In the shadow of Khaby Lame’s deal, marketers face hard questions about influence and value

The release made that all too clear: it talked up Khaby Lame as a “global-tier traffic entrance”. His company was framed as the “once-in-a-generation traffic gateway” to some 360 million followers. Moreover, those same fans could generate more than $4 billion in annual sales.  

Look closer, though, and the shine dulls. 

That $975 million figure is mainly stock, not a mountain of cash, which means his paper fortune now rides the mood swings of Rich Sparke Holdings’ share price. His oft-cited 360 followers is rooted in platform-reported totals, duplicated across apps, shaped by algorithms and ultimately controlled by companies that can tweak distribution at will. And the $4 billion sales projection assumes conversion behaviour and spending power at a level that even scaled global media business rarely deliver with consistency. 

This is the kind of fuzzy, modern math the industry has gotten comfortable with: cultural mass translated into enterprise value with more confidence than consistency. 

That’s less an indictment of creators themselves than of the industrial complex built around them. Again and again, that mix of empire-building language and headline-sized numbers gets used to make platform-dependent, personality-led businesses read like stable, infrastructure-grade assets, even when the durability and financial fundamentals are still very much open to debate. Look at the uneven paths of MrBeast Burger, Lunchly, Prime Hydration or Dude Perfect branching into tours, films and even amusement park ambitions. Scale in audience doesn’t automatically translate into frictionless scale in operational margins or long-term demand. 

“Followers are being treated as the asset, yet those numbers are platform-reported, duplicated across apps, and ultimately controlled by algorithms and platform policy,” said Abeed Janmohamed, founding partner of growth consultancy Volando. “Describing this reach as a ‘traffic gateway’ borrows the language of infrastructure, but it is leased attention rather than owned distribution.”

Maybe that’s the cynical read. Perhaps there is deeper deal infrastructure – licensing, IP, long-tail revenue rights and more – that makes the math sturdier than it looks from the outside. If there is, it is trailing the narrative of scale rather than leading it. Which should sound familiar to marketers still  paying premium rates for reach inside environments where creator valuations and a lot of media spend are built on the same foundation – platform metrics standing in for independently verified reality.  

It goes a long way toward explaining why so few CEOs talk about these investments with the kind of public clarity and conviction that Fernando Fernández has shown at Unilever.

“The creator economy has effectively invented a new asset class here but it basically dissolves the moment TikTok changes its algorithm or Instagram decides to push down Reels in favor of a new product,” James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic, explained. “So we’re watching financial engineering of attention economics and the transparency problem then is about whether the underlying asset ever actually exists in the form that it’s being sold. The followers aren’t the asset, the collective agreement to pretend they are is the asset.”

When that logic sets the tone, it doesn’t just shape valuations. It bends expectations. Lame has effectively licensed his name, likeness, promotional power and even an AI-twin of himself into a company that started life in financial services before swinging toward e-commerce. If anyone has the scale and clout to try to make a move like that, it’s him. Even so, the wager is that cultural momentum stays hot long enough for the business mechanics to catch-up. 

“Clearly Khaby Lame has potential beyond his current social content, but whether that potential is to commercialise his audience is questionable,” said Tim Mitchell, co-founder of DRPCRD, a creator content platform built specifically for agencies. “As a creator who shines a light on overly complex life hacks and grounds everything back to common sense, the danger is that by getting into e-commerce and AI-generated content of himself, he’s doing the one thing he’s spent five years parodying  – and to fickle social media audiences and algorithms, that traction can fall away very quickly.”

And that is the quiet risk thread through a lot of creator-era dealmaking: attention moves fast, culture moves faster while infrastructure – the boring durable part — tends to move slow. Marketers got a reminder of that fragility when Lame posted a promotional TikTok for a hotel chain late last year and his fans quickly zeroed in on the gap between the views and likes, reading it as a paid amplification rather than organic pull. As Mitchell explained: “They could instantly tell the post was boosted with ads and showed their displeasure. We know from working with creators for years that any creator trying to pivot after building an audience usually turns out badly.”

Marketers argue they’re not blind to any of this. They’re trying to operate inside the system as it exists. The real choke point sits with the platforms, where the creator activity actually happens. Broad access to the underlying mobile and exposure-level data needed to build something resembling a Nielsen-style measurement framework still isn’t on the table. 

Until that changes, belief in proxies and partial visibility remain the currency everyone’s trading in, whether they’re buying media or underwriting a creator’s enterprise value. 

Or as Volando’s Janmohamed put it: “The [Khaby Lame] deal reflects a transparency issue in the creator economy: reach is often conflated with revenue potential, while questions around conversion, durability of audiences and platform dependence remain under-examined. In many cases, pricing still leans more on narrative than evidence.”

None of that makes the creator economy imaginary. The cultural impact is obvious. What this deal really sharpens is the open question around durability – or how long influence built on platform-controlled distribution can behave like proxies for enterprise value and business outcome before the ground shifts underneath it.