The life of a social media creator can be high in glamour and status. The well-paid endorsement deals, the online followers and proximity to the celebrity establishment are all perks of the industry.
But one hidden cost will be familiar to anyone coping with the 21st-century economy: burnout. The Guardian has spoken to five creators with a combined audience of millions who have all experienced degrees of workplace stress or fatigue.
“There’s no off button in this job,” says Melanie Murphy, 35, who has been a social media creator since 2013. “The algorithms never stop. You can’t pause the internet because you get sick. If you vanish for two or three months completely you know the algorithms will bring your followers to new accounts who are being active.”
Dublin-based Murphy says her symptoms of burnout were “complete fatigue” and a “nerve sensation of tingling and brain fog.” A dose of Covid was then “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, she adds.
There is also a self-consciousness that comes with struggling in a nascent industry some people may not take seriously – or cannot conceive of as being hard work, given its association with glamour or the ephemeral nature of social media fame.
“It’s really hard to talk about my job impacting how bad I felt without people being like ‘shut up you’re so privileged’,” Murphy admits.
She is not alone. Five out of ten creators say they have experienced burnout as a direct result of their career as a social media creator, according to a survey of 1,000 creators in the US and the UK by Billion Dollar Boy, a London-based advertising agency that works with creators. Nearly four out of 10 (37%) have considered quitting their career due to burnout as well, according to the research.
The World Health Organization defines burnout as the consequence of “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”, with symptoms including exhaustion, reduced effectiveness at your job and a feeling of mental distance from your work.
Others spoken to by the Guardian talk of creative block and their own lack of engagement with the material that, by necessity, they have to churn out on a regular basis.
“There’s no HR department, there’s no union,” says Murphy. “If my husband got burned out, like I did, and literally couldn’t stand up off the couch, he would have someone to call. The only people I could really call were creators.”
Shortly after the birth of her second child in 2023, Murphy had what she called a “complete burnout breakdown”.
“My body was, like, ‘I’m done’.”
Perhaps ironically, Murphy says, YouTube videos were a help in her recovery. She also sought out therapy and “pulled back a bit” from work, having saved up enough money to cover a few months off. Now, after “a lot of brain retraining stuff”, she only posts two YouTube videos a month – having run at one or two a week before. She used to be “very, very active” on Instagram but now posts only “if I feel inspired to post”.
Now, Murphy and her husband, an airline pilot, “kind of match” each other in earnings which “does mentally take a bit of weight off”. Murphy’s company makes “a bit over” €100,000 (£86,000) a year. She says she has cut down heavily on unpaid work and changes to her work-life balance have probably reduced her earnings by about €20,000.
Murphy has 800,000 followers across YouTube and Instagram – her main sources of income are brand sponsorship – including from the Trainwell personal training app and online therapy company BetterHelp – and advertising revenue from YouTube, which shares a substantial cut of ad spend with creators.
Creators – people who make a living from making online content, often via brand sponsorships – lead a professional life that reflects the digital culture they are embedded in. It is fast, demanding and vulnerable to sudden changes of taste.
Becky Owen, the global chief marketing officer at Billion Dollar Boy, says the average full-time creator has to carry out a number of tasks to be successful, from planning, filming and editing content to managing relationships with brands; and, of course, engaging with followers.
Owen says the “wheels are coming off” for many creators.
“It’s prevalent. It’s not just a few,” she says, adding that there can also be an emotional toll because a lot of creators “monetise themselves” and turn their lives into content.
“Beyond getting new commercial deals, the greatest challenge creators face is managing the business side of what they do. They’re juggling countless responsibilities, trying to excel at all of them, often before they even have a chance to focus on the content itself. That’s where they really need support,” says Owen.
Allison Chen, 22, a New York-based creator who specialises in baking, cooking and lifestyle content and has a combined audience of 1.3 million across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, says the pursuit of views and engagement can be wearying. It can leave you feeling “regardless of how many views you get, there is always a higher peak to achieve”.
“Social media creators also have the same comparison and self-esteem issues that regular social media users have,” she says.
Chen says deleting social media apps has helped. Her routine involves downloading Instagram and TikTok whenever she needs to upload content – and then deleting them. “I repeat it every day,” she says.
London-based Hannah Witton, 33, suffered in a similar way. She restructured her professional life to avoid burning out completely, having been a full-time creator since 2015. Witton took three months of maternity leave after giving birth to her son in 2022. Three months, she says, is the longest amount of time she has seen any creator take off after having children.
“The shortest amount of time I’ve seen someone take off [for maternity leave] is three days. I wish I could have taken longer off but I just knew it wasn’t possible.”
When she returned, Witton found she was trying to produce the same amount of YouTube and podcast content – on sex and relationship advice – within half the time, with the added financial burden of paying for a producer to help make her content.
“Something had to suffer. And the thing that was suffering was me and the content – and my relationship with the content,” she adds. “Audiences are smart, and I think they can pick up on those kinds of things.
This week Google-owned YouTube called on the UK government to take creators more seriously as a profession, in recognition of the “profound economic and cultural contributions they bring to the UK’s creative industries”.
Meanwhile, creators used to broadcasting advice to others are having to rally themselves through the hard times.
“It is possible to get through this and still earn good money while not spreading yourself too thin, which many creators do,” says Murphy.