As creator fees rise, so does the confusion over what to pay

Where fees once mapped cleanly to scale — macro, micro, niche — those lines have blurred. Two creators with near identical followings can command radically different rates. With no clear benchmarks, pricing can — and often does — run on instinct, perception and whoever’s holding the purse strings that day.

“There’s a lot of variance,” said Gall. 

That came through clearly when Digiday spoke with seven other execs. Some said fees were up. Others said they were down. What they all had in common: wildly different numbers for what those fees actually are. 

Samantha Ribakove, founder of consulting firm Solutions by Sam, saw this firsthand. Earlier this year, she was on set for a full-day shoot with one of her clients, whom she declined to name. The scope included in-feed content, paid media usage for a year and on-site production. She cast four creators — two male, two female, per the brand’s request. 

Two of the creators had nearly identical followings and engagement stats. Yet, their initial asking rates were nearly $10,000 apart. 

“Of course we negotiated to ensure that they were paid nearly the same rate given this information, but this starting point was quite alarming,” said Ribakove, without revealing exact figures. 

By contrast, the other two creators — whose states were vastly different — had fee expectations that aligned more predictably with their reach and performance.

“There is just no standard rate set in the industry right now,” said Ribakove.

Scott Sutton, CEO of influencer marketing platform Later, sees the same volatility at scale.

“One of the biggest issues is inconsistency across internal teams,” he continued. “A creator might be quoted $4,000 to $5,000 by a brand-direct client, and $500 to $1,000 plus commission by an affiliate-driven team for nearly identical deliverables. It is not about price gouging.”

In fairness, experts like this don’t see this as a crisis, but a recalibration. Creators are testing what their work is worth, marketers are trying to decide what that value actually looks like for them. Still, the result is a pricing environment that’s difficult to navigate — and even harder to forecast.

“We’ve generally seen creator rates across tiers tick up 10-20% over the past 18 months or so,” said Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer at Collectively, without providing exact figures. “Negotiations then kick in and incorporate usage rights and exclusivity to get to a number that everyone feels good about.”

The fact that nearly everyone agreed prices are all over the place, but can’t quite agree on why, says a lot about where the industry is right now. And the fluctuations aren’t going away anytime soon. Beyond the usual push and pull of negotiation, the reasons for the spread are as structural as they are idiosyncratic — driven by shifting platform dynamics, talent agents and layers of intermediaries. 

Then there’s Unilever. Its public commitment to spend 20 times more on creators signaled something bigger: if one of the world’s largest advertisers is willing to treat influencers like media partners, others are sure to follow. For many creators, it was encouragement to push their rates even higher. 

Put it all together, and it’s clear to see that this is a pricing environment that’s less a marketplace and more a moving target.

“Many big brands have entered the creator space (e.g., Unilever), which is bringing significant money into the market,” said Thomas Markland, founder of creator company HYDP. “However, many of these brands are unaware of how to price talent and are moving at such a rapid pace that they end up paying creators more than they’re worth. This has a knock-on effect for anyone who wants to work with them afterwards.”

Eventually, this chaotic phase will pass but not before it reshapes how creators get paid. After all, the creator economy, like many before it, is in transition. It’s moving toward a future where pricing baselines are more embedded across the industry. That doesn’t mean uniform fees. It means shared expectations around value, deliverables and results.

Until then, expect more trial and error. Marketers are still chasing better signals of value than follower counts. Creators are still working to prove what they offer isn’t just reach.

“Our recommendation is always to layer tiers, micro for efficiency and content, macro for scale and brand recognition and optimize continuously,” said Steven Lammertink, founder and CEO of The Cirqle. “The best-performing brands treat influencers the way they treat paid media: iterate fast, cut what underperforms, scale what converts.”

That’s the real throughline here: creator pricing is starting to act more like media pricing. Messy, subjective and volatile — but increasingly tied to outcomes. And that’s fundamentally a different equation.

As William Gasner, co-founder and CMO of influencer marketing platform Stack Influencer, put it: “Rewarding creators for results rather than follower base is a compensation model I think many other platforms and agencies will have to embrace as someone’s followers in this day and age is more a vanity metric and no longer the reason to be paid more or less.”