We’re Tired of Platforms that Profit from What Creators Don’t Know

Over the past few weeks, a major influencer marketing platform, Fohr, has been sending emails making the same argument in different packaging.

Creators are overcharging, and brands need better tools to hold them accountable.

What’s missing from all of it is any acknowledgment of the 35% pay gap between Black and white creators, or the fact that this industry (driven primarily by women) has a long, documented history of undervaluing women’s labor. What is presented is aggregated data dressed up as transparency and a sales pitch for their platform. This isn’t the first time this platform has had to reckon with equity in creator pay, though. 🫠 In 2020, a group of Black and Brown influencers published an open letter calling them out directly for racial pay disparities, lack of staff diversity transparency, and inadequate responses to racism on their own team. They responded by acknowledging the problem, auditing their offers, and launching a Diversity Advisory Board. Four years later, they’re publishing emails telling brands they’re overpaying creators. Draw your own conclusions. I’m here to name what’s happening and to offer a different vision for what this industry could be.

What They’re Really Saying

When platforms tell brands that creators are “making more than you think,” the subtext isn’t subtle. You’re overpaying. Use our tools to pay them less. When they frame that as transparency, what they’re actually building is a one-sided information flow where brands get access to creator data and creators get nothing in return. The newest emails get more sophisticated. There’s a metric called Views Per Dollar (VPD) built from 10,000 simulations using the last 90 days of a creator’s content. The pitch is that this is more objective than the old way. THIS is “performance-based.” THIS is “more fair” (for the brands). But they never actually explain what the benchmark is. Is it $1 per 100 views? $10 per 1,000? Where does that threshold come from, and whose content history built it? That methodology isn’t disclosed. They’re asking creators to accept a number produced by a black box and calling it transparency. That’s not a new standard. Instead, it’s the same power imbalance with better branding. The algorithm doesn’t correct for structural underpayment. It uses it as a starting point. Introducing a new metric doesn’t change that. It just makes the problem harder to see. What looks like objectivity is historical inequity, automated and scaled. Calling it data science doesn’t change what it is.

The Access Gap No One Talks About

Here’s what brands can demand and/or track from creators:

• Your engagement rate
• Screenshots of your platform AND content analytics
• Demographic breakdowns
• Past campaign performance
• Proof of your audience’s purchasing behavior

Here’s what creators can ask brands for:

• Their budget? (and you’re lucky if you even get that).

Try asking for their campaign KPIs. Ask them what they’ve paid other creators with similar reach & deliverables. Historical performance data from past influencer partnerships. See how fast the conversation ends. What makes this worse is what this model chooses to measure and what it decides not to. Views Per Dollar over the last 90 days. That’s the benchmark. What it leaves out is distribution reach beyond raw views, content quality and production value, experience level, audience trust, niche authority, and the kind of conversion behavior that doesn’t always show up in impression counts. These aren’t irrational line items! They’re the parts of creator value that don’t fit neatly into a simulation. Calling them inefficiencies isn’t objective. It’s a choice about what gets to count. This is what I like to call “information asymmetry”, and it’s structural.

Information asymmetry occurs when one party in an economic transaction possesses greater material knowledge than the other, creating an imbalance of power

Creators are being penalized not just for what they don’t know, but for what they’re not being given access to. You can’t ask what a brand has historically paid someone in your lane with similar reach and deliverables. They have your entire performance history. You have nothing that tells you what this deal is actually worth to them, or what they’ve been willing to pay for it before. They define your value, and you’re expected to just take the number. You can’t negotiate from a position of strength when one side holds all the cards and the other is left to guess. Tools that give brands more data without giving creators any don’t close that gap. They widen it.

