mainly like somewhere creators sent an audience they had built elsewhere. Its new network is trying to change that. Patreon said an initial version was already delivering more than one million new members to creators each month. The company is now changing its recommendation system to understand the actual content of posts, and it is testing topic-based communities and more short-form video features.
That strategy comes with pressure. Patreon recently cut around 20% of its workforce, following an earlier large reduction. It is simultaneously rebuilding a mature product while younger competitors attack individual pieces of the creator business from different directions.
Patreon has not lost relevance. More than $10 billion has gone to creators through the platform since launch, and current activity is still growing. The open question is whether the new discovery network can make Patreon a place where creators find audiences as well as monetize them. If it works, Patreon becomes much harder to dismiss as a legacy membership company.
Is Substack still winning the creator publishing market?
Substack is currently the strongest private platform for paid independent publishing, although its paid-subscription growth no longer looks as explosive as it did during its earlier surge.
The company passed five million paid subscriptions after roughly doubling from two million in 2023. It then raised $100 million at a valuation above $1.1 billion. Those numbers established Substack as the clear heavyweight in paid newsletters.
More recent evidence shows the business broadening. Substack said this summer that more than 100,000 publishers now make money from subscriptions, while its ten highest-earning publishers collectively generate more than $100 million a year. It has also hired its first head of brand sponsorships, adding another monetization route beyond taking 10% of paid subscription revenue.
The platform itself increasingly resembles a media network. Writers can publish text, podcasts and video, run livestreams and chats, and use Notes to reach people who have never subscribed to them. That internal discovery gives Substack an advantage over traditional email software because a new publisher can potentially gain readers from inside the network.
There is one reason to temper the growth story. Substack announced five million paid subscriptions more than a year ago and still describes the figure as “more than five million.” We cannot infer an exact current number from that language, but the absence of another million-subscriber milestone suggests paid growth has probably slowed from the period when Substack added roughly one million paid subscriptions in only a few months.
Even with that slowdown, nobody else has built a comparable private network around paid independent publishing. Substack remains the leader for now, with beehiiv becoming the most interesting infrastructure-first challenger.
This chart, included in our creator economy deck, breaks down beehiiv’s strategy in the creator economy
Is ShopMy actually catching LTK in creator shopping?
ShopMy is now a real threat to LTK, but LTK still leads creator shopping by a wide margin in total commerce.
LTK says creators on its platform drive more than $6 billion in annual consumer sales. It reaches more than 44 million shoppers each month and works with over 8,000 integrated retailers. The company has also paid more than $3 billion to creators over its lifetime.
That is the incumbent benchmark ShopMy is chasing. The challenger is already processing more than $200 million of sales per month, according to the Financial Times, across a network of roughly 243,000 creators. Annualizing that monthly volume gives us around $2.4 billion of product sales.
So ShopMy is already running at roughly 40% of LTK's reported annual sales volume, despite being founded almost a decade later.
The speed of that catch-up explains why investors have repriced the company so aggressively. ShopMy moved from a valuation of roughly $410 million to $1.5 billion during 2025. The company has also said it is profitable, which makes the expansion more convincing than growth financed entirely by heavy losses.
The two businesses increasingly compete for the same valuable position between brands, creators and consumers. LTK brings years of purchase data and a much larger shopping network. ShopMy has grown around a newer generation of creators and has made performance-based brand relationships central to the product from the beginning.
LTK therefore stays ahead in our ranking today. ShopMy gets the higher momentum score, and the gap is now small enough that another year of growth at anything close to its recent pace could change the answer.
| Metric | LTK | ShopMy |
|---|---|---|
| Reported commerce | More than $6B annually | More than $200M monthly |
| Implied annual ShopMy comparison | $6B+ | About $2.4B at current monthly pace |
| Consumer / creator reach | 44M+ monthly shoppers | About 243,000 creators |
| Current position | Scale leader | Fast-growing challenger |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest creator economy report.
Is Whop becoming the main platform for digital entrepreneurs?
Whop is currently one of the fastest-rising creator economy companies because it serves people who increasingly see themselves as internet business owners rather than influencers.
The company says roughly 22 million people now use Whop, with 50,000 to 60,000 joining each day. Businesses on the platform generate about $4 billion in annual commerce across 145 countries. Fortune also reported that more than 650 people have become millionaires through businesses built on Whop.
