# Transcript: The Price of Influence: Why Undefined Value Kills Trust

**Date:** March 13, 2026 · 10:00 PM  
**Session:** [The Price of Influence: Why Undefined Value Kills Trust](/sessions/2026-03-13/pp1162689-the-price-of-influence-why-undefined-value-kills-trust)

## Summary

This session explores the fundamental challenge facing the creator economy: the lack of standardized value and pricing models. Dylan, a creator and agency owner, and Julia, CEO of XrossWorld, discuss how fragmentation across 2 million brands and 40,000+ creators makes it impossible to centralize pricing, leading to creators undervaluing themselves and brands struggling with ROI measurement.

## Topics

`creator economy` · `influencer pricing` · `value attribution` · `brand partnerships` · `ai in marketing` · `engagement metrics` · `funnel strategies` · `equity deals` · `creator infrastructure`

## Key Takeaways

1. The creator economy lacks centralized pricing infrastructure, with over 5,000 boutique agencies using different valuation methods (CPM, flat fees, engagement-based), creating a 'Wild West' where creators with millions of followers sometimes charge just $500.
2. Dylan distinguishes creators (content makers) from influencers (those who make impact): nano creators (1K-10K followers) often have higher engagement and conversion rates than macro influencers because of personal relationships with their audience.
3. For bottom-funnel conversions, brands should allocate 10% of budget to testing multiple creators, measure KPIs beyond sales (content quality, engagement depth, views), then offer long-term performance-based deals to top performers.
4. Strategic creator deals go beyond flat fees: equity partnerships, hiring creators to run brand social accounts (Paramount and Sony models), C-suite positions, and hybrid compensation structures are emerging as alternatives.
5. AI is being used to predict creator value through LLMs analyzing first-party data across 4+ years, but AI influencers fail because audiences value authenticity and relatability over synthetic content—creators who tested AI replacements lost 80% viewership.

## Full Transcript

We're going to jump straight into it, because we all know the creative economy has become a multi-billion dollar industry. But yet, there is no system that defines value. We have brands spending millions of dollars. We have creators making massive businesses. We have agencies executing on amazing campaigns. And yet, the system has no structure. So that brings me to a question for you, Dylan. You're negotiating deals with creators and brands on a day-to-day basis through your agency. You get in the room with these people. How do you define value and pricing?

Let me introduce myself first. Hi guys, my name is Dylan. I've been in the creator space for 10 years. I started off as a content creator myself. I have 6 million followers on social media. I get 20 million views every day on Snapchat, so 200 million monthly views. And then simultaneously, I run a company called Reach. We started it as a national influencer organization. Now it's across 100 universities with 5,000 college students. We grew that out into a marketing agency and talent management group. We represent 250 influencers, and we also have a venture studio. Simultaneously with that, I started a company called Daisy, which allows brands, as opposed to doing paid media spend, to do organic boosting by getting creators to amplify content at one cent to three cents CPV. I've been in the creator space for a long time, and I think my unique value is I see it from a creator lens, a talent manager lens, and also the brand lens, all simultaneously.

To answer your question, Julia, in general we keep saying that the creator space is very much the Wild West, and I do agree with that. I always compare it to traditional entertainment, where you have those guilds and the unionization, and you only have so many major studios, right? So you can have some dominant players in that space. But in the creator space, you have over 2 million brands spending money on influencer marketing, whether it's five bucks, whether it's zero dollars, whether it's millions and millions of dollars. And you also have over 40,000 creators with over a million followers on TikTok. There are so many people, so many talent management companies. There's over 5,000 boutique talent management companies. There's just so many players, and that makes it hard to centralize an ecosystem where you're able to say, this is what tangible value looks like.

I was just in an Inc Magazine article about a month ago. I was one out of three people, and I gave the perspective of how I charge for creators that I represent. Every other person who was in the article gave a different way, whether it be CPM, whether it be flat fee based off of the creator's following, or if it's based off of comments and engagement. There are all these different tidbits of tips and tricks to price out creators. There's no centralized value proposition. Simultaneously, influencer marketing managers at these brands are getting a budget and saying, okay, this is how much I have to play with. It's not a set defined rate where, okay, if you have this engagement rate and this following, here's the calculator that's going to say here's what your price is. That's traditionally what I've seen on my side.

But I also think, for a creator, it fluctuates, right? It's supply and demand. Sometimes I'm like, okay, I want to do a deal, I want some money in my bank account. And other times I'm like, hey, this brand just doesn't align with my values, and I'm going to have to charge more. We have a music artist that we manage who just got asked to do a deal with an AI company, and he turned it down because he didn't want to compromise his artistry for the money, which was arguably a really good amount of money.