The “Overcharging” Myth Contributing to the Creator Pay Gap

When platforms suggest creators are overcharging, they’re ignoring what the data actually shows. In 2021, I co-authored a study on the creator pay gap with MSL. It was covered by NBC, Good Morning America, Adweek, and even referenced in Parliament. We found a 29% overall racial pay gap in influencer marketing, a 35% gap specifically between Black and white creators, and these gaps exist even when you control for follower count, engagement, and content quality. These aren’t market rates. These are the result of opacity, weak bargaining power, and structural discrimination. When creators of color undercharge, it’s often because financial literacy isn’t a staple in our communities (our own study cites this as a contributing factor to the pay gap). When we overcharge, it’s often because we’re trying to combat that gap the only way we know how: asking for more, hoping to land somewhere near what our white counterparts are already getting offered. Neither is fraud. Both are what happens when one side of a negotiation has no infrastructure and the other has a legal team. What these platforms also consistently ignore is that rates aren’t supposed to be fixed. I teach creators to negotiate, not pull a number out of thin air and defend it forever. Rates shift based on the brand’s budget, the agency’s margin structure, campaign scope, timeline, deliverables, usage rights, exclusivity, and the relationship itself. The same creator will quote differently to different brands because every deal is different.

Where We Agree (and Where We Don’t)

I actually agree with part of what this campaign implied. Brands and agencies SHOULD do a better job tracking metrics beyond surface-level vanity numbers. Measuring engagement quality, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value (real ROI down the funnel), etc. is how we prove influencer marketing works and how we build a sustainable industry. I’m not going to argue that. Where we diverge is on who the problem belongs to. Their framing positions creators as the ones overcharging and brands as the ones who need protection. I see creators operating without access to the same data, benchmarks, or business education that brands have, and platforms profiting off that gap instead of closing it. That’s my problem with this entire campaign.

What Real Transparency Actually Looks Like

If you know me fr, then you know that Brittany Bright is a true data girly. I want everyone on the same page. Real transparency means both parties operating from the same data. Right now, brands have a model that tells them what a creator’s content is worth to them. Creators have nothing equivalent. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and a tool that gives brands more pricing intelligence while creators are still guessing doesn’t solve it. It actually just makes it worse for creators. That’s why The Influencer League®️ exists. I’ve worked agency-side. I’ve managed talent. I’ve been a creator booking brand deals. I’ve negotiated from multiple chairs. I know what brands need to justify budgets and prove ROI, and I know what creators need to run sustainable businesses and command fair rates. That dual vantage point is the whole thing.

Why I Built Gage

Four years ago, this platform was auditing their own offers for racial bias after Black and Brown creators demanded accountability. Now they’re running webinars called “The Price of Influence” and telling brands the answer to “are we overpaying creators?” is, and I’m quoting their email directly, “more often than not, yes.” What changed? Their business model. I built Gage™️ (and The Influencer League®️) because creators deserve infrastructure that works for them. Gage doesn’t just estimate what the “market” says you’re worth. She:

1. Enforces pricing floors so you can’t be algorithmically undervalued based on historical underpayment or structural bias.
2. Gives you access to the frameworks brands actually use, so you’re not guessing at their logic while they’re using it against you.
3. Teaches you to articulate your value beyond vanity metrics, because you’re not a content factory. You’re a business owner.

AND she does it from a foundation of documented research, lived experience, and an explicit equity lens, because when platforms build tools that use “market data” without correcting for pay gaps, they aren’t creating transparency. Instead, they’re automating inequality.

What Happens Next

You can keep playing a game where the rules are hidden, the data is asymmetric, and the platforms profit by keeping you in the dark. Or you can get smarter. Not “influencer smarter.” Business smarter. You’re not overcharging. The industry finally caught up to what the work was always worth. You’re not inflating your rates for a lavish lifestyle. You’re running a business with real costs and real risk (payroll, taxes, equipment, healthcare, software, content creation expenses). You’re not asking for handouts. All you’re doing is asking for the same access to information, tools, and respect that every other business gets. You deserve infrastructure that reflects that. The Influencer League exists because business literacy shouldn’t be a luxury. Gage exists because pricing yourself shouldn’t require a PhD in negotiation or a miracle. This industry has spent too long treating creators like metrics instead of business owners, like content factories instead of strategic partners, like people who should be grateful for the opportunity instead of professionals who deserve fair compensation. That ends when WE decide it ends. Influencing just got smarter. And it’s about got damn time. Brittany Bright Founder & CEO, The Influencer League & Gage AI

P.S. Before you can negotiate the room, you have to know how to read it. Read the Room is the foundation. The business literacy piece that makes everything else (including Gage) possible. Get it here. This is where it starts.