Those businesses can look very different from a classic creator account. People sell courses, software, paid communities, coaching, services, memberships, digital products and access to specialized information. Whop provides the storefront, payments and community infrastructure underneath them.
Lately, the company has been moving deeper into the financial side of those businesses. Whop launched Treasury products, business cards, an advertising platform connected to Meta and a command-line interface that lets owners and AI agents operate parts of a business through Whop's API. Its advertising product can already draw on data from more than 22 million buyers.
Tether's $200 million investment valued Whop at $1.6 billion. That valuation actually looks modest beside Whatnot's $20 billion when we compare the amounts of commerce the two platforms touch, although Whop's take rate, business model and transaction mix are very different.
The more interesting point is strategic. Whop wants somebody to start a business, collect revenue, advertise, hold money, spend money and eventually automate that business without leaving its platform.
If creators continue turning into small digital companies, Whop is unusually well positioned to benefit.
This chart, included in our creator economy deck, shows annual funding in creator economy startups
Is Kajabi still relevant now that AI can create courses and content for free?
Kajabi is still one of the strongest creator business platforms because people continue paying experts for outcomes, access and relationships even when AI makes basic information almost free.
Fresh data from Kajabi gives us a clearer picture than its old lifetime-sales headline alone. Experts have now generated more than $11.7 billion on the platform since 2010, across more than 600,000 digital products.
The interesting part is where that revenue comes from. Kajabi says 53.8% of the money generated on the platform comes from repeat purchases. Among creators who have made at least one sale, someone with a single offer has earned a median of only $180 over their lifetime. For creators with ten or more offers, the median jumps to $82,212, and 45% of that group has generated at least six figures.
Kajabi has also found that adding human involvement changes what customers will pay. One-time offers containing coaching sell for a typical $326 versus $147 for offers without coaching, around 2.2 times as much.
Those numbers help explain why generative AI has not wiped out the expert economy. The weakest product is increasingly a static bundle of information. Higher-value creators sell coaching, communities, memberships, implementation, judgment and repeated access to the same audience.
Kajabi's problem is visibility rather than proof that its model works. We have much better public growth data for Whatnot, Whop, ShopMy, beehiiv and Stan. Kajabi's $11.7 billion figure accumulated over sixteen years, so it tells us more about durability than current acceleration.
For that reason, Kajabi remains in our top group but below the companies where we can see a sharper growth curve right now.
Is beehiiv actually catching Substack?
beehiiv is still far behind Substack in paid consumer subscriptions, but it is becoming the strongest creator publishing infrastructure company outside Substack's closed network.
The company has grown quickly enough that the distinction is becoming important. Founder Tyler Denk has put beehiiv at roughly $32 million in annualized revenue. The platform sends more than three billion emails each month, while publishers on beehiiv are earning around $3 million per month through monetization products tracked by the company.
beehiiv's paid-subscription business is also getting larger. Publisher subscription revenue increased from roughly $8 million in 2024 to about $19 million in 2025, a 138% jump. The company has now expanded beyond newsletters into websites, digital products, advertising, podcasts, webinars and other tools for running an independent publishing business.
That strategy is quite different from Substack's. Substack wants creators and readers inside a consumer network where it can recommend one publication to another. beehiiv behaves more like Shopify for publishers: the creator owns the brand while beehiiv supplies software, distribution and monetization underneath it.
The trade-off is obvious. Substack's network can hand a writer new readers. beehiiv gives larger publishers more control over their business, data and monetization stack.
Today, Substack is clearly ahead as a creator network. beehiiv has the more credible chance of becoming the infrastructure layer behind creators, professional newsletters and media companies that do not want their identity tied to somebody else's platform.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest creator economy report.
This chart, included in our creator economy deck, compares the main business model options for creator monetization platforms
Is Stan becoming more than a creator storefront?
Stan has become a serious creator software company, with around $41 million in annual recurring revenue and a new AI business starting to contribute meaningful growth.
Business Insider recently reported that Stan's total ARR had reached about $41 million. Most still comes from Stan Store, the product that lets creators sell courses, downloads, coaching and other offers through a simple storefront.
That alone makes Stan unusually efficient. The company reached tens of millions of recurring revenue without raising the kind of capital we see at many creator economy unicorns.
