For a decade, the secret to pricing a brand deal was simple: text another rep, get their number, know instantly if you were getting played.

That’s how I played it. And it worked.

That was the whole system. A multi-billion-dollar industry priced on group-chat gossip.

And it worked! Because flat fees were comparable. "$8k for a TikTok" meant roughly the same thing whether it was your creator or mine.

But a report out this month says that whole stable little ecosystem is collapsing, and most reps haven't updated their mental price book to match.

So get ready to tag that one rep in your life who's still quoting 2023 rates like they mean something.

Also in this edition:

🤔 The M&A Land Grab Will Be Creative IP, Not Tech (Thoughts Are My Own)

🎩 TikTok Shop is Heavy at the Top

💄 Alex Cooper, The Substack Writer

🐊 Crocs Launches a Vertical Drama

👩🏻‍⚖️ Hate AI? You Should Have Read Googles Terms of Service

💪🏼 Jobs from VaynerX, Google, and Twitch

🎭 …and a dank meme from yours truly!

Let’s get into it.

TLDR:

Here's why this matters more than it sounds.

The whisper network, where the influencer marketing illuminati shared information, worked because everyone was trading the same kind of number. A flat fee is a flat fee.

One data point, fully comparable, easy to gossip about over a margarita at VidCon.

Hybrid base-plus-commission breaks that completely.

Now the "rate" is a reduced base, reportedly 40-60% of the old flat fee, plus commission on attributable sales. So when a brand tells you "we got $5k," you have no idea if that's a win or a catastrophe without also knowing the commission rate, the attribution window, the conversion data, and whether the brand controls the dashboard.

One number became five. And four of them are invisible.

Trust me when I say: a creator who "got $5k plus 10% on sales" with a 7-day attribution window and a brand-controlled dashboard got a worse deal than the one who took a clean $4k flat. But the whisper network will record them as roughly equal. That's the problem.

So what do we actually do about it? Three things, and you can steal all of them:

So net-net, is rate transparency ever actually coming to save us?

Heck no.

A real public benchmark would kill the worst lowball offers overnight, and we all kind of know it'd help creators more than it'd scare them. But it'll never happen, because the information asymmetry is the business model for half the players in this space. And in a hybrid-deal world, any single benchmark number is almost meaningless anyway.

So the backchannel survives. It just got harder to read.

The reps who win the next two years are the ones who stop trading rate numbers and start trading deal structures, because in a 53%-performance world, the structure IS the price.

If you want to know which brands are quietly using "performance-based" as a polite word for "pay cut," my DMs are open.

When a $250 million check shows up in the creator economy, where does the smart money think the value is hiding?

Five years ago the answer was obvious: tools, platforms, tech stacks. Investors threw nine figures at "operating systems for creators." You know how I feel about that era if you’re a regular reader.

This month, CAA gave us the new answer. And it's not tech.

CAA and TPG's Integrated Media Company launched Compound Creative Holdings, a $250 million vehicle focused on acquiring and scaling creator-led businesses. It's a shift from commission to ownership: instead of repping creators for a cut, they want to own the enterprise outright. The biggest talent agency on earth pointed a quarter-billion dollars at creator IP, not the software underneath it.

Here's why that's the right call.

Tech got cheap. Almost free, actually. The dashboard that took StreamElements a $100M+ war chest and 200 employees can now be stood up by a small team with AI help, for a fraction of the cost. (I won't put a fake multiple on it, but anyone shipping product right now knows the curve has collapsed.) And when building tech approaches zero cost, the value of building it approaches zero too. If anyone can build it, nobody can defend it. The moat evaporates. That's the quiet lesson under every creator-tech shutdown: the tool was never the scarce thing.

So what's scarce? The audience. The voice. The IP. You can't AI-generate a 15-year relationship between a creator and the people who trust them. The exec leading this fund facilitated Dude Perfect's $100M+ growth investment and MeidasTouch Network's investment from Soros Fund Management, and those aren't tech deals. They're audience-and-IP deals. The thing being bought is the thing a model can't replicate.

But here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. Creative IP at venture scale is rare. CAA pegs the creator economy above $250 billion today, headed past $1.25 trillion by 2035. Enormous market. But a $250M fund doesn't buy a thousand small businesses. As one writeup put it, there are now dozens of creators whose businesses are big enough to command a slice. Dozens. Not thousands.

That's the uncomfortable math: most creators run lifestyle businesses, and I mean that as a compliment. A great living for a person and their team. But "great living" and "returns a slice of a $250M fund" are different universes, and pretending otherwise is how investors lost their shirts last cycle. So expect a lot of capital chasing a short list of names, bidding wars over the few rosters that clear the bar, and everyone else getting a polite pass.

What this means if you're a rep:

Tech was the story of the last decade of creator-economy investing, and it mostly didn't work. IP is the story of the next one. CAA just told you so with $250 million. The catch is that the winners' circle is small, and it always was.

If you think your creator belongs in it, you know where my DMs are.

What creators, brands, governments, and platforms are making waves this week in the name of fortune, fame, and fun?

🎩 A Marketplace Pulse report says TikTok Shop is more top-heavy than Amazon, with 1% of sellers driving 60% of sales. Translation for reps: the "anyone can win on TikTok Shop" dream is mostly marketing. If your creator isn't already in that top sliver, plan accordingly.

💄 Alex Cooper's media company Unwell signed a podcast called Girls, Disrupted and launched a Substack newsletter called UnSaid. The Call Her Daddy empire keeps expanding into a full media house, and the newsletter move is the part reps should clock: even the biggest audio creators want owned channels they control.

🐊 Crocs and creator-commerce agency SuperOrdinary are launching Déjà Shoe, a seven-episode TikTok microdrama series, making Crocs the first U.S. footwear brand to embed TikTok Shop into a microdrama. Microdramas plus shoppable links is a format worth watching, even if "the first footwear brand to do a shoppable soap opera" is a sentence I can't believe I just typed.

👩🏻‍⚖️ Google filed a motion to dismiss a copyright lawsuit, arguing YouTube's Terms of Service authorized its AI music training all along. "You agreed to this in the ToS you didn't read" is going to be the defining legal argument of the AI era, and creators are about to feel it.

Director, Creator Management, VaynerX

If you want to learn creator management at scale, working under the Vayner umbrella is about as deep an end as it gets. Gary built that whole machine on the bet that attention is the only real asset, and a Director seat managing creators there means you're operating at the volume and velocity most agencies only talk about. Just be ready to move fast, because that's the only speed they have.

Strategic Partner Manager, Talent Agencies and Management, YouTube, Google

This is the seat on the other side of the table from where most of us sit, and that's exactly why it's valuable. Being the person at YouTube who manages the relationship with agencies and management companies means you become the connective tissue between the biggest platform on earth and the people repping its talent. You'd learn how the platform actually thinks about creators, where the monetization levers really are, and you'd build a rolodex that's useful for the rest of your career no matter which side you end up on.

Strategic Partner Manager, Twitch

Yes, I just spent a whole edition writing about Twitch's single-platform risk and the StreamElements wind-down, and yes, I'm still telling you this is a great seat. Hear me out. A role partnering creators with opportunity and growth, working across Global Partnerships, Product, Customer Trust, and Creator Expansion, reporting to the Director of North American Partnerships, puts you at the actual decision layer of the platform that basically invented live streaming culture.