I'd love to see their data, I'd bet that people making six figures or more make up less than 1%.
Anecdotally, it's very safe to assume that for every Pewdiepie, there's 10 million accounts making less than $100 a month.
That just seems crazy high. Maybe my sense of scale is off, but I suspect their definition of youtuber/influencer is some subset of that: people with a certain number of subs or something.
We also have to factor in the following, which makes the economics of being a content creator even worse:
1) If you made $12,140 last year ($1,000 a month post tax for sake of whole numbers), how much of that went to recouping production costs? Include food, travel, electricity, amortized hardware cost for cameras and computers, etc.
2) Of the money that's leftover, how many hours went into creating this content? Divide those two numbers (e.g $800 per month / 40 hours per month = $20 effective hourly rate).
If $1,000 a month pays the bills and allows you to live a non-corporate, stress free life, then being one of the 175,000 people making this type of money sounds like a great deal. But I have a feeling the economics of this situation aren't sustainable.
Also check out EEVBlog. He makes about 40k a year on youtube with frequent, family-friendly, profitable-niche content. Decent, but not full-time family supporting money.