Goldman Sachs' half-trillion creator figure is its own forecast

The test

On 19 April 2023, Goldman Sachs published an article summarizing its own research projecting that the creator economy could roughly double from a stated $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027. The estimate is credited to Eric Sheridan, a senior equity research analyst in the firm's Global Investment Research division, a unit described on Goldman Sachs' own insights hub as one of the firm's research and perspectives businesses. The live article now returns a bot-verification page rather than serving the text directly, so the version examined here is a Wayback Machine capture of the firm's own page.

What the evidence says

The article states that Goldman Sachs Research expects roughly 50 million global creators to grow at a 10 to 20 percent compound annual rate over five years, that brand deals supply about 70 percent of creator income 'according to survey data', and that the firm expects creator-economy growth to track its own forecast for global digital advertising spend over the same period. The analysts also name six factors, including scale, capital access and recommendation-engine strength, that they expect to determine which platforms capture the growth. None of this is presented as a measured total; it is described throughout as what 'Goldman Sachs Research expects' or what its team's report 'points to', the language of an in-house forecast rather than an audited count of existing creator revenue.

The sample and the variance

A total addressable market projection compresses many separate assumptions, creator counts, expected income per creator, advertising-spend growth and platform monetization mix, into one number for a market five years out. The $250 billion 'today' figure that anchors the forecast is itself an estimate, not a disclosed transaction total from any platform, and the article does not publish the underlying model. That means the $480 billion figure cannot be checked against a published methodology the way a platform's own disclosed payout figure can, and it should not be treated as an industry consensus simply because a large bank published it.

What to try next

Anyone citing this projection should name Goldman Sachs Research as the source of both the $250 billion base and the $480 billion target, and should treat 2027 as the forecast's own horizon rather than extending its growth rate further. This is an editorial caution, not a critique of the analysis itself, which the firm frames as client commentary rather than investment advice.

• Is a cited creator-economy market size a platform-disclosed total, a modelled bank forecast, or a survey estimate, and does the source say which?
• What assumptions about creator count and per-creator income does the forecast rest on, and are they published anywhere?
• Does the timeframe of the projection still apply, or has the target year already passed?

A bank's research note can be a useful early signal about where analysts expect a market to move, but it remains a forecast built on stated assumptions, not a record of what the creator economy is worth today.