Content creators: a €9 billion market, and 56% earning under €4,420 a year

According to franceinfo, the French news service of the public broadcaster, the French content creator market came to nearly €9 billion in 2026. The same article, citing a study published on the occasion of the Paris Creator Week, notes that the activity remains poorly paid for most creators: 56.1% of them earn less than $5,000 a year, or roughly €4,420. At this stage we do not know who commissioned the study, how the "market" is defined, or what exactly the €9 billion figure covers. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, admire the layout. On one side, a round, flattering number that makes video cooking tutorials and gaming commentary into a bona fide industry. On the other, a qualifier tucked into the second sentence: "toutefois" ("however"). That "however" carries a lot of weight. It suggests the problem is one of future growth, that a little patience and it will pay off. Yet a €9 billion market in which more than half the participants earn less than €370 a month is not a market that is slow to deliver on its promises. It is a market that concentrates its gains elsewhere.

Where, exactly? The dispatch doesn't say, and that is the right question. One working hypothesis: the platforms, which own the infrastructure, the algorithm and the rules of visibility, take their cut from work that millions of people first provide for free, sometimes for years, in the hope of a breakthrough. Creators produce the content that holds attention; the platforms sell that attention. In the terms of Marx and Engels, those without their own means of production are reduced to selling their labour power. Here the means of production is the platform, and the "boss" has the good sense never to call himself that.

This is where common sense does its work. The vocabulary is that of freedom: "entrepreneur of oneself", "community", "passion". Gramsci would speak of hegemony: an order holds up best when those who live under it find it normal, even to their advantage. When 56% of creators earn little, one rarely hears that the system is badly built; one hears that they should train harder, sell themselves better, be more consistent. Failure becomes an individual fault, success proof that everything is possible. The rare big earners serve as a shop window for everyone else.

The Paris Creator Week itself, with its studies and its stages, belongs to this apparatus for manufacturing consent: a place where the profession constructs its own story, often with platforms and brands as natural partners. Nothing says the figures are false. The question is who commissions them, who comments on them, and who is cited as the "sensible adult" to interpret them.

What the dispatch does not tell us: median incomes, the share captured by the platforms, actual working hours, social protection. Yet those are the figures that would show whether we are talking about a profession or a well-informed lottery.