Creator Pricing Has "Spiraled Out of Control": Marketing Admits the Problem, Can't Find the Fix

As ad budgets and campaign scale keep growing, brands are increasingly feeling that pricing for creators — content makers with a social media following — has spiraled out of control. According to a survey by agency Billion Dollar Boy covering 1,000 marketing and procurement leaders, half of brands miscalculate what they pay creators, and 40% believe they're overpaying. Danielle Wiley, CEO of influencer-marketing agency Sway, says that in her experience, brands overpay relative to actual value 90% of the time.

The root of the problem is a lack of price transparency, says James Nord, founder of predictive creator-marketing platform Fohr. "Imagine a real estate market where you can never find out what the house down the street sold for," he says, describing the situation. Harley Bloch, CEO and co-founder of brand strategy firm IF7, is more blunt, calling it simply "a broken market": prices never come down, there's no central clearinghouse, there's no transparency — and all of that produces information asymmetry.

According to Jamie Gutfreund, founder of consulting firm Creator Vision, the fragmentation of data isn't accidental — it's deliberate, and it gives agencies more leverage. "Brands have no historical benchmark, which means they can't forecast anything in advance," she says. While the industry body IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) has already developed terminology and classifications for the creator economy, no official pricing guidance exists yet.

To fill that gap, a number of tech companies — Fohr, Billion Dollar Boy, and AI-driven Nutcake — now offer tools aimed at increasing pricing transparency. Fohr's recently launched Price Check tool, for instance, lets a brand or creator enter a creator's name, a proposed rate, and the scope of work to check whether an offer is fair. But Paul Benigeri, CEO of AI-driven creator-marketing company Archive, notes that such tools often miss important factors — like fourth-quarter price surges or current demand for a specific creator who happens to be trending right now.

There's another side to the problem: Osman Badat, a financial advisor to creators and a successful creator himself, has observed that two creators with the same level of engagement often get paid wildly different amounts for the same work — and this shows up especially often as underpayment, not overpayment, among creators of color. In his view, pricing tools could benefit this group the most.

The consensus among experts: tech tools can make negotiations better informed, but they will never become the primary factor that sets the price — because, as IF7's Bloch puts it, "the people building these tools don't set the prices." The creator-marketing market, for now, keeps operating without clear rules — but with ever-higher budgets.