Marketers admit creator fees are guesswork, and the industry can’t agree on a fix

The creator economy is heading into its biggest spending season with no shared idea of what a post is worth. A survey of 1,000 marketing and procurement decision-makers in the US and UK, commissioned by agency Billion Dollar Boy and run by Censuswide in mid-July, found that 45% admit their organization has mispriced creator partnerships. Among those, 40% say they paid too much and 36% too little. The problem is worse in the UK, where 58% report mispricing, against 33% in the US.

The reason is structural. Some 81% of brands negotiate with creators in-house, 73% manage the money manually, and only 21% use software built for the job. Digiday, which put the numbers to a dozen industry figures last week, found broad agreement that fees have drifted from any measurable value, and no agreement on what should replace the current haggling.

Danielle Wiley, chief executive of influencer agency Sway, told Digiday that in her experience brands overpay far more often than they underpay. Others argued the opposite: creators who lack a manager routinely undersell usage rights and exclusivity, then discover their content running in paid media for months.

Why it matters

Everyone has a tool to sell. Fohr founder James Nord 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 of past client spend; Archive and Nutcake pitch AI-driven alternatives. The catch is that each benchmark reflects its owner’s book of business, and none of them has the standing of a Nielsen rating or a CPM.

The IAB is working on measurement guidelines for creator content, with Creator Vision founder Jamie Gutfreund co-leading the effort and a release expected in October. Measurement is the prerequisite for pricing: until brands agree on what a creator delivers, they cannot agree on what it costs.

What’s next

In its Future of TV briefing this week, Digiday’s Tim Peterson argued the sector may be edging toward a correction. Creator ad spending is projected at $43.9 billion in 2026, but Dentsu, L’Oreal and LTK are all automating brand-creator transactions, and automation in advertising has historically pushed prices down, as programmatic did for display. Emma Chamberlain, one of the most successful creators of her generation, recently likened the influencer business to a balloon with a needle already touching it. If she is right, standardized pricing will arrive not as a courtesy to creators but as a squeeze on them.