12 jobs that did not exist 20 years ago

The first YouTube video went up in April 2005. In May 2007 YouTube started its partner program, which shared ad money with a small group of creators. Before that, nobody was paid for posting videos.

The typical channel still earns nothing. Long videos pay about $1 to $45 per 1,000 views in RPM (revenue per thousand views, what you keep after YouTube's cut), paid in US dollars. Google says more than 90% of the views on Canadian channels come from outside Canada, so you are competing for a worldwide audience.

The channels that make it usually pick one topic, upload on a schedule for a year or more before any money arrives, and earn most of their income from sponsors rather than ads.

Facebook opened to anyone with an email address in September 2006, and Instagram launched in 2010. Companies soon needed someone to run their accounts, and a new job appeared. Job Bank still files it under public relations.

This is a salaried job. The national median is about $74,000 a year full time, though pure social media roles often pay a bit less. First jobs as a coordinator pay about $40,000 to $50,000, and Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal have the most openings.

If you already run accounts that grew, that is real evidence. Employers hire on numbers you moved, not on how many posts you made.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) launched its online storage service in March 2006 and its rented servers in August 2006. Companies could stop buying their own machines, and someone had to build and run the rented ones.

Job Bank calls this a cloud service management specialist, with a national median of about $96,000 a year. Juniors start around $60,000 to $75,000, usually after a help desk or systems job. In Quebec the word engineer is reserved by law for members of the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (the Quebec order of engineers), so check the title on any job you take there.

The title data scientist was coined around 2008 by people building analytics teams at LinkedIn and Facebook. In 2017 Canada became the first country with a national AI strategy, and demand here grew with it.

Job Bank's national median is about $96,000 a year, and first jobs pay about $60,000 to $75,000. Many people start as a data analyst. Most of the day goes on cleaning messy data, not building clever models.

The iPhone went on sale in 2007, but outside developers could not sell apps on it until Apple opened the App Store in July 2008. Google's Android store followed later that year. Before that, Waterloo's BlackBerry was the phone business people carried.

Job Bank pools mobile developers with all software developers, where the national median is about $100,000 a year and juniors start around $60,000 to $75,000. Banks, telecoms and big retailers hire steadily through co-op. Publishing your own app costs US$99 a year with Apple or a one-time US$25 with Google.

Bloggers took free products before this, but Instagram launched in October 2010 and turned posting photos into something brands would pay for. TikTok merged with Musical.ly in 2018 and sped everything up.

Across 14,400 creators paid through CreatorIQ campaigns in 2025, the median was about US$3,000, roughly $4,000 here, and the top 10% took 62% of the money. The CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) counts free products and trips from brands as income at their fair market value.

The ones who last treat it as a small media business: a clear niche, a rate card, written contracts, and a clear ad label on every paid post, which the Competition Bureau expects.

Twitch launched in June 2011 as a gaming spin-off of the live video site Justin.tv. Earning from subs, tips and ads on live video became a realistic goal from then on.

Most streams have almost no viewers. A channel with 5 to 20 viewers at a time often makes $0 to $250 a month, paid in US dollars, and you keep about half of each sub on the standard split. The 2021 Twitch leak showed huge payouts at the very top and tiny ones below.

People played video games for prize money in the 1990s. What is new is a salary: Riot Games started its League of Legends Championship Series in 2013 with paid team rosters, and leagues with contracts followed.

Riot's minimum for partner-team players in the Valorant Champions Tour Americas league is US$50,000 a year, about $68,000. Canada has no top-league team of its own, so Canadians who make it usually move to the United States. The 100th highest-earning Canadian won US$1,265 in prizes in 2025.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University found reaction speed in StarCraft II players starts slowing around 24, so careers are short. Many players keep studying while they compete.

The idea is old, but the job took off after 2012, when a neural network built at the University of Toronto won a major image recognition contest by a wide margin. Geoffrey Hinton, who led that lab, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for the research behind it.

Job Bank pools this title with data scientists, at a national median of about $96,000 a year, and machine learning engineers usually sit in the upper half. First jobs pay about $65,000 to $85,000, and the usual entry is a master's degree or a couple of years as a developer first.

Transport Canada's drone rules came into force on June 1, 2019. Anyone flying a drone between 250 grams and 25 kilograms now needs a pilot certificate: 14 is the minimum age for basic operations and 16 for advanced, and the certificates do not expire.

Job Bank files drone pilots in a catch-all group, so the figures here are estimates: about $38,000 to $48,000 to start and $75,000 to $95,000 for survey, inspection and film work. The money follows the data, so pilots who can turn images into maps and 3D models earn the most.

UGC (user-generated content) creators film casual, real-customer style videos that brands run as ads. It grew into its own freelance job in the early 2020s, once brands found TikTok-style clips often sold better than polished ads. On Collabstr's marketplace, 66% of creators offered it in 2025, up from 26% a year earlier.

You do not need followers, but it is freelance work, usually priced in US dollars. One video pays about $70 to $700 in Canadian money, so a part-timer landing about 10 videos a year makes around $2,500. Charging extra when a brand runs your video as a paid ad is where the better money is.

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022. Within months, people were selling chatbots, voice receptionists and automated workflows to small businesses, and calling it an AI automation agency.

No survey tracks it, so the typical figure of about $3,000 a year is an estimate. First projects often go for $700 to $4,000, and the real business is a monthly fee of $250 to $2,500 per client to keep things running. Since 2023, Quebec's privacy law also requires a business to tell people when a decision about them was made only by automated processing.