“The days of impressions as a proxy for results are fading,” was IAB CEO David Cohen’s pronouncement at this year’s NewFronts. And he’s right. Streaming and CTV are now performance-driven channels, directly accountable for business outcomes. And the creator economy, which is projected to reach $44 billion this year, has been leading for years as a performance channel, at least for those truly paying attention. Venture capital continues to pour into platforms designed to automate influencer marketing at scale. But these platforms can only optimize for what they can measure quickly: CPM. Without historical performance data, they’re defaulting to an old media-buying assumption—that lower CPMs mean better value—in a media landscape where that logic doesn’t apply.
The data tells a different story.
What 50,000 campaigns actually show
In a review of 50,000 creator sponsorships across YouTube for some of the most performance-driven brands in the country, tracking CPM against creator performance to understand whether lower CPMs predict better results. Do you know what was found?
There’s zero statistical correlation between CPM and performance.
A creator charging a lower CPM is not more likely to drive conversions, engagement, or brand lift than one charging a higher rate. The assumption baked into most media plans, that lower CPMs are better, is not supported by the numbers.
This matters because nearly eight in ten CMOs now say proving ROI has become more important over the past two years, and key video and social media platforms are responding with scale. YouTube launched a Creator Partnerships platform with over 3 million creators. Meta reports 1.5 million discoverable creators and paid out $3 billion to creators in 2025 alone, up 35% year-over-year. As the creator pool expands and AI-powered discovery tools automate matching at scale, the pressure to evaluate quality rapidly intensifies. This has resulted in slick media-buying platforms powered by LLMs that are optimized for the wrong metrics.
This puts marketers in a bind: if CPM isn’t a reliable quality signal, what is?
CPM is not what you think it is
CPM isn’t wrong, it’s misunderstood.
In programmatic, CPM functions primarily as a cost to minimize. The ad unit is standardized, so a lower CPM for the same placement is objectively better. But creators confound this business-as-usual philosophy because they aren’t ad units. They’re individual businesses with unique audiences, content styles, and endorsement philosophies. CPM in the creator economy reflects supply and demand, scarcity of endorsement, vertical norms, and perceived value rather than output quality.
There’s so much more nuance involved in the creator economy that can’t be explained away by the old rules. Is a creator charging a high CPM overpriced relative to performance, or do they command a premium because they rarely do partnerships, meaning their endorsement carries unusual weight because their audience actually listens? Or perhaps their strong performance is driving up prices because the demand for their services exceeds the number of ads they’re willing to do in a month. Is a creator with a low CPM an undiscovered top performer in a vertical with soft pricing, or do they churn through so many sponsorships that their audience has tuned out?
CPM tells you what the market is willing to pay, but it can’t tell you what you’ll get back.
What actually predicts performance
At Outloud, we’ve found three factors that correlate with creator performance far more reliably than price: historical performance data, vertical fit, and content authenticity.
Historical performance data is the single best predictor we have,
and most brands aren’t using it. If a creator has driven strong results for brands in the past, that track record is far more meaningful than whether the creator charged above or below a category benchmark. Too many brands still default to CPM comps and media mix models built for channels where past performance doesn’t vary by individual placement.
Vertical fit matters more than most brands realize.
Our multi-year CPM analysis from 2023 to 2025 shows that Health/Fitness and Business content CPMs have been rising while Beauty, Travel, and Education have softened. A brand chasing cheaper CPMs in a declining vertical isn’t getting a bargain, it’s getting exposure to a category where audience behavior, platform algorithms, and content trends will be working against it.
For premium product brands actively looking for new customer segments, we can successfully identify top performers in verticals that typically have low CPMs. These creators may command a premium relative to their peers in the vertical, but they deliver outsized value and are substantially de-risked because their historical performance is a known quantity.
Content authenticity separates signal from noise.
We’ve seen this play out most clearly with value-driven brands. Many overpay for what we call “Premium Polish”, creators with high-end production, perfect aesthetics, and flawless presentation, only to find that the expected premium results don’t follow. Our data shows a marked preference for “Salt of the Earth” creators: discerning voices who don’t do a ton of partnerships, may not have a studio setup, but who have cultivated loyal audiences that trust them. These creators can charge a premium CPM because their endorsement is rare and high-integrity or it may be lower because many brands still buy into the “Premium Polish” trap. For brands in high-consideration categories, paying more for scarcity of endorsement or high-demand creators is often more efficient than buying cheap, high-volume eyeballs. Remember, you’re not buying a view, you’re buying a transfer of trust.
The path forward
Cohen warned this year that without shared measurement standards, the creator economy’s explosive growth could stall. And he’s right, but standardization doesn’t mean bringing programmatic buying frameworks to a fundamentally different channel; it means taking the time to develop quality signals that actually predict performance.
As $44 billion flows into the creator economy this year and platforms scale discovery to millions of creators, brands need to move beyond CPM as a decision-making shortcut. How?:
- Stop optimizing for cost and start optimizing for value and fit. CPM is a data point, not a strategy. Understand the vertical dynamics, audience behavior, and content trends shaping the categories you’re buying in.
- Prioritize historical performance over pricing benchmarks. If you have access to a creator’s track record with similar products, that’s the most reliable signal you have. Build systems that capture and use that data.
- Recognize that trust doesn’t scale like impressions. In high-consideration categories, a creator’s discerning approach to brand sponsorship and audience relationship matter more than production quality or low CPM. Don’t think of it as buying media, think of it as cultivating credibility.
The brands that learn this now, while the industry is still treating creators like a new form of programmatic, will have a significant advantage. Because creator marketing doesn’t reward optimization, it rewards rigor. You can’t buy influence on the cheap; you have to identify who moves an audience, where they do it, why it works, and then invest accordingly.
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Brad Hoos is CEO of The Outloud Group, a leading influencer marketing agency. He has overseen nearly 50,000 creator sponsorships over 17 years for brands including AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid, Fiverr,and Hungryroot.*
