Brands pick creators on past performance, then pay them a flat fee

The money is real and it is moving fast

US creator-economy ad spend more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, from $13.9B to $29.5B. IAB projects $37.1B for 2025 and $43.9B for 2026, a rate roughly four times the growth of the media industry overall, which it puts at 5.7%.

The thing being bought is attention someone chose to give

Nielsen’s 2021 US trust study puts recommendations from people you know at 89%, the most trusted channel it measures, and finds those recommendations roughly twice as likely to generate action as the average channel. That is the asset a creator campaign is renting: not a slot, but a relationship somebody built and an audience that opted into it.

It is also why the unit is awkward. A slot has a fixed price because a slot is fixed. A post is not: the same creator, the same brief and the same fee can return a hundred thousand views or four thousand, and both are ordinary outcomes.

Chosen on results, paid regardless

Asked what makes them choose one creator over another, brands ranked reputation first and past performance third. Asked how they pay, three in four said a flat fee. Performance-based pricing was used by 49% and retainers by 48%. IAB’s own reading is that the market “appears to favor cost certainty over nuanced, results-driven pricing”.

Why the gap exists

IAB names the reason without softening it. Finding the right creator is the top challenge brands report, and the report attributes that to a market where “identity, audience quality, and performance data are not standardized across platforms”, inside “a highly fragmented ecosystem with multiple partnership models, dispersed budgets, and limited standardization”. Its fifth headline finding is that measurement, standards and operational tools are the single biggest opportunity for improvement.

Read those together and the flat fee stops looking like laziness. If you cannot get a number you trust, in a form that compares across platforms, then a fixed price is the only honest thing left to agree on. The report says as much: flat fees are “particularly practical for smaller brands and creators which likely lack sophisticated ROI tracking”.

What one place instead of six would actually fix

The fragmentation IAB describes is not only annoying, it is the reason the pricing is blunt. Discovery, briefing, contracting, payment and measurement sit in different tools owned by different companies, so the count that would justify a performance price is produced in one place, argued about in another, and paid from a third. A single surface is not a convenience feature in that picture; it is the only arrangement where the number that decides the price and the number that triggers the payment are the same number.

That is the argument, not a result. Whether it holds is something this company will have to demonstrate with campaigns it has not yet run.

Check it

Both sources are public. Nothing on this page is our measurement, so there is no script to run; there are two documents to open.

• IAB / Advertiser Perceptions, Creator Economy 2025: Ad Spend & Strategies

  November 2025

  15-minute anonymous online survey of 453 US ad-spend decision-makers, fielded 28 July to 12 August 2025. Respondents plan $1M+ total ad spend and $100K+ creator spend in 2025.

• Nielsen, Trust in Advertising (US)

  2021

  Nielsen global study of consumer attitudes to advertising, US sell sheet.

Both surveys are US-based. Vouched operates in the Philippines, where no equivalent measurement exists that we could find, and we are not going to imply that a US spend figure is a Philippine one. The structural finding, that selection criteria and payment structure have come apart, is what travels; the peso amounts do not.