Marketers say creator fees are guesswork, and the industry cannot agree on a fix

The creator business is going into its biggest spending season with no shared idea of what one post is worth. Censuswide asked 1,000 people who decide on marketing and buying in the United States and the United Kingdom. The agency Billion Dollar Boy paid for the survey, which ran in mid-July. It found that 45% admit their organisation has paid the wrong price for creator deals. Of those, 40% say they paid too much and 36% say they paid too little. The problem is bigger in the UK, where 58% report getting the price wrong, against 33% in the US.

There is a reason for this. Some 81% of brands negotiate with creators themselves. Seventy-three percent handle the money by hand. Only 21% use software made for the job. Digiday took the numbers to a dozen people in the industry last week. They mostly agreed that fees have drifted away from any value you can measure. They did not agree on what should take the place of today’s haggling.

Danielle Wiley, chief executive of the influencer agency Sway, told Digiday that in her experience brands pay too much far more often than too little. Others said the opposite. Creators without a manager often sell the right to use their work, and promises not to work with rivals, too cheaply. They then find their content running in paid ads for months.

Fohr and Billion Dollar Boy each sell their own pricing tool

Everyone has a tool to sell. James Nord, founder of Fohr, promotes his platform’s Rate Check calculator. Billion Dollar Boy has built a pricing engine into its Companion platform, using data from more than 180,000 deals and 173 million dollars of past client money. Archive and Nutcake offer options based on AI. The catch is that each benchmark reflects the deals its own owner has done. None of them has the standing of a Nielsen rating or of a CPM, the standard price for reaching a thousand people.

The IAB, the trade body for digital advertising, is working on rules for measuring creator content. Jamie Gutfreund, founder of Creator Vision, is co-leading the work, and the rules are expected in October. Measurement has to come first. Until brands agree on what a creator delivers, they cannot agree on what it costs.

Creator ad spending is expected to reach 43.9 billion dollars in 2026

In Digiday’s Future of TV briefing this week, Tim Peterson said the sector may be moving towards a correction. Spending on creator ads is expected to reach 43.9 billion dollars in 2026. But Dentsu, L’Oreal and LTK are all automating deals between brands and creators. In advertising, automation has usually pushed prices down, as programmatic buying did for display ads. Emma Chamberlain, one of the most successful creators of her generation, recently said the influencer business is like a balloon with a needle already touching it. If she is right, standard prices may arrive as a squeeze on creators rather than as a favour to them.