Follower count is the worst way to price a sponsorship

Somewhere in every creator forum the same folk formula circulates: about a hundred dollars per ten thousand followers, adjust for vibes. Brands run a dressier version of the same idea, audience size times a CPM they would accept from an ad network.

Both are pricing the wrong thing.

What the count actually counts

A follower count is not an audience. It is a screenshot of everyone who ever tapped follow, including the accounts that went dormant years ago, the bots, and the people who came for one giveaway and muted you the same week. The number only goes up, so it systematically overstates the thing it claims to measure.

Worse, the overstating is uneven. Published engagement benchmarks land in the same place year after year: the rate falls as accounts grow, so the raw count flatters the biggest accounts most. The metric is softest exactly where the money is largest.

What the brand is actually buying

If reach were the product, brands would not need creators at all. Ad networks sell reach by the thousand, targeted, on demand. I'll say it flatly: reach is the thing a brand needs you for least.

What a sponsorship actually bundles looks more like this:

Run the fit line with numbers. Say a dog food brand can book a 400,000-follower lifestyle account or an 80,000-follower account that posts only about dogs. Roughly half of US households live with a dog, so even on a generous read the lifestyle account carries maybe 200,000 dog people, most of whom followed for something else and scroll straight past the sponsored dog content. The dog account carries 80,000 people who followed because of dogs, and they are the ones who read the ingredient list.

Two and a half times the raw market, at five times the price, aimed at attention that is pointed somewhere else. That is not a rounding error. That is the model charging a premium for dilution.

Usage rights are the other quiet giveaway. A post on your channel is one product. That same video running as the brand's paid ad for six months is a different product entirely, and brands increasingly ask for it precisely because creator-made ads perform. If the follower formula is your whole price, you just licensed media for free.

Why the bad proxy keeps winning

Here is the concession, because the follower model did not win by accident.

It is legible. Public, cheap to verify, comparable across a spreadsheet of two hundred creators, which is exactly what a marketing team needs to survive a budget meeting. Every better measure is private, harder to audit, and easier to fake. And reach does correlate loosely with outcomes. The count is not meaningless; it is just the weakest of the measurable things. If you refuse reach-based framing entirely, you will lose deals with media buyers who only think in CPM, and some of those deals were worth having.

So don't refuse the frame. Outgrow it.

Price the job, not the crowd

The practical move is to stop selling one blended number and start itemizing, because the items drag the conversation onto value:

1. A content fee for the work itself: concepting, shooting, editing, revisions.
2. A usage fee if the brand runs your content as ads, priced by scope and duration.
3. An exclusivity fee if a category gets locked, priced by how long and how wide.

The deal that reads "$1,200 for one Reel" becomes "$650 creation, $400 for ninety days of paid usage, $300 for sixty days of category exclusivity." The total went up. The brand can now see what each dollar buys, and can trim scope instead of haggling your worth. This is the way Feona's rate guidance reasons through a deal, but you do not need any tool to do it. You need the itemized list and the nerve to send it.

The follower formula will outlive this essay. Spreadsheets are durable. But the creators who get paid properly are the ones who make the spreadsheet negotiate on their terms.