<b>Brand-deal rates have quietly decoupled from follower count</b>

<b>Brand-deal rates have quietly decoupled from follower count</b>

Thesis: the old '1% of followers in dollars' heuristic is now actively wrong, and the data on why is more interesting than the rule it replaced.

Context: influencer-pricing surveys from 2023-2024 (aggregating thousands of self-reported deals across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) consistently show follower count explaining a shrinking share of price variance once you control for engagement and niche.

Findings: on average, mid-tier creators (50k-500k) command higher effective CPMs per delivered view than mega-accounts, because brands increasingly price on predicted conversions, not reach. Category matters enormously — finance and beauty deals clear at multiples of lifestyle.

Caveats: this is self-reported sell-side data, which inflates. It also ignores the deals that never closed, so it's a price ceiling among completed transactions. Engagement rate, the variable doing the work here, is itself gameable and inconsistently defined across studies.

Implications: report your median delivered-view rate to brands, not your follower number.

What we still don't know: there is no public dataset linking quoted rate to actual campaign conversion, so whether brands' conversion-based pricing is accurate — or just a story — remains untested.