Ask a brand what matters most when picking a creator to work with, and “fit” wins every time. The brand wants to find the right voice, the right audience, and the right vibe for the product. But if you look at the actual payment data to see what predicts a creator’s income, the answer is blunter: follower count. That’s the core finding of “The State of Creators,” a new report from CreatorIQ surveying 5,095 creators across 100 countries, and it exposes a gap between what the industry says it values and what it actually rewards.
It’s not a small gap, either. CreatorIQ’s own prior brand-side survey found marketers ranking “fit” as the top factor in creator selection and follower count dead last. But verified platform data across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok tells the opposite story. It’s clear that reach is the metric most tightly correlated with what creators actually get paid. Report author Cherline Bazile has a theory for the gap: it’s not that brands don’t understand nuance; it’s that the people approving budgets don’t want to. Engagement rate requires context a finance executive might push back on. Follower count doesn’t. “Follower counts are most visible, and therefore most defensible to the teams in charge of budgets,” CreatorIQ’s Jennifer Cho explains. The industry isn’t really rejecting the better measurement as much as defaulting to whatever’s easiest to justify in a budget meeting.
That defaulting has real costs, and not just for creators. Cho notes that brands pouring bigger budgets into influencer deals tend to tighten creative control in response, demanding compliance with rigid briefs to protect the spend. And yes, that does undermine the entire reason influencer marketing worked in the first place: a creator’s credibility with their specific audience. Over-managed content from big-name creators routinely underperforms scrappier posts from smaller creators working with more creative freedom, to the point that Cho describes CMOs regularly asking why their expensive “mega-creator” partnership flopped, without connecting it to how tightly they’d controlled it.
There’s also a big misunderstanding about influencers in general. Most creators aren’t living the mega influencer making bank dream at all. 67% of those surveyed earned under $10,000 in creator income over the past year, and for 62%, content creation isn’t even their primary source of income, despite an industry now valued at roughly $250 billion globally. Compensation has grown 59% year over year according to CreatorIQ’s prior research, but that growth concentrates at the top rather than lifting the middle. The share of creators for whom this is a primary income source has barely moved since 2022.
OnlyFans offers the sharpest illustration of exactly that concentration. The platform announced this week that 5,076 creators have crossed $1 million in lifetime earnings since its 2016 launch, out of $30 billion paid out to creators total over the past decade, including $6.3 billion in the fiscal year ending November 2025 alone. That’s an extraordinary sum funneled to a teeny tiny slice of the platform’s 2.5 million active creator accounts. Meanwhile, celebrity arrivals with existing built-in audiences keep landing headline-grabbing numbers fast. Shannon Elizabeth reportedly earned more than $1.2 million in her first week on the platform, pure reach converted instantly into revenue, no gradual audience-building required. That’s the follower-count-predicts-income pattern playing out in its starkest form: name recognition imported wholesale from another platform, monetized on day one.
So what should the brands who want to actually see an ROI from their influencer budgets do? Invest in the middle instead of concentrating everything on the most visible names. Cho’s argument is that helping a creator move from $10,000 to something closer to a livable wage builds a genuinely loyal long-term partner, rather than one more transaction with someone whose next opportunity is always one bigger check away. It’s a compelling pitch, and also one that requires brands to justify spending on creators finance teams have never heard of, which is exactly what made follower count the default in the first place.