Over the last six months I’ve had more calls and coffees than I can count, all circling the same two questions: what counts as a podcast today, and where do podcasters sit inside the creator economy?

The latest earnings calls put hard numbers behind the chatter:

• YouTube: 1B monthly podcast viewers, Shorts views +20% YoY
  

• Meta: $2B paid to creators this year, Reels payouts +80%
  

• TikTok: $32.6B in Gross Merchandise Value, roughly double 2023
  

• Patreon: Discovery feed adding ≈$200M a year to creator payouts
  

• Kajabi: Creators grossed $2B in the past 12 months
  

• Substack: 5M paid subs; top ten writers earn about $40M a year
  

• Spotify: Podcasters took home $100M in one quarter
  

  Share

Those headline totals come to life when you watch individual creators stretch the aperture of their platforms. Two snapshots make the trend concrete

• MrBallen turned 60-second TikToks into 10M YouTube subs, a chart-topping podcast, and a live tour
  

• Emma Chamberlain channels Anything Goes listeners into a coffee brand reportedly valued near $20M
  

Meanwhile, the toolkit is expanding just as quickly as the payouts.

Production velocity is about to spike too. On the Creator Upload podcast hosts Josh Cohen and Lauren Schnipper note that YouTube Originals went long-form “too early,” but AI has the potential to make longer-form video production far more accessible to all ranges of creators. When high-polish long-form content takes days instead of weeks, the old quantity-versus-quality trade-off potentially disappears (or at least becomes far less prominent).

Video stars launch podcasts, podcasters spin up merch and tours, and AI keeps shortening the path from idea to audience—evidence that the creator economy isn’t just thriving, it’s compounding.