By 2025, the global digital creator economy stands as one of the most culturally influential—and economically misunderstood—phenomena of the post-pandemic world. In a widely circulated Gigabeat essay titled “The Permissionless Economy: Creativity, Algorithms, and the Creator’s Dilemma”, entrepreneur Nicholas Kinports reflects on the promise of creator liberation, a concept he first explored in his 2018 HackerNoon piece, “Permission to Create”. The essential claim: thanks to new tools and platforms, the era of creative gatekeeping is over, replaced by an open-access meritocracy of self-expression and self-monetisation.
As a working economist, one can admire the cultural optimism—yet such sweeping declarations must stand up to economic scrutiny. Has the permissionless economy truly fulfilled its promise? Or has the market reality evolved into something far more complicated?
This essay interrogates Kinports’ original thesis using seven years of global platform revenue, creator income distribution, and productivity data to answer a simple but essential question: did the economics of creative freedom ever materialise for the majority of creators?
Creative Production Exploded — But Labour Oversupply Followed
From a productivity standpoint, Kinports was largely correct. Between 2018 and 2025, the volume of digital content creation exploded. YouTube reported more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute by 2023—up from 300 hours in 2018 (YouTube Press). TikTok, practically a non-entity in 2018, surged to over 1 billion active users by 2021, generating terabytes of content daily.
However, while this exponential supply reflects increased accessibility, it also created a textbook labour market imbalance. According to data from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), freelance creative jobs rose by 19.2% between 2018 and 2024, yet median income for freelance creatives declined by 8.6% in real terms. A parallel report by Stripe in 2024 indicated that while 200 million individuals globally now identify as creators, fewer than 4 million generate consistent full-time income.
This divergence supports what classical economic models would predict in the face of oversupply: commodification, declining marginal value, and wage compression.
Platforms Grew Richer — Creators Did Not
One of the most robust ways to evaluate Kinports’ permissionless thesis is by analysing platform profitability versus creator earnings.
Let’s consider YouTube and TikTok:
- YouTube paid out over $50 billion to creators between 2018 and 2023 (Google Earnings Report). However, over 85% of that revenue was captured by the top 3% of creators.
- TikTok launched its Creator Fund in 2020 but has faced criticism for low payout rates. A BBC investigation found that TikTok creators averaged only £0.02 to £0.03 per 1,000 views—despite the platform generating $18 billion in global revenue in 2023 alone.
Meanwhile, the combined ad revenues of Meta, Alphabet, ByteDance, and Amazon’s Twitch segment grew from $228 billion in 2018 to over $460 billion in 2024 (source: Statista). This suggests that platform operators captured most of the economic surplus, while creators—despite being the content producers—remained largely under-compensated.
In economic terms, we have witnessed a “value capture asymmetry”: while creative output surged, the marginal revenue accrued by creators did not.
The Creator Economy: Gig Work in Disguise?
Kinports’ framing suggests that the permissionless economy empowered creators to become independent operators—businesses of one. But backtested labour and wage data suggests a closer parallel to gig economy structures like Uber and Deliveroo, wherein platforms define the terms of engagement and extract substantial value from workers without formal employment protections.
In 2022, The Brookings Institution likened creators to “digital pieceworkers,” echoing similar findings from a 2023 Pew Research Center study which revealed that:
- 60% of creators felt they could not take a week off without losing income or visibility.
- 72% reported anxiety around algorithm changes and platform policy shifts.
Thus, from a macroeconomic labour analysis, the permissionless economy has recreated the precarity of gig work—disguised by the veneer of independence.
AI’s Emergence Further Depressed Wages
While Kinports’ 2018 essay did not account for generative AI, his Gigabeat follow-up briefly acknowledges it as both a tool and threat. The data affirms the latter.
According to the OECD, the rise of generative AI between 2021 and 2024 led to a 27% reduction in freelance illustration contracts and a 19% decline in copywriting rates globally. In the UK, Nesta found that creative freelancers using AI saw initial productivity gains but reported median income decline, due to a flood of supply and devaluation of labour.
This follows Baumol’s cost disease theory in reverse: as AI accelerates the output of creative labour, its economic value compresses—leaving human creators economically vulnerable, despite technical empowerment.
The Decentralisation Dream Remains Mostly Aspirational
One of the few more optimistic aspects of Kinports’ narrative was his belief that creators might eventually migrate to decentralised platforms and protocols, thereby retaining ownership of their work and income.
Yet despite the proliferation of Web3-native creator ecosystems (e.g. Lens Protocol, Mirror.xyz), real-world economic data reveals limited adoption. According to Electric Capital’s Developer Report (2024), fewer than 0.1% of global creators monetised work on-chain. Most remained dependent on traditional, centralised platforms, constrained by their policies and payout systems.
The decentralisation thesis may still hold potential—but as of mid-2025, it remains more ideological than economically transformative.
Final Assessment: Did Kinports’ Thesis Hold Up?
From a macroeconomic perspective, the answer is nuanced.
- True: Kinports was correct to predict an explosion in creative output, greater accessibility to production tools, and the decline of traditional gatekeepers.
- Partially True: He foresaw the rise of alternative monetisation channels, but overstated their economic impact across the creator population.
- Underestimated: The role of algorithmic opacity, income inequality, platform control, and AI’s labour disruption.
Ultimately, the permissionless economy is not an egalitarian utopia. It is a stratified, efficiency-optimised marketplace where a few capture the gains of visibility and virality—while the majority shoulder the risks without stable reward.
Kinports remains a credible voice in chronicling this transformation, but the empirical reality suggests that permission may be gone—but control never left. It simply changed form.
