The Data Tightrope

Behind the Metrics Curtain: What Brands See (and You Don’t)

Author

Jim Louderback
June 09, 2025

This Week: A special version, as I am in France for VivaTech – and I know we’ll have a lot coming out of that this week, and then VidCon and Cannes next week.  Flipping the funnel with research and Quibis on top followed by a deeper dive into CreatorIQ’s recent release of metrics designed to help brands benchmark and measure creator partnerships, along with my scary conclusion (echoed by the latest research from Mary Meeker) that creators need more leverage over metrics defining their future.  And please drop me a line and let me know if you liked this format!  

Hi, I’m Jim Louderback and this is my weekly creator economy newsletter. If you’ve received it, then you are either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.


If the latter – and you want to subscribe, get it here!

💡 RESEARCH

Grab a Drink and Get Comfy:  Web guru @Mary Meeker is back with an epic 340-page analysis of AI trends.  Key findings for creators:   

  • We’ve entered a hyper-adoption phase where AI tools are getting cheaper, faster, and more global by the day. 

  • Voice cloning and real-time translation are breaking language barriers. 

  • Big brands and CMOs are going all-in on AI-powered marketing (see Meta story on this below). 

  • Attribution models like EMV are gaining traction (and getting scarier) as creators are judged by metrics we can’t see or influence.  More on this in the CreatorIQ deep dive below. 

  • Open-source AI and China’s rise are heating up the competition. 

What’s next?  Hybrid creator-machine workflows, multilingual distribution, and AI-augmentation of everything will quickly become table-stakes for creator success.  Don’t sleep on what’s happening.

Trend-A-Palooza:  Regular readers know I love Pinterest Trends, and it’s packed with great insights. Hot Vax Summer has been replaced by Digital Detox, the rustic farmhouse is back, nature bathing keeps trending and the boho aesthetic has been revived. Apparently I’ll be leaning into Capricorn makeup this summer too.

High Schools Discover Creators:  New study finds most high schools encourage students to consider a career as a creator, while more than a third feel pressure to become one.  Strong findings – but with just 300 surveyed, it’s not very predictive.

Mapping the YouTube Landscape:  Media Cartographer @Evan Shapiro just dropped a new map of global non-Shorts video content on YouTube.  It’s a top-heavy place, as the top 10% of channels deliver 94% of views.  His global look at the top 50 (from a 30-day window that started in late April) is full of surprises.  MrBeast lands at #18.  That’s behind Misti Happy but thankfully ahead of FuFu Squishy.  It’s a wild reminder that YouTube is big, weird, and way more global than most people suspect.

💡 PLATFORMS

YOUTUBE

META

  • Gotta Wear Shades:  Fully AI automated ad campaigns?  You’ll see ‘em next year on Meta.

  • We Know GenZ:  Meta surveyed 1,500 GenZ across 5 countries and found that memes are better than text pings, and short form is changing product discovery.  Small sample, and a lack of a methodology statement make the report directional at best.

TIKTOK

LINKEDIN

💡 QUIBIS

OTHER CREATOR ECONOMY

  • Same Wine, New bottle: “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel”, has been updated.  Elon’s version?  Replace ink with bits.   Now we’ll find out who’s got a better bully pulpit. 

  • Crazy AI Videos Released Last Week:  @Brad Berens starts his newsletter with a few crazy AI generated videos you need to see.

  • Need More Subs? Great post on 10 ways to grow your newsletter.  I’m trying the Product Hunt thing!

  • Unlocking Their Potential:  Congrats to @Allison Yazdian, new CEO of Uscreen, and former head of creator growth and success at LTK. 

  • Ms Creator Goes to Washington: A new US government creator effort underway called the “Congressional Creator Caucus”.  Apply here.

  • Chart Toppers: Great case study on how Twitch creates culture – in this case helping an album top the charts for Plaqueboymax.  Congrats to @ana sena and the whole team.

  • Inside the Information Summit:  I was sorry to miss this one last week, but France beckoned (I do have my priorities).  @lia Haberman has a great round-up of what happened in her latest newsletter!

