YouTube has paid out $70 billion to content creators in the last three years. That's an average of $23 billion a year.

For context, Netflix is now spending around $13 billion on content and Disney is set to hit a $24 billion content spend this year.

And that YouTube revenue share only accounts for a fraction of the money creators are generating on the platform. When you factor in sponsorships, merch, subscriptions, and other revenue streams, it wouldn't surprise me if YouTube is driving upwards of $50 billion a year for content creators.

That's enough to pay 500,000 people upward of $100,000 a year. And that's only YouTube. This is why Patreon CEO Jack Conte says we're currently in a second creative Renaissance. It's also why a lot of the coverage around media being a dying industry is incredibly reductive; the media has never been more vibrant in all of human history.