Nobody Can Price a Creator Post. I Couldn't Even Price My Own.
Nobody Can Price a Creator Post. I Couldn't Even Price My Own.
Digiday ran a story on August 28. The creator economy said the quiet part into a mic. Nobody in it knows what anything costs.
The creator fee market is broken. The people writing the checks keep saying it. Harley Block, CEO and co-founder of IF7, called creator pricing "out of control." James Nord founded Fohr. He went further: "This is not a functioning market." Billion Dollar Boy surveyed 1,000 marketing and procurement leaders. Half of them misprice creator fees. Forty percent come away feeling like they overpaid. Danielle Wiley runs Sway. She told Digiday that anecdotally brands overpay about 90% of the time.
Then everyone proposed the same fix, which is a benchmarking tool.
I finished an audit of my own production spend the day before I read that piece. The numbers said I couldn't price my own work either. Nobody sat across the table negotiating against me.
The diagnosis is right. The remedy is aimed at the wrong target.
Nord nailed it. "Imagine the real estate market where you could never look up what a house on your street sold for." No comps. No clearinghouse. Prices only ever move one way.
Jamie Gutfreund of Creator Vision cut to it with Digiday. The data is siloed on purpose, she said, because that silo hands agencies the leverage. Brands "have no historical benchmarking, which means they can't do anything predictive." The IAB put out creator economy definitions and a taxonomy. Pricing guidance? Exactly zero. Tells you how badly the standards body wants to touch this one.
Vendors filled the hole. Fohr shipped Price Check. Billion Dollar Boy is stuffing a pricing feature into Companion. Nutcake and Archive sell adjacent versions of the same promise.
Block called the market out of control. He also walked through how the meeting actually goes. A brand runs the calculator, brings the number to a creator's manager, and the manager says "that's nice, I'm glad your calculator said that, but he's double."
There's the problem. A calculator built out of other people's deals tells you roughly what the market did. It doesn't tell you what the post is worth to you. It doesn't hand you a number you'd stand up and leave over. Manager doubles you and the tool goes quiet. You're back negotiating on instinct with a printout in your hand.
I audited my own shop and found the same hole
I run an AI marketing agency. In practice that means a fleet of machines producing content overnight while I sleep. Last week I had one of them run a spend audit on image generation across the whole operation. Fourteen days, August 15 through 28. No vendor. No rate card. Just me buying from me.
1,727 fresh 4K images rendered in fourteen days. That's about 123 a night, every night. Run rate sits near $625 a month.
I didn't know that number before the audit. Same reason the creator market can't price itself. Two engines ran in parallel and only one of them was metered. The metered one came in slightly over budget. That's what being metered does for you. The unmetered one had no ceiling, no log, and nobody watching it. The render script printed its cost estimate to the screen and wrote it precisely nowhere. There's no ledger, no CSV, no call log for it anywhere on my drives. To get a dollar figure at all, the audit had to count raw files by modification time and price the remainder by hand.
The worst line item was mine. Every night one of my own jobs renders a full asset set for Instagram, Threads, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X. Then it publishes to exactly one of them on a five-day rotation. The other four decks get rendered, uploaded, archived, and never opened by a living soul. That's 247 images rendered in the window against roughly 49 published. About 198 paid 4K renders every two weeks that exist only as an archive nobody checks. Call it $103 a month. The fix is one flag in the orchestrator.
There's more, and none of it looks good. An 11.6% render failure rate. Forty-nine refunds dropped in one two-hour block on the afternoon of August 17. Nothing was set up to catch it. Fifty-five paid renders went straight into a rejected folder and got auto-discarded. One day hit 359 renders against a median of 111. No explanation. No per-task nightly ceiling to stop it.
I've owned this domain since 1996. More than twenty years at this and I still couldn't tell you what a single image cost me. Not until somebody counted the files.
Then the audit turned out to be wrong too
I ran my own numbers. The benchmark problem is worse than Digiday makes it sound.
I checked the audit against Google's live pricing page while I was writing this. The audit put the cheaper Gemini image tier at $0.080 per 4K image and called it three times cheaper than the default. Google lists that model at $0.151. Not three times cheaper. Closer to a third off.
The audit lifted the figure out of a comment in my own source code, not the vendor's page. Somebody wrote that constant down once. It went stale. Every reader after that treated it as fact. I'd have quoted it in a meeting with a straight face.
The only savings that held up is the boring one. Google wants $0.24 for a 4K image at the standard rate. Same image through the Batch API is $0.12. Flat half off. Every render I make runs overnight on a schedule. Nobody's waiting on it. There was never a case for the interactive rate. I was just paying it.
What to actually do about creator pricing
Almost nobody meters their own side of a creator deal. When the negotiation starts, neither party has a number they trust. Gutfreund is right that the silo is deliberate. She's also describing a lock a lot of brands never bother to test, because they've never counted what a piece of content is worth to them in the first place.
Four things. Not one needs a standards body to sign off.
Log the cost the second you incur it. Reconstruction after the fact is guessing with better manners. My own audit is the proof. It had to price 1,201 images by counting files on a disk, and it says so in its own confidence note.
Count what you published, not what you produced. Those are different numbers and the gap between them is where the money goes. I produced 247. I published 49.
Pull the vendor's rates off their page on a calendar. Not off a hunch. A stale number sitting in your own shop does the same damage as an agency that withholds comps. More embarrassing, too. You did it to yourself. Any AI marketing agency running on vendor APIs is one forgotten constant from that exact mistake.
Price creators on delivered views and tracked conversions. Follower count is how the rate card stays broken. Osman Badat advises creators on their finances. He told Digiday he routinely sees two creators with similar engagement get wildly different offers for identical deliverables, and creators of color tend to land on the underpriced side. A cost-per-delivered-view number makes it a lot harder to pull off in either direction.
An internal benchmark you build yourself will tell you unflattering things about your own operation long before it helps you negotiate. Mine did. Single largest waste line was a task I wrote, running a flag I set, burning money on decks nobody would ever see. That's the price of admission. You don't get the walk-away number without first finding out you've been sloppy.
Nobody's going to hand you comps. Go count your own.
If you're heading into Q4 creator conversations without your own cost-per-delivered-view number, build that first. It takes a week, not a quarter. That measurement work is most of what a food and beverage marketing agency should be doing before it spends a dollar of your budget on anybody's rate card.
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Related reading:
adage, emmy, telly & webby award-winning digital marketing consultant for purpose-driven food & beverage brands.
