Forbes Top Creators 2026: MrBeast at $300M Is Half the Story. The Other Half Is Who Sits Where.
Forbes released its 2026 Top Creators ranking on June 23. MrBeast $300M is the headline. The actual signal is the structure of the list under him: business creators, narrative IP operators, and family content all overperforming pure entertainment.
The Creator Economy
Editorial oversight by the Editor-in-Chief
Forbes published its 2026 Top Creators list on June 23, ranking individual creators by past-year earnings. The headline number is MrBeast at $300 million. The more useful number is the gap between him and number two: Dhar Mann at $65 million. MrBeast earned roughly 4.6x what the next creator on the list earned, and approximately 35 percent of the combined earnings of the entire top 42. That is not a top of a list. That is a market structure where one operator has built a category-of-one business and everyone else is competing for the remaining share.
The names underneath that gap are where the real lessons sit for any working creator.
The top 10 and what each of them actually does
The top of the list, ranked: MrBeast ($300M), Dhar Mann ($65M), Steven Bartlett ($52M), Markiplier ($38M), Rhett & Link ($37M), Codie Sanchez ($31M), IShowSpeed ($30M), Mark Rober ($30M), Druski ($20M), and Charli D'Amelio ($18M). Read the business under each name and the pattern becomes obvious. MrBeast is competition entertainment plus CPG (Feastables) plus shows (Amazon Prime) plus a book deal with James Patterson now layering in. Dhar Mann is short-form narrative content at industrial scale, with his own studios. Steven Bartlett is podcast (Diary of a CEO) plus investing plus speaking plus books, and he's the highest non-American on the list. Markiplier is gaming entertainment plus owned media. Rhett & Link are a duo running Good Mythical Morning plus Mythical Entertainment as an operating company. Codie Sanchez is business and finance content plus Main Street acquisitions plus Contrarian Thinking community.
Of those ten, exactly two (Charli D'Amelio and IShowSpeed) make most of their money from straight personality-driven content. The other eight all run operating companies, with multiple product lines, where the creator name is the brand on top of a layered business. That is the single most important pattern in the entire ranking.
Business creators are punching above their audience size
Compare two data points. Codie Sanchez (#10, $31M) and Mark Rober (#9, $30M) have meaningfully smaller social audiences than creators ranked 15 to 30 spots below them. They out-earn most of the people with bigger followings. Erika Kullberg (#40, $6.8M) is a personal finance attorney with a small specialized following who out-earns several creators with 10x her audience size. The pattern matches what beehiiv's State of Paid Newsletters 2026 data shows on the newsletter side: a 1,000-subscriber investing newsletter earns ten times what a 1,000-subscriber travel newsletter earns. Commercial intent of the audience matters more than the size of the audience for the kind of earnings that show up on this list.
For any creator deciding what to focus on, this is the actionable takeaway. If you're building toward a business that could one day appear on a list like this, vertical concentration in a high-intent category (business, finance, professional skills, parenting, education) compounds with audience size in a way that pure entertainment does not.
Narrative IP is the surprise category
Dhar Mann at $65M is the most instructive single entry on the list. He is not the most famous creator. He does not have the highest social following at his rank. He has built a vertically integrated short-form narrative studio that produces moral-lesson stories at scale and monetizes them across YouTube, Facebook, and streaming. The business looks much more like a media company than a creator account, and the earnings reflect that. MrBallen (#21, $24M) is the same pattern in true-crime audio. Ms. Rachel (#24, $26M) is the same pattern in children's educational content, where the IP itself (the format, the characters, the curriculum-adjacent positioning) is the asset that compounds.
The lesson: owned narrative IP, even at a small scale, compounds in ways that single-personality content does not. MrBeast's own pivot into co-authored fiction with James Patterson sits inside this same pattern. Books, characters, shows, and formats keep paying for years after they ship. Personality-driven posts pay once.
