Did you know that the median AdSense income for creators with one million subscribers on YouTube is $90,025 per year? How about that Twitch streamers with a million followers have a median income of $542,208 per year? Or that TikTokers with a million followers have median annual earnings of just $473 from TikTok’s Creator Fund?
You probably didn’t know that, because this information–like lots of financial information about our industry–isn’t widely available to anyone, including the people most impacted: creators.
But Karat Financial wants to change that. The fintech company, which was founded in 2019 by Eric Wei and Will Kim and whose flagship product is a credit card for content creators, is introducing Karat Insights, a free-to-access tool that lets creators compare their earnings against anonymized financials from their peers.
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Karat Insights’ data comes from thousands of creators who’ve hooked up their bank accounts directly to Karat’s other services, like bookkeeping and tax prep. Those creators provided “millions” of data points about how much they’re earning and where their earnings are coming from, Wei and Kim tell Tubefilter.
“Eric and I built Karat with this understanding that creators are businesses, but traditional banks and institutions didn’t recognize this,” Kim says. “As we built some of these financial tools, we got a lot of insight. We saw that creators today one, don’t know how much they’re making, and two, they don’t know how much they should expect from their content.”
Financial information is “so hard to access and understand,” he adds. “We’ve heard this a number of times across the board: creators, both big and small, ask these simple questions like, how much can I be making? It doesn’t have a real answer. And so they’ll go and ask their friends, Hey, how much are you making? And they’ll try and cobble together this data, but some of these creators are larger than them, smaller than them, different kinds of categories. It’s really, really hard to understand.”
Karat says Insights is built to help creators get a better picture of their own income, but also to see how they compare to both top earners and creators in similar brackets to them across platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok. (To that end, part of Insights involves sorting each creator into one of eight archetypes, like “producer,” “magician,” and “hustler,” based on how they earn their revenue. They’ll have an option to see data from other creators who’ve also been sorted into that archetype.)
Here’s some examples of what Insights offers:
Wei adds that something like Insights has “always been a part of our vision.”
“We finally have enough data gathered from underwriting creators on the credit card for us to be able to build this product,” he says.
And Karat (which recently raised $70 million from investors including Will Smith‘s Dreamers VC) plans to keep adding to that pool of data. Its Insights tool is free, but creators who want to access it will have to connect their own financial information, thus giving Karat more data points.
“It’s a big deal for us where creators are giving us this data in order to get access to these tools,” Kim says. “It’s important to us to also share this information back to the ecosystem freely. As the creator economy wins, we will also benefit from that larger win. We don’t want to try to turn a quick buck on this when it’s something we believe should be a community-wide resource.”
You can see more about Insights here.
