Stop saying follower counts are dead. Brands still pay for them

The follower count has been pronounced dead more often than any metric in marketing. Agencies publish its obituary every January. Conference panels nod along every June. Then the contracts get signed, and the corpse turns out to be negotiating the rate.

So here's the unpopular argument. Follower counts aren't dead, and pretending they are is making the industry dishonest. The problem isn't that brands look at followers. It's that they say one thing and pay another, and creators are left to guess which rule applies.

What the market actually rewards

The clearest recent evidence comes from CreatorIQ's State of Creators 2026 survey, run with Influencers.club and published in August. It covered 5,055 creators across ten regions, with responses matched to verified data on each creator's followers, engagement, views and posting cadence.

The findings are blunt. Instagram follower count had the strongest relationship with annual income of any single metric the study measured. Views tracked income more closely than engagement did on all three major platforms. Meanwhile, the brands surveyed ranked follower count last of eight criteria they say they use to choose partners.

This wasn't a loose poll of opinions about pay. Because responses were matched to verified account data, the study could compare what creators reported earning against what their accounts actually showed. Influencers.club ran the fieldwork between late May and late June, and the release quotes a margin of error of about 1.4 percentage points. Those are not perfect conditions, but they are better than most of the evidence offered for the "engagement is everything" view.

That gap is the story. Brands tell creators they care about engagement, fit and authenticity. The money, at least in this data, still follows size.

The pattern holds at the top. Among creators earning more than $250,000 a year, 60% named Instagram as their main branded content platform, double the share naming TikTok. Instagram's long-established follower economics still seem to anchor the biggest deals.

Even CreatorIQ's chief customer officer, Jennifer Cho, told Marketing Brew that engagement rate alone may not show whether a creator's audience matches what a brand needs. She's right. Engagement rate is easy to inflate, swings wildly by platform and format, and says little about who is doing the engaging.

The case for followers (yes, really)

A large following isn't meaningless. It's a rough proxy for distribution capacity and for a track record of earning attention over months or years. For an awareness campaign, reach is the product being bought.

Paid amplification makes size even more relevant. Billion Dollar Boy's analysis of TikTok sponsored content, reported by eMarketer, notes that boosted creator posts and branded sponsored posts featuring creators rated highest for ROI among creator marketing activities in CreatorIQ data. Both depend on creative built to travel to a big audience, and a creator who has already done that at scale is a safer bet.

Where the critics are right

The "followers are dead" camp has a real point. It's just overstated. Genevieve Day, founder of Australian talent agency Day Management, argued in Forbes Australia in June that the industry borrowed reach as its main currency from broadcast advertising. In her view, that pushed creators to chase virality rather than audience depth.

She gives examples from her own roster: a creator with around 20,000 followers out-earning accounts with millions from brand deals, and another with under 10,000 followers drawing interest usually reserved for much larger accounts.

eMarketer's projection that micro- and nano-influencers will take 45.5% of influencer spend this year supports her. Smaller creators are getting real budgets.

Her diagnosis also explains the contradiction in the CreatorIQ data. Brands may genuinely want depth and fit. But when a buyer has to choose among thousands of accounts quickly, a big, visible number is the easiest thing to defend to a boss. Followers survive not because anyone loves them, but because they are cheap to check.

So both things are true. Size is still heavily priced in, and smaller, deeper audiences are being paid better than they used to be.

What to do instead of the obituary

Stop arguing about which single number wins. Price by campaign objective, and put it in the brief.

• Awareness deal? Pay for reach and verified views, and say so openly. Followers are a fair input here.
• Conversion deal? Pay on audience fit and outcome data, as Day recommends, with briefs built around the audience behaviour you need rather than a follower minimum.
• Community or trust deal? Price the depth: comment quality, repeat engagement, audience match.

This isn't radical. It's how the rest of media buys. Nobody prices a TV spot and a direct-response email on the same metric, and nobody pretends they should. Creator marketing has simply been slow to admit that it sells several different products under one label.

Then publish the logic. A rate card that explains what it's buying is a rate card creators can negotiate against.

What breaks trust is the gap between rhetoric and contracts. A creator who hears "we care about engagement" and is then offered a rate built on follower count learns that the industry's talk is cheap. Multiply that by thousands of deals and you get a market where nobody believes the brief.

The strongest counterargument

The best objection is that the data is weaker than it looks. CreatorIQ sells influencer marketing software. Its survey is self-reported income from a sample weighted toward the US, the UK and Canada. A rank correlation of 0.40 is moderate, not overwhelming. It describes a tendency, not a law. And correlation doesn't explain causation: maybe creators who are better at making content earn more and also happen to gain more followers.

All fair. But nobody has produced better data at scale showing the opposite, and the brands' own ranking makes the contradiction hard to explain away. Until someone does, the defensible position is the boring one. The follower count is a crude, still-dominant pricing input. The fix is honesty about what each deal is buying. Bury the obituary, not the metric.