MARKETING AND BRANDS

CREATOR TECH – AI, AR, VR, MORE

😎 SPONSOR - POSSIBLY YOU

Inside the Creator Economy is open for business!  Interested in sponsoring this newsletter?  Drop me an email and check out our sponsorship information here.

WHAT’S A VIEW WORTH – PART 2

A few weeks ago I talked about the devaluation of the view and how everyone’s got their own metrics.  I was inspired by CreatorIQ’s release of four metrics designed to measure share of voice, exposure, engagement and influence (available only to paid clients), along with a calculator that everyone can use.  I was cautiously optimistic, but skeptical too.

Here’s part of what I said:

It’s a blizzard of TLAs, each promising to help brands identify the right creators, optimize campaigns, and track ROI. There’s probably a lot of profound mathematics here, but without clarity on variables, weights and regression models these metrics remain an unproven black box.   They might genuinely benefit brands and creators with real community power, or they might just add more noise to an already chaotic ecosystem.

I sent a bunch of questions to the CreatorIQ team, and they were kind enough to respond.

Q: What platforms are you supporting at launch?  

A: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and X. These platforms represent the vast majority of creator-driven content and brand investment today.

Q: Are you comparing across or just within platform?

A: The suite supports both cross-platform and platform-specific analysis. Brands can view aggregate performance or drill down by platform to evaluate performance within specific ecosystems. 

Q: Are you sharing your equations for how you derive your 4 metrics? 

  • Share of Voice (SOV): brand presence based on % of total creator content volume

  • Share of Exposure (SOX): visibility based on % of estimated impressions

  • Share of Engagement (SOE): resonance based on % of audience interactions

  • Share of Influence (SOI): brand impact based on % of total Earned Media Value (EMV)

Each metric is based on a straightforward formula—like dividing brand impressions by total category impressions—to enable apples-to-apples comparison. The equation to calculate Share Of is simple: each metric (post count, impressions, EMV, engagements) divided by the total cohort, whether that’s smaller or larger competitive sets.

How do you prove that your metrics are measuring what they say they are?

We conduct ongoing validation of our metrics, equations, and measurement standards through a combination of internal quality assurance processes and external calibration with customers and partners (these include):

For creator content volume and engagements, the metrics are calculated directly from the social posts via the social media platforms’ APIs. 

CreatorIQ has standardized methodologies for estimating impressions and calculating Earned Media Value (EMV). EMV is a metric CreatorIQ developed to measure the performance of digital earned media. Our approach assigns EMV to each social media post created about a brand based on the engagement that the post has received. This value can then be used as a point of comparison between posts, or it can be summed to measure the performance driven by influencers and campaigns for any brand. 

Q: Since it is built for “benchmarking and descriptive analysis”, how current is the data?  Meaning how long after a particular campaign has run will it show up in the data?

The calculator will be updated quarterly to pull data from the previous quarter. In July it will be updated with April-June 2025 data. Note that the calculator is powered by brand data—meaning, campaign results will show up aggregated with other campaign and organic posts. It isn’t intended to give metrics for specific campaigns, rather, it provides baselines for holistic creator programs. 

Q: Do you have 2 million creators in the social accounts?  How current is the data?  How geographically dispersed?  How are they diversified across platforms?  How “random” are they – ie how do you know they represent a statistically valid sample for each metric, for each platform, for each country and for each of your 4 “levels” of creator?

Our benchmarking dataset for includes over 2 million accounts, representing more than 1.1 million active creators. We run biannual updates to our panel based on recency and relevance. The panel spans more than 50 global markets and includes creators across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, and Pinterest. Instagram remains the most represented due to its historical prominence, but TikTok and YouTube are rapidly gaining share.

This is not a random sample—we curate for relevance, focusing on creators who consistently drive reach and engagement. This ensures the benchmarks reflect the creators who move the market, rather than just appearing in it.

We set standards to ensure our creator panel is representative for our customer dashboards. Within our Industry Benchmarks Calculator, we conducted research and QA to set thresholds for determining relevance related to country censuses and active users on each social platform. This gives brands confidence that our data is representative and actionable.