The platform-dependent creators are visibly shrinking
Several creators on this list are former top earners whose ranking has slid as their platform leverage shifted. Names from the early TikTok era (Charli D'Amelio at $18M down from peak years, Hannah Stocking at $5.8M, Tana Mongeau at $8M, the D'Amelios more broadly with Dixie at $7M) are visible examples. The earnings are still substantial, and the work is real, but the trajectory is different from creators who built operating companies behind the personality. Platform-dependent creators ride the platform's monetization decisions and brand-deal economics. Operator-creators capture upside that compounds outside any one platform.
The same dynamic showed up when we covered AI influencers versus human creators: the creators most exposed to AI substitution are the ones whose entire business is the personality. The creators least exposed are the ones whose business is the IP, the product, or the operating company behind the personality.
What this means for creators below the top 42
Three actionable takeaways, in order of leverage.
One: pick the vertical, then build the audience. The list rewards audience commercial intent more than audience size. If you have a choice between growing a 500K general lifestyle following and a 50K finance, business, parenting, or expert-skills following, the financial outcome on a list like this favors the smaller specialized audience nearly every time.
Two: build an operating company under the personality. Eight of the top ten earners run multi-product businesses with a team, not solo creator accounts. The work changes from "make content" to "run the company that makes content, products, and adjacent revenue." That transition is hard, but it is the only path to the durable earnings the top of this list shows.
Three: own the IP. Creator revenue is being securitized and treated as an asset class precisely because the underlying IP and recurring revenue streams are durable enough to underwrite. The creators who structure their businesses for owned IP today are the ones who will be priced as media companies tomorrow.
The honest caveat on lists like this
The Forbes methodology necessarily under-counts creators whose revenue is private, B2B, routed through holding entities, or generated outside the consumer-facing surfaces Forbes can verify. The actual top of the earnings table in the creator economy includes B2B newsletter publishers, niche software operators who built audiences first, and licensing operations that monetize IP without putting a face on it. None of them show up on Forbes Top Creators because the list is built around public-facing personalities. Read it as the public-facing tip of the iceberg, useful as a comp set and a directional signal, not as the complete earnings ranking of the creator economy.
See the full ranking at Forbes.com. For the broader market context, see our coverage of the $314 billion creator economy inflection.
Frequently asked questions
Who is number one on the Forbes Top Creators 2026 list?
MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) at $300 million in past-year earnings. That is roughly 4.6 times the earnings of the number two creator on the list and approximately 35 percent of the combined earnings of the entire top 42.
Who is number two?
Dhar Mann at $65 million. His business is short-form narrative video at industrial scale, produced through his own studios. It is the most underestimated creator business model on the list and worth studying for any creator thinking about format scale.
Are gaming creators still earning at the top?
Yes. Markiplier ($38M), Jacksepticeye ($18M), Typical Gamer ($13M), and IShowSpeed ($30M) all rank in the top 30. The model has shifted from pure gameplay to gameplay plus shows, merch, and operating companies.
What is the smallest-audience creator earning at the top?
Several finance and business creators (Codie Sanchez at $31M, Erika Kullberg at $6.8M, Steven Bartlett at $52M) earn more than entertainment creators with substantially larger audiences. Commercial intent of the audience compounds with audience size for earnings of this scale.
How is this list different from a follower-count ranking?
It is an earnings ranking, not an audience ranking. Several of the highest-earning creators have meaningfully smaller follower counts than creators ranked below them on the list. The methodology rewards revenue across all channels (ads, sponsorships, owned products, IP licensing, shows, books) rather than platform metrics.
By The Creator Economy Editorial Team
Editorial oversight by Ismail Oyekan
Ismail Oyekan is the Editor-in-Chief of The Creator Economy and the founder of IMCX (Influencer Marketing Conference & Expo), the premier industry gathering connecting creators, brands, and capital. Named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Influencer Marketing by Influence Weekly, he has managed over $20 million in influencer marketing budgets and worked with A-list talent including Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled. He is a sought-after advisor to creator economy startups.