The more interesting development lately is Stanley, its AI product for creating and growing social content. Stan built the initial LinkedIn version in about two weeks. According to co-founder John Hu, that product reached $200,000 ARR within six weeks and $1 million within a few months. After an Instagram version launched, the two AI products together reached roughly $3 million of ARR.
That still represents less than 10% of Stan's total recurring revenue, so the company has not completed an AI reinvention. It does show that Stan can sell another product to the same creator base, which is exactly what a mature creator software company needs to do once its original storefront starts growing more slowly.
Stan is much smaller than the marketplaces near the top of our ranking. Yet $41 million of recurring software revenue gives it a stronger business than its simple storefront product might suggest.
Does Linktree's 70 million users make it a top creator economy company?
Linktree is still one of the biggest creator products in the world by reach, but its position in our ranking is lower because it captures less of the money flowing through creators than the companies above it.
The audience remains enormous. Linktree says more than 70 million people use the product, and current job listings say around 48,000 new accounts are still being created each day. Its pages receive around 1.7 billion views per month, while the company says roughly 1.2 billion unique visitors reach Linktrees monthly.
Few creator startups have that distribution.
The harder question is how much Linktree can earn from it. A link page often sits one step before the valuable transaction. Someone clicks from Instagram into Linktree, then leaves for Shopify, Patreon, Spotify, a restaurant booking page or another service where the actual purchase happens.
Linktree has spent the last few years trying to move closer to that transaction. It now offers commerce features, analytics and AI recommendations, while its acquisition of Fingertip added bookings, payments and small-business tools directly inside Linktree. The company is also hiring around monetization and revenue strategy.
The opportunity is large because Linktree already owns a high-traffic piece of internet real estate. The problem is equally simple: switching between link-in-bio products is easy, and social networks can copy basic linking features.
So 70 million users absolutely keep Linktree in the conversation. We just value one dollar of commerce controlled inside Whatnot, Whop or Patreon more highly than a dollar that merely passes through a Linktree click on its way somewhere else.
This chart, featured in our creator economy deck, illustrates the revenue mix across customer segments in the creator economy
Should Suno, Runway and ElevenLabs count as creator economy startups?
Suno belongs closest to the creator economy today, while Runway and ElevenLabs have already grown too far into enterprise AI for us to include them in the core ranking.
Suno makes the boundary genuinely difficult. Fortune recently reported more than 100 million lifetime users, two million paying subscribers and roughly $300 million of ARR. Users make complete songs from prompts, so creation itself is the product. Its latest financing valued Suno at $5.4 billion.
Yet many Suno customers are creating for themselves rather than building audiences or businesses. That makes Suno partly a consumer entertainment company and partly a creator tool.
Runway has moved even further away from a pure creator classification. The company said very recently that its business has more than doubled this year and net revenue retention has risen above 300%. A Fortune 20 customer increased usage more than 17 times. Runway still works with film and media companies such as Lionsgate and Paramount, but recent growth is increasingly coming from enterprises including Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Allstate and Robinhood.
ElevenLabs makes the distinction clearest. The company passed $500 million ARR during the first four months of the year after ending 2025 around $350 million. Its growth now comes heavily from voice agents used for customer service, sales, hiring and other enterprise workflows.
All three companies will shape what creators can produce. We still keep them in an adjacent creative-AI category for this ranking. Otherwise, rapidly growing enterprise AI companies would start crowding out businesses whose entire purpose is helping creators make money from audiences.
What are the top creator economy startups right now?
Whatnot is our number-one creator economy startup today, followed by OnlyFans and LTK on economic scale, with Whop, Patreon, Substack and ShopMy forming the strongest group immediately behind them.
Whatnot gets the top position because several types of evidence point in the same direction at once. Commerce is exploding, buyer growth remains unusually high, the marketplace is moving into dozens of new categories, revenue is heading above $1 billion, and investors have repriced the company to $20 billion. As seen above, it has already processed more GMV in half a year than during the whole previous year.
OnlyFans ranks second because its creator economics dwarf almost everybody else, even if adult content makes the company a special case. LTK takes third because it still controls the largest established creator-shopping network we found.
Whop is the company we would watch most closely from here. Its reach across digital products, payments, advertising and business finance could make it much more important than the typical “creator platform.” Patreon remains one of the deepest direct-to-fan businesses in the market, and its current push into discovery gives it a plausible route back to faster growth.
Substack still owns the strongest paid publishing network, although growth appears less explosive than during its earlier subscription surge. ShopMy follows closely because its commerce growth now looks large enough to threaten LTK rather than simply coexist with it.
Kajabi earns its place through years of creator revenue and unusually rich data on what successful expert businesses actually sell. beehiiv and Stan are smaller but currently growing into broader creator operating systems. Linktree closes our list because its distribution remains enormous, even though it has more work to do to turn that traffic into owned economic activity.
The pattern across the ranking is fairly clear these days. The companies moving up are getting closer to the creator's money: the checkout, subscription, customer, store, payment or business account. Publishing tools still matter, but owning the economic relationship has become much more valuable.
| Rank | Company | Why it ranks here now |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Whatnot | Fastest combination of marketplace scale, buyer growth and category expansion |
| 2 | OnlyFans | Extraordinary creator payouts, revenue and profitability |
| 3 | LTK | Still the scale leader in creator-driven shopping |
| 4 | Whop | Rapidly becoming infrastructure for internet-native businesses |
| 5 | Patreon | Huge direct-to-fan economy with a fresh push into discovery |
| 6 | Substack | Strongest paid independent publishing network |
| 7 | ShopMy | The clearest fast-growing challenger in creator commerce |
| 8 | Kajabi | Deep, proven infrastructure for experts selling high-value products |
| 9 | beehiiv | Fast-growing independent publishing infrastructure |
| 10 | Stan | Roughly $41M ARR with early success expanding into AI creator tools |
| 11 | Linktree | Massive reach, but weaker ownership of the final transaction |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest creator economy report.
This chart, included in our creator economy deck, shows how audience growth distribution tool technology has evolved over time
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis ranks the top creator economy startups by looking at which private companies already control meaningful creator spending, income or customer relationships, while still growing fast enough to reshape the market. We did not use valuation, user count or revenue as a standalone ranking method because those metrics capture very different kinds of strength.
We compared companies across current economic scale, growth momentum, depth of creator monetization, control of the transaction and customer relationship, and the direction in which each business is expanding. The evidence was gathered from the freshest relevant operating and financial disclosures available as of August 27, 2026.
We treated GMV, creator payouts, retail sales, ARR, revenue, paid subscriptions, creator counts and user counts as different measures rather than interchangeable ones. GMV helps us understand commerce flowing through a platform; ARR gives a cleaner view of recurring software economics; creator payouts show how much money reaches creators; and audience metrics mainly tell us about distribution.
We also separated scale from momentum. LTK, Patreon and Substack have large established creator economies, while ShopMy, Whop, beehiiv and Stan are smaller but currently showing sharper growth in specific parts of the market. That distinction prevents a mature incumbent from automatically outranking a younger company simply because it has existed longer.
Transaction ownership was given more weight than raw traffic. We prioritized companies that directly control checkout, subscriptions, payments, stores or customer relationships over products that mainly refer users elsewhere. This is why Linktree's huge reach does not automatically place it above platforms such as Whatnot, Whop or Patreon.
Creative AI companies were kept at the edge of the definition. Suno remains close enough to creator workflows to discuss, but Runway and ElevenLabs now derive substantial growth from enterprise use cases outside audience-driven creator businesses. Including every creative AI company would blur the market and turn the ranking into a broader generative AI list.
The final ranking is a structured synthesis rather than a mechanical score. We looked for convergence across recent evidence: scale, growth, monetization, market position and strategic expansion. Companies rose when several of those indicators reinforced each other, not because of one unusually large number.
Key sources used for this analysis include: Whatnot on marketplace and seller activity, Fortune on Whatnot's $545 million financing and $20 billion valuation, the Financial Times on OnlyFans revenue, profit, creator payouts and valuation, LTK on annual creator-driven retail sales and shopper reach, the Financial Times on ShopMy's monthly commerce volume and valuation, Patreon on creator payments, fan activity and memberships, Substack on its paid publishing network, Tether on its Whop investment and payments expansion, Kajabi on expert sales and repeat-purchase economics, beehiiv on annualized revenue, email volume and publisher earnings, Business Insider on Stan's ARR and Stanley, Linktree on users and monthly profile views, Suno on its latest financing, Runway on enterprise expansion, and ElevenLabs on passing $500 million ARR.
In our creator economy deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
