Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the practice of buying reach through other people's audiences rather than through ad inventory. What separates one program from another is not the payment terms — gifted, paid, affiliate — but the mechanism that produces the reach: a borrowed reputation, one creator's own story, similarity engineered across many pieces of content, or a share of revenue.

For a brand entering a market where it has no recognition, this is usually the only channel that can return a disproportionate result, because the price of attention there is set by relevance rather than by budget. It is also the channel where spending more is least reliably connected to getting more.

What we publish here comes from campaigns we ran and measured: what a seeded view actually costs, how often a piece passes a million views, what share of creators accept a proposal. These are our own numbers, not benchmarks collected from the market.