The Economics of Invisible Labour

The problem is not the price, but the unit of measurement

A fee of several hundred thousand roubles for a post can feel disproportionate to the work we can see: a few photographs, a short video, some copy and several hours of production. Measured this way, it is difficult to explain why one placement costs 50,000 roubles, another 500,000 and a third several million.

The price of a creator is still compared with the cost of producing the content, although content is only the tangible vehicle for a different asset. What a brand primarily pays for is someone else’s accumulated capital of attention and trust.

This is why the economics of influencer marketing cannot be explained through labour hours. Its price is formed much like the value of a media property, a brand or intellectual property: most of the value was created long before the specific transaction and does not appear in its production cost.

A post may indeed take two hours to make. Those two hours have almost nothing to do with what it is worth.

The creator as an intangible asset

Content is no longer scarce in the attention economy. More of it is produced than any person could physically consume. Attention is scarce. Voluntary, recurring attention attached to a specific source is rarer still.

A successful creator accumulates precisely this resource over years. Follower count is therefore one of the crudest proxies for its value. Two accounts with 300,000 followers may have fundamentally different commercial worth. One owns a number of contacts. The other has a durable social relationship with a particular community.

Advertising can buy an impression. At its best, a creator can allow a brand into an existing relationship.

This explains why the market continues to grow even after brands gained sophisticated targeting tools of their own. If a creator’s only function were to deliver an advertising message to a set number of people, algorithmic advertising would already have made much of the market economically redundant.

It has not. AKAR and the Russian Internet Research Centre estimated Russia’s creator market at RUB 57–60 billion in 2024. Five hundred of the largest advertisers generated 80% of investment, while tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses accounted for the remaining 20%.

The US market is larger still. IAB projected creator ad spend of $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year on year. The market grew from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024, with $44 billion forecast for 2026. Almost half of ad buyers — 48% — now classify creators as a must buy.

The market is clearly purchasing something that cannot be obtained through an advertising dashboard alone.

Trust as an economic asset

Marketing long treated trust as an almost humanistic category: important to a brand, yet difficult to translate into economics. The creator economy is gradually dismantling that distinction.

A creator converts trust into an asset capable of producing measurable economic outcomes. At the same time, they spend some of it whenever they introduce a commercial message into the relationship with their audience.

In Sprout Social’s 2024 study of more than 2,000 consumers, 49% said influencer content prompted them to buy at least once a month, while 30% said they trusted influencers more than they had six months earlier.

An advertising platform sells inventory. A creator sells access to an audience together with part of their own reputation.

Creator inventory is therefore naturally limited. An author cannot increase integrations indefinitely as demand rises: at some point, the advertising load begins to destroy the asset that made the placement valuable.

This produces a classic scarcity economy. The greater the audience’s trust and the stricter the creator’s commercial selection, the less inventory can safely enter the market — and the more expensive each unit of that inventory can become.

Why “expensive” is not an adequate category

None of this means that every price quoted by a creator is economically justified. The market remains opaque: inflated audiences, low real engagement, unrealistic expectations and fees tied mechanically to follower count all exist.

The professional response to opacity, however, is not a moral judgement about price. It is better measurement.

A mature buyer needs to understand not only audience size, but actual reach, audience profile and geography, the frequency of commercial integrations, reactions to previous recommendations, overlap with the brand’s target audience, the cost of a relevant contact and, where the task allows it, subsequent conversion.

Reducing influence exclusively to performance metrics is also a mistake. IAB lists proving ROI, finding the right creators and the absence of common measurement standards among the major challenges of the growing creator market. As more money enters the channel, the gap between the complexity of the effect and the simplicity of the metrics used to describe it becomes more visible.

Audience size and the value of influence are not the same

Another persistent habit is using follower count as a universal equivalent of influence. Yet the commercial value of an audience depends not only on scale, but on the density of the relationship, its context and its fit with the brand’s objective.

This does not mean a micro-influencer is always more effective than a creator with millions of followers. A mass brand may need scale. But for a niche task, one hundred thousand random contacts can be less valuable than ten thousand people connected by profession, aesthetics, income, lifestyle or a lasting interest.

CreatorIQ’s 2024–2025 research provides another relevant perspective: 94% of surveyed organisations believed creator content delivered higher ROI than traditional digital advertising. Across 39 leading Fortune 100 brands, creator posts generated 12 times more impressions and 17 times more engagements than the brands’ owned content.

These figures require normal research caution: CreatorIQ is itself a participant in the market. They nonetheless illustrate the direction in which marketing attention and budgets are moving.

A creator is a small media company

Perhaps the most useful way to value a creator is to stop seeing a person being paid for a post and start seeing an independent micro-media property.

It has an audience, an editorial policy, a tone of voice, a reputation, a distribution system, production capabilities, analytics, advertising inventory and limited inventory capacity.

When a brand buys a page in a magazine, nobody derives its fair value from the hours a designer spent laying it out. The advertiser is clearly buying access to the media asset, not the designer’s labour.

With creators, the market still makes precisely this mistake: it attempts to value the asset through the production cost of its visible output.

The economics of relationships

One more component of value is almost impossible to place accurately in a spreadsheet: the quality of the relationship between the brand and the creator.

A creator used exclusively as advertising surface will most likely provide exactly that: execute the brief and publish the approved material.

A creator brought into the task earlier, given context and allowed to adapt the message to their audience can offer more — not only distribution, but interpretation.

This is one of the most undervalued creator functions. Creators are closer to their audiences than most brand teams and carry accumulated knowledge of which messages feel natural within a community and which arrive as an external advertising intrusion.

Economics instead of morality

Influencer marketing does not need protection from criticism. Inefficient placements, inflated prices, poor analytics and overrated creators genuinely exist.

But a market matures when the cost of professional work stops being discussed in moral categories.

Not ‘greedy’, but what creates the price premium. Not ‘too expensive’, but relative to which outcome. Not ‘only 10,000 followers’, but who those people are and how relevant they are to the brand’s task.

Russia’s market is already measured in tens of billions of roubles and America’s in tens of billions of dollars. Brands are moving creators from an experimental budget line into a media channel of their own. At the same time, the measurement problem is becoming more acute, not less.

The important question is no longer whether blogging is ‘real work’. For a business, that question is irrelevant.

The relevant question is how much economic value a particular creator produces for a particular brand — and how much the brand is prepared to pay for it.

Perhaps the clearest sign of maturity will not be brands paying creators more. It will be the moment when ‘why is it so expensive?’ ceases to be an emotional question because both sides can answer it economically.