The whole industry is pretty fragmented. We have multiple businesses across creators making millions of dollars, and some maybe making zero dollars but really putting a lot of time and effort into working on their own brand. What are your thoughts about how the industry is starting to level itself out, becoming more structured, creating infrastructure? Do you think having infrastructure and creating standardized pricing and value for influencers will disrupt it? Will people not be making millions of dollars anymore? Or will it enable it?

It's like every industry—they need to find their market correction and what each thing is. Simultaneously, to the positive side of big creators being able to make millions and millions of dollars with no strings attached, we also see creators who really don't know their value. I have a bunch of creators that I'm friends with—5 million followers, 10 million followers—that will charge 500 bucks because they don't understand that they could be asking for more money. So simultaneously, I think these systems are also going to benefit the creators who aren't really business savvy. There are a lot of creators who aren't that knowledgeable in the business world of the creator space and don't really think of themselves as a business, more as a creative, and don't want that business entrepreneurial mindset.

For me, starting off as a creator when I was 14, I really did want that business aspect—negotiating brand deals, knowing what my value is, knowing what my worth is. I was representing a creator who's the number one 15-year-old creator, and she was just taking affiliate deals left and right where I was like, you built a brand, arguably helped build a brand that now is one of the largest Gen Alpha brands, and got no equity, no flat fee, only a 20% commission.

Before we get a little bit further on that path, what have you seen creators do in terms of strategic deals that enable not only just the creators, but allow the brands to also get access to the audience of the creators, providing a fair value?

I think you named one of the examples that I love, which is equity and ownership. There are creators that have a lot of value that can provide their audience insights. I think creators really know how to garner an audience better than a brand does. Equity is great, but not every brand can enable equity. Paramount Plus, for example—let's take Paramount Plus equity to a creator. You know what Paramount does do, though? Paramount actually employs creators to run their socials for them. They have a bunch of fan accounts, and they have hired these creators on W9 full-time, basically, to run those accounts, go to movie premieres, do the interviews on the red carpet. I have a friend Parker Panel who's doing that for Paramount. There are like 10 creators doing that. Sony is doing the same exact thing.

There are so many different systems and processes for brands to integrate with creators. That's a really cool thing about what you're building—you're allowing these brands to figure out what the path is in working with creators. There are so many different paths: the flat fee, a hybrid, equity, hiring them to run their socials. There are now creators being C-suites at different companies. We're only going to see more strategic opportunities start to come to fruition. I want to dive in on your side and talk about what you're building as well, because even though there are so many different fragmented opportunities where creators can support brands, you're really building a tool that allows those brands to find mutual value with those creators.

Great question. I think before I even dive into that, it's probably important for the audience to understand a little bit about my background. I've been a serial entrepreneur for two and a bit decades now, and most of my companies have been built around infrastructure, education, and entertainment. As I dove into this whole creator economy, influencer world for a decade and a bit now, at the early stages I could see there was a massive trend where more people were getting involved in social media platforms, utilizing that platform to monetize themselves. I think back in the early days, the biggest and earliest indicators were the fitness influencers, the health influencers, the beauty influencers, and stuff like that.

We started to develop a little bit of infrastructure to start recording what that data looked like. From there, a friend of mine who is an AI engineer was like, let's build some LLMs and see if we can figure out what the price looks like for an influencer based on their first-party data. Very much like some of the other platforms like The Trade Desk and a few of the early ones, even Google and Meta, they all started building infrastructure to understand what the pricing looks like so they can scale it into more of a programmatic way of delivering media.

For the last four and a half years, we've been testing our LLMs across multiple different media buy aspects, from the brand's perspective, the creator's perspective, to determine what an actual fair market value is of an influencer on their first-party data. It's interesting that we launched our AI last year, and since then it's scaled a lot, very quickly. It allows us to look a little bit deeper than just basic deals like affiliate programs or free stuff or flat rate. We're talking more about scalable deals where you can look at an influencer or group of influencers and determine what that value looks like over a long period of time, across their audience, across what the trends are doing, across what the market is doing. It allows ad buyers to predict value that way.

Talking about AI, which is the future—a lot of people ask me, is AI going to take my job? From my lens, AI is going to enable people to make quicker decisions, and that's going to enable them to make faster progress. But from a creator lens and an agency lens, how do you feel AI is going to be for you guys?

