Yahoo News’ next big source? Creators, who are getting ad revenue in exchange for articles

Creators have lots of ways to reach their current audiences. Their home platforms, other social media sites, third-party extra-content sites like Patreon and Ko-fi, newsletter platforms like Substack, and more. But what if a creator wants to expand that reach to an entirely new audience?

Well, some of them go to Yahoo.

Yes, that Yahoo. The web company is not the behemoth it once was, but some of its consumer-facing content aggregation services, like Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance, have persisted, and still reach close to 200 million readers per month.

Now, to inject fresh content into those services, Yahoo is launching Stories from Creators, a section on its homepage filled with new articles, all written by social media influencers. It first announced Stories from Creators back in March 2024, and went into beta with just 21 participating creators.

“We hear consistently that people want to get their news from other people,” Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and General Manager of Yahoo News, told Fast Company at the time. “They have institutions they trust, but they also really want connections…In addition to the publisher network that we have, and the journalists that we have in-house, creators would add an additional dimension to that content. And so it would really help us to flesh out that whole ecosystem of content as we really look to become the world’s best guide to the internet.”

To date, Yahoo has signed up nearly 100 YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram creators, Bloomberg reports. Participating creators are paid by revenue share, receiving a 50/50 split on earnings from ads run against their articles.

“Yahoo is an aggregator at its heart, and really our goal is to curate the vast amount of the content on the internet,” Downs Mulder told Bloomberg. “Creators are generating a tremendous amount of interesting content that’s relevant to our readers.”

Yahoo wouldn’t tell Bloomberg how much it makes from advertising or how many page views creators’ articles are getting–but some creators were willing to share their metrics. They told Bloomberg

the number of page views varies widely from article to article, but top-performing pieces are bringing more than 300,000 views.

As for how much ad revenue that generates for creators, couple Brent and Michael make around $3,000 a month for writing about travel. They also write on Substack, so Yahoo was–as we mentioned above–a way for them to take the sort of content they already produced, feed it to Yahoo, and use that platform to reach a new audience and make some extra cash.

As Bloomberg points out, content creators are increasingly becoming a source of news for the general public–so much so that the Biden administration held the first-ever creator summit at the White House last summer (though, of course, this was before the current era, where podcasters are being thanked for securing presidencies). That’s why Yahoo wants to put creators at the forefront of driving new content.

However, that being said, Yahoo is avoiding political content for this partnership. The Stories from Creators section is meant to be filled with lighthearted and noncontroversial articles, so Yahoo is only selecting creators in niches like lifestyle, travel, and parenting. It’s also not fact-checking any articles written by creators (though it does have guidelines prohibiting defamation, misinformation, or content that incites violence, Bloomberg reports).

“They really saw the way the wind was blowing,” Cory Allen, a self-help creator with 50K Instagram followers, said about joining Yahoo’s program. “The public is more interested in the individual perspective of a creator these days than they are a legacy media source.”

We think that’s up for debate, especially when it comes to more serious topics than what Yahoo is looking for here–but this entire $250 billion creator industry is built on audiences seeking creators’ perspectives. It’s clear people want to hear what creators have to say–and both Yahoo and creators might benefit from cultivating a new place where they can speak.