Q: Are these “creators” also companies?  IE do you have NBC in the same dataset as Under the Desk News?

Yes, our dataset includes both individual creators and non-individual entities such as publishers, retailers, and brands, with more than 90% of the panel made up of creators. These creators are individuals who build influence through original, social-first content. We intentionally include traditional outlets and organizations—like Vogue, NBC, or Sephora—so that brands can compare performance across a full range of voices in the social ecosystem. For example, customers can see whether a traditional media outlet is outperforming individual creators in a campaign, or whether certain brands are acting as influential content engines themselves. We’re currently expanding classification filters to make it easier for customers to analyze by creator type.

Q: What are those 4 creator tiers?  Are they the “same” for each platform?  Are they determined by subs, views, something else?

A: Our creator tiers are standardized across social platforms to ensure consistency in benchmarking, while also being calibrated to reflect the norms of each platform. The tiers are based primarily on follower count, which remains the most consistent baseline across social channels. The tiers across all platforms are:

Micro: 0 – 100K Followers

Mid-Tier: 100k – 300K Followers

Established: 300K – 1M Followers

Powerhouse: 1M+ Followers

Q: Do you have a predictability confidence score? 

A: The Share Of suite is built for benchmarking and descriptive analysis, so it’s not predictive in nature. 

Q: How will brands use this?  

There are three primary use cases, competitive intelligence, performance benchmarking and strategic decision making.

Customers can understand how their brand stacks up against peers. This allows CMOs and strategy teams to allocate budget and prioritize markets or platforms more effectively.

They can also set realistic KPIs for individual campaigns or long-term programs by referencing industry standards. The calculator and dashboard provide an anchor point for what “good” looks like by industry, region, and creator tier.

Brands can use these metrics to assess which creators drove the most relative value. Over time, this also supports annual planning, creator tier-mix optimization, and even attribution modeling.

Q: Will you open source your formulas and data so others can use the same thing or is this all proprietary to you?  


We believe in open standards and transparent methodology, which is why the definitions and logic behind our metrics will be publicly available. 

CreatorIQ’s data is proprietary to us and will not be made open-source. That includes details about our models, data processing, and underlying technology. This allows us to maintain quality, speed, and scale across a wide variety of use cases. 

We’re committed to working with the industry to advance standardized measurement, and we welcome collaboration where it helps drive clarity and consistency in creator marketing for the industry at large.

MY TAKE 

I welcome these answers. It’s important to know what’s going on behind the scenes as there’s way too much funny data in the creator economy. I’m still skeptical that EMV measures what it claims to, and it’s a core pillar of this whole initiative. That’s why I was glad to see them commit to publishing “the definitions and logic behind our metrics.”

It’s also dangerous for creators.  They risk being judged on metrics they can’t see or influence directly, especially if EMV becomes a primary currency and they’re left out of the loop.

At the end of the day, brands advertise to make money, usually by selling something. These new metrics may bring us closer to understanding that, but “closer” still doesn’t mean direct attribution.

Benchmarks like this can help move more money into the creator economy and away from less effective media.  Helpful, that is, until they’re used to justify budget cuts or amplify only the “safe” creators.

I’d also like to see support for LinkedIn, but that would require LIttle Blue to open up its data to third parties.

The cynic in me says it’ll be a long time before the veil lifts on EMV or LinkedIn shares its data.   And unless creators are selling stuff along with talking about it, attribution will remain inscrutable.

Finally, this won’t be the last “industry standard” we’re promised. Until platforms align and creators are part of the equation, we’ll keep skating on thin data and risk plunging through the crust.

ASIDE: As I mentioned back in my 5-12 issue, the IAB is wading in as well, hoping to provide clarity to this proprietary and confusing world.  I’m on the task force and will report back when I can.  Nothing to report back yet, but soon!


📍 Where’s Jim? In France for VivaTech and VidCon next week! Details on our party at VidCon later this week!

100% written by me – no human or AI ghostwriters were involved in the production (except for the cover art!).

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