Influencer Marketing Is Dead, Creator Volume Is What's Scaling DTC Now

Influencer marketing, the way most brands still do it, is basically dead. What's replacing it isn't a better influencer. It's volume.

I'll back that up, because it's a big claim and it'll cost you money if I'm wrong. But I've watched the spend that used to go to one big name quietly get more out of forty small ones, and once you see the maths, it's hard to unsee.

Let me be precise about what I mean by dead. The old model was: find someone with a million followers, pay them ~A$20k for a piece of content, and trust that their audience would see it and act. That trade is the bit that's broken. Not creators. The deal structure.

Reach stopped being something you could buy

Here's what actually changed, and it's structural, not a fad.

Ten years ago, following someone was a real choice. You picked a few hundred accounts and that's what filled your feed, so a creator's follower count was a fair proxy for guaranteed reach. Pay the person, reach their people. Simple.

That world is gone. The feeds run on the algorithm now, not your follