While researching her forthcoming book on the promises and perils of visibility in the content creator economy, Brooke Erin Duffy noticed a surprising pattern.
“I wanted to understand the nuances of social media content creation from a sociological perspective,” said Duffy, associate professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “But interview participants kept pointed me toward harms from the psychological domain – ‘I can’t take a break. I’m exhausted. I’m beholden to platforms, sponsors and audiences.'”
Worse, Duffy said, creators have few mechanisms for protection from work-related harms, given their status as independent contractors.
For the most part, these admissions go unsaid, although the world’s biggest YouTube star, MrBeast – the 28-year-old who boasts more than 500 million followers in a career that started when he was 11 – opened up in an interview last year: “There [were] definitely times where I would cry. But if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am.”
Duffy understood, though, that the performative nature of the job means creators generally don’t admit in public – not in media interviews, and certainly not on their TikTok and YouTube accounts – what they would share confidentially to a researcher. That got Duffy thinking about the contradictory way that work in the creator economy is framed, while also raising questions about who can speak out, how and to whom.
Duffy and doctoral candidate Rosie Nguyen are co-authors of “Creator Burnout is Real’: Risk, Responsibility, and Un/speakability in Platform-Dependent Creative Labor,” which published July 7 in New Media & Society.
They found that content creator burnout is, in part, “unspeakable” – a product of a complex confluence of factors: the informal structural conditions of platform labor; the privileged status of creative work, seen by many as a “dream job”; and entrenched markers of power and social identity, with gender playing an outsize role.
First author Nguyen approached this research from multiple perspectives: She was a travel author and influencer in her native Vietnam for more than five years before beginning her doctoral work at Cornell in 2023.
“The creators we talked to felt that burnout was partially unspeakable because of the unique relationships between creators, platforms and the audience,” Nguyen said. “They felt a sense of gratitude toward the community that they built, and the audience and the platforms they depend on. That is exactly what I felt.”
Nguyen and Duffy analyzed three sources of data – 58 examples of creators’ self-authored content on TikTok and YouTube; 62 news media accounts; and 78 in-depth interviews the researchers conducted with creators – to compare how these workers define, attribute and mitigate burnout.
Like many creative workers in arts, entertainment and even news production, content creators tend to normalize burnout as “part of the job,” the researchers found. Lifestyle blogger Lucy Moon said in 2018 in The Guardian, for example: “I don’t know a single YouTuber who hasn’t had a burnout in some form or another.”
Publicly speaking out about the hazards of the job introduces different risks – including blowback from audiences. But outsiders may feel the workload is worth it: An influencer marketing agency study in 2024 found that more than half of people ages 18 to 60 would quit their jobs if they could make a living as a full-time content creator.
“Social media content creation is depicted as a ‘dream job’ in the popular imagination,” said Duffy, the author of “(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love” (2017). “It offers flexibility, autonomy, and for some people is quite lucrative. But our research highlights the much less auspicious elements of work in this space, especially the endemic nature of burnout, when your career is essentially shaped by platform conditions, over which you have very little control.”
The nature of creators’ “employment” – as independent contractors, with great freedom but none of the protections that full-time employees have – means that stress, loneliness and burnout loom large. The support, recourse and solidarity found in a traditional work environment don’t apply in this context.
“You are considered in a work relationship with these platform companies, but you’re not legally employed,” Duffy said. “One recurrent theme was, ‘If I take a break, I’m going to get punished by the algorithm.’ That’s one reason why this ‘unspeakability’ is part of the individualized nature of risk in the platform-dependent economy.”
A surprising theme from their findings was the role gender played in addressing the risks of burnout. “The male creators,” Nguyen said, “tend to resort to the ‘grinding’ ethos – keep grinding and you’ll overcome it. The women tend to resort to self-care or restorative practices.”
The researchers said a couple of recent developments – especially legislation introduced earlier this year by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, establishing a Creator Bill of Rights – are steps in the right direction. And movements like Creators 4 Mental Health, and trade organizations like the American Influencer Council (for which Duffy is an adviser), are important steps in bringing attention to the plight of today’s creative workforce.
Otherwise, Duffy said, creators shoulder the burden themselves.
“To what extent can they rely on structural solutions for problems when they are cast as individual failures?” she said. “They’re not (failures), but that’s the framing that circulates about creator burnout.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences.
