Creator Economy Salaries Revealed: How Much Patreon, Discord, And Others Pay Employees, From Data Scientists To Engineers

Creator economy startups have boomed in recent years as a flurry of new companies has emerged to support digital talent.

Some, like Cameo and Patreon , help creators make money by charging their fans for video shout-outs and subscriber-only content. Others, like Discord and Beacons, are building tools for creators to engage with their audiences directly through messaging and link-in-bio features.

The emergence of these companies has led some staffers at top social brands like TikTok and YouTube to jump ship, trading in cushy roles at big tech companies to join an upstart.

"I looked out at the industry and saw so many exciting things happening in the creator economy that I wanted to be a part of and contribute to," Matt Koval, a former YouTube staffer who joined creator startup Mighty Networks, told Insider.

The decision to join a creator startup comes with risk. Companies like Cameo and Substack have both recently laid off employees as they've responded to a broader economic downturn.

But the upside can also be large, as getting in early at a company that offers equity options can pay out down the road.

To see how much jobs in the creator economy pay, Insider analyzed salary data from 41 work-visa applications filed with the US government between October 2020 and March 2022.

The pay data include salaries ranging from a data scientist making $170,000 per year at Discord to a staff engineer earning $250,000 or more at Patreon. The salaries tended to vary by location, with many of the jobs based in California and New York where pay levels are typically higher than other parts of the country, and a handful based in Texas.

The data have limitations. They include only base salaries, and not other forms of compensation like stock options. And they only cover US-based jobs for which the companies sought to hire through work visas, which can be few and far between at smaller companies and skew toward tech jobs. Some of the creator-economy companies had a single pay data point.

Still, the data offers insight into salary levels across the creator economy.