Top Creators is a charitable organisation in England and Wales. We publish free guidance for people trying to earn a living online, and we check our sources.
Why we exist#
Almost everything written about earning money online is written by someone with a stake in what you decide. Tool round-ups run on affiliate commission. Growth advice is usually the front end of a course. Platform guides are published by the platforms. There is an enormous quantity of this material and very little of it will ever tell you that a route is a dead end.
What’s missing isn’t information. It’s someone without a financial interest in the answer. We take no affiliate commission, sell nothing, and accept no money from platforms or tool vendors, which means we can publish the discouraging numbers alongside the encouraging ones.
The picture we’re working from#
Things are hard in 2026 and we think saying so plainly is more use than encouragement. Over half of online creators earn under $5,000 a year. The median wait for a first payment of any size is around six and a half months. The top tenth of creators take 62% of platform advertising payouts, up from 53% in 2023. Roughly 57% of people doing this full-time earn less than a living wage from content alone.
That doesn’t mean it can’t work. It means the route you pick matters a great deal, and the routes that get promoted hardest are rarely the ones that pay first. Our guides are built around that problem: what each path pays, how long it takes, what it needs from you, and who should skip it.
Our rules#
We hold ourselves to these. If we break one, we’d like to hear about it.
- Every figure carries a source and a date. If we can’t source it, it doesn’t go up.
- Estimates are labelled as estimates. Most published earnings data is third-party guesswork with no methodology attached. Where we cite it, it is labelled as an estimate.
- Every route we describe includes who it doesn’t suit, and how often it fails.
- No affiliate links. Not disclosed ones, not “we only link to things we use” ones. None.
- No income projections. Ranges with provenance, nothing more.
- Everything is dated. When material goes stale we mark it rather than quietly deleting it.
Who writes this#
We publish as an organisation and haven’t built personal brands around the work. What should decide whether you trust a page here is whether the sources hold up, and every page is written so you can go and check them.
Money#
Top Creators is a company limited by guarantee. There are no shareholders and no share capital, so there’s no mechanism by which anyone extracts profit from it. Any surplus goes back into the work.
We don’t take money from platforms, tool vendors, affiliate networks, or brands whose products we might have to assess. If that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it appears anywhere else on the site.
Legal and registration details#
| Registered name | TOP CREATORS |
| Company number | 14554380 |
| Legal form | Private company limited by guarantee, without share capital, with exemption from using ‘Limited’ in its name |
| Incorporated | 22 December 2022 |
| Jurisdiction | England and Wales |
| Registered office | 27 Old Gloucester Street, London, WC1N 3AX, United Kingdom |
Our entry on the public register is at Companies House.
Corrections#
If a figure here is wrong, out of date, or true but misleading, tell us. Email [email protected] and put “correction” at the start of the subject line. Corrections from people who actually earn money the way we’ve described it are the most valuable post we get.