Do I think AI influencers are going to take over? I saw the AI influencer who went to Wimbledon. That was a fun one. I think it's bad. There's something to be said about people enjoying AI content right now—it's quirky and cute and funny. But the honest truth is that personability and relatability in terms of content really does win. For me, when I started off as a creator when I was 14, I was live streaming for five hours a day every single day for three years straight. I was getting 10,000 viewers at a time. That made so much of a difference. If I had AI just be my face, that would not hold to fruition.

We see a lot of creators that understand that. We see a lot of creators that utilize AI for expediting their workflow processes. There are great tools that can help you edit faster, or storyboard, or think of captions. I can just use ChatGPT. But the honest substance of consumable content, I think it will always prevail with the creative individual getting the face of the brand. We've seen creators test that. I think a few years ago, there's a gaming creator, Kwebbelkop, that tested completely replacing his entire content with AI, and he lost 80% of his viewership. There is something to be said about true, honest content. AI influencers really don't fit any of those categories, other than just entertainment that you might watch at 3 a.m. because you're bored. But I do think it helps workflow processes.

I want to take it to the audience a little bit here. Just a quick show of hands, if you are part of an agency or work for an agency? What about brands? What about business owners?

What about people that are just here because they wanted to see Julia speak? They're the same thing, basically. That's such a hard take. What do you think the difference between influencers and creators are? And how do you see tangible value being different from an influencer versus a creator?

To me, a creator is someone who's a thought leader in that specific industry, who's creating content around their own niche, their own experience, their own passion. To me, an influencer is someone who's chasing clout and they'll do whatever they want to get that clout.

How do you think that tangibly provides different value?

I believe creators provide more of an educational aspect, an aspiration for the audience that allows the audience to make an educated decision on whatever they want to do and why they're following them. For influencers, I feel like they're more about entertainment, looking for the entertainment, looking for the clout.

I disagree with you completely. The way I define influencers versus creators is that creators are individuals making content tangibly. A filmmaker is a creator. A live streamer is a creator because they're making content for the general public to consume. I believe that a creator is an influencer, but an influencer is not necessarily a creator. I define an influencer as somebody who does not necessarily need to make tangible content to be able to make impact.

We define influencers in different tiers of this industry: nano creators, micro influencers, macro creators, mid-size creators. Traditionally, it's really been based on following, which is why, traditionally, when I'm pricing out creators, for the most part I'm using following tied with some CPM and engagement to prove that they have tangible value. I believe a nano creator, which is usually defined as someone with 1,000 to 10,000 followers, is most of you guys. If you have an Instagram, it's not hard to get 1,000 followers in general. You're probably influencing your small friend group, or maybe some people you went to school with. Your parents might follow you, your kids might follow you. Those are the people you're influencing. Usually that engagement rate is much higher, conversion of sales, because you have a smaller tangible audience that really does know you on a personal level.

Larger than that, as you start to scale up—macro influencers, mega creators, celebrities—your engagement decreases because you have substantially fewer people who know you personally and more people who are watching you passively. But I think there are so many celebrities that aren't technically creators that you might know because maybe they go to a party or maybe they hang out and want to be building something, but they're not necessarily known for building something. I think their value is very different. A creator does not need to be speaking at South by Southwest. An influencer is more someone who's speaking at South by Southwest to impart their wisdom. The creator might be the person actually making the movie, rather than the person talking on stage about why the movie was executive produced.

Interesting thought. I was at Instagram a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the use of social media. We did: everyone raise your hand, who's here engaging in content? Everyone in the room engaged in content. Then it was: who's creating content? It was literally maybe 20% of the room creating content. That was an interesting topic, because what it realized is that even though everyone's engaging on content and looking at content, using social media as an entertainment form, educational form, discovery form, there is a small amount of people creating content.

What we talked about was: are you creating content because you're creating content based on whatever brand is sponsoring you, or are you creating content because you're building your own personal brand? I think that's the value that we have as everyday users with social media—you don't have to have multi-million followers. As content creators, everyday users, business owners, you should look at social media as: how can you utilize social media to develop your own brand if you want that out there as you as a human being, your values, your purpose.

Instagram brought out a little chart, and they were talking about how much of the content is actually being engaged on. The average engagement on content is less than 1% across the board. When brands are like, oh, we need 7% engagement for every content they look at, the reality is that it's the content that drives the value. It will drive the engagement if the audience is there, but if the content is not of value, it will never drive any engagement, no matter how big your funnel.

I have to ask you a question, because I think a lot of brands nowadays are talking about top funnel versus bottom funnel influencers and creators. For a company like you guys that are building LLMs and AI attribution for these creators, the brand tells you, hey, I want bottom funnel versus top funnel. For you guys, top funnel is creators with great engagement but are more focused on brand awareness, more focused on the reach. Bottom funnel is: who can drive sales for your brand? Those are two different playbooks. A creator with 10 million followers, I would never put as a bottom funnel creator, because more than likely they have a great following, but they're going to bring brand validity to that brand, rather than actual tangible sales. Whereas a bottom funnel 20,000 follower creator is probably going to generate you 20, 30, 40 sales. How do you see that on your side?

I'm not going to give you the secret sauce of our LLMs, sorry about that, guys. But I will give you, for the audience and everyone else, a small playbook on top and bottom funnel and how you can look at that. Of course, bottom funnel conversions is the number one thing that everyone's looking for. How do you get conversions? I'm going to tell a little story. I was hiking at the canyons in LA—that's where I'm based right now, in Los Angeles—and I'm hiking with a group of people, and the guy hiking with me sells billboards on a freeway. I'm like, interesting, you sell billboards on the freeway, and how do you measure the results on that?

He's like, well, we buy billboards on specific highways, and then the city gives you the number of cars that drive through there—aka impressions or views—and that's how we sell that to advertisers. I was like, great, but what's the conversion of that? How many people convert? He's like, they use the classic: you've got to see it seven times before it converts, or 1,000 impressions gives you X. I'm like, that's such an integrated system, but yet he still sells those billboards for hundreds of thousands of dollars and makes excellent money. It's almost like real estate—that's their business model.

What I'm saying is, from the top and bottom funnel of influencers and creators, and it's something that you guys can utilize manually, without using AI tools—which you should be using AI tools—is this: if the goal is bottom funnel for conversions, you look at the long game. What that means is, one, you have to test. You need to understand how to create a budget. Set aside 10% of your overall budget to test. Test on as many people as you can—test on the lower level, smaller following creators, or some form of budget, whatever it may be, maybe a couple of mid-tiers. Then the other 30% of your budget, from the ones that you've tested, you saw that drove some form of results that you liked.

The results that you liked could be three or four or five different things. Maybe that person created amazing content and we can repurpose that content for something else. I like that. Keep that on the side. This person here did amazing views more than the other people. I like that. So these are the measurements that you use when you're testing. This person here did amazing engagement—not just likes or emoji comments, but there was actual true engagement, shares, real comments.

Once you've tested that and you've created some form of KPI, then you try and find other creators that look exactly like those. It's hard to determine what that looks like without data, but you can do a basic analysis on their profile. Then, once you have a pool of creators that look exactly like what you thought performed well, test with them. And the ones that did well, offer them a long-term opportunity. Create it in a way that it's a performance opportunity. Allow them to go in there and say, great, if you deliver well this month, you will continue for the next month. That way now you've hired yourself a full-time marketer who's willing to go out there and succeed for you. If they succeed, they continue working.

The reason I say this, and this is more for mid-size to nano tier creators—they're looking for paid opportunities. They need paid opportunities. They want to build a business around here. There are multi-million dollar businesses being built by creators. Eventually, though, like that example I gave you on the freeway with those billboards, eventually that billboard is not going to drive any more sales. Unfortunately, not every creator is long-term, like I'm going to hire them for six months. You have to switch them out. That's just an unfortunate situation, because we're so addicted to what's new.

That's what happens with creators as well. Some creators—and there are some creators in here—you're posting, you're generating a lot of sales, and all of a sudden your sales dip, engagement dips, because your content now is no longer resonating with your audience. Brands do have to switch out quicker too. That was long-winded, but without getting too much into it, eventually you get access to data, and if you start applying AI and all that type of stuff, AI can predict what are the best outcomes.

How does the brand know who the best creator to start off with is? Are they able to—if I'm a CPG brand, for example, what creator should I start off with? How do I start even? Because you're talking about working with creators. How do you even know which creators are the best creators to start working with, or to put in a trial with?

I mean, they should be your ICP. You guys know your ICP—your ideal customer profile. So that creator should be your ICP. If they are your ICP, that's your first test. Doesn't mean they're going to sell. Doesn't mean they're going to generate traffic or revenue or anything else like that. But like I said on the first thing, they're going to generate at least a piece of content that can be reusable for anything else that you might want to apply—paid social media, maybe a website, maybe even just organically.

I'm seeing a lot of brands I work with—Fortune 100 companies who are very B2B type of companies—their social media pages are very B2B. There's no sort of industry experts in there. I've seen a lot of brands flipping that and now putting content in there from people that are not part of the organization to create that human connection.

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*Source: stt · Language: en · Model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5*

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