Over the past few years, more and more creators have successfully built their personal brand on the Internet. However, there still many of them are struggling with creator labour, especially precarity labour where their jobs tend to be creative without a contract, health protection, insurance and the benefits of pension are less than the normal job would provide. Furthurmore, most of them were self-employed or freelance, where the creator is in charge of their own earning based on the offer they receive. Not only do they earn unpredictable earnings but also rarely have job protection. The beginning of the creator’s career, they don’t earn a lot, most of the time they even have to create lots of free content before receiving offers from brands. A lot of creators tend to work many jobs to cover up the uncertainty of their daily expenses(Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009, 420). This is the reason why most people quit before they even receive their first offer. 

However, there are still some creators who have built a successful personal brand and become a full time content creator. For instance, glowwithava commenced her skincare contents in 2018 as skincare is her passion(Generalassemb.ly, 2024) but  she was working in finance as her full time job to provide her living as she did not earn any penny at the beginning. She began to create content online talking about her passion,  educating her audiences about how to use skincare products such as toner properly and now she has successfully built 1.7 million followers on Tik Tok who has the same passion as her(Spruch-Feiner, 2023). Below is her Tik Tok account where she has accumulated 1.7M followers.

Overall, people assume being a creator seems like an easy job when they have sponsorship to talk about the products they like. However, not too many people know that they have put into a lot of free labour to reach fame and then be able to make their living out of a creator job. Being a creator is a difficult job as you have to practise without getting paid before you are able to provide for your own living.  

Bibliography

Banks, M., and Hesmondhalgh, D. (2009). “Looking for Work in Creative Industries

Policy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4): 415–30.

Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019). NYU Press Chapter Title: Creator Labor Book Title: Social Media Entertainment Book Subtitle: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. NYU Press.

glowwithava (2022). Instagram. [online] http://www.instagram.com. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/glowwithava/.

Generalassemb.ly. (2024). Ava Lee Bio. [online] Available at: https://generalassemb.ly/instructors/ava-lee/27035  [Accessed 5 Nov. 2024].

Spruch-Feiner, S. (2023). Ava Lee, the TikToker behind #JelloSkin, launches ingestible beauty brand ByAva. [online] Glossy. Available at: https://www.glossy.co/beauty/ava-lee-the-tiktoker-behind-jelloskin-launches-byava-an-ingestible-beauty-brand/ .

Written by Meng Hsin Kuo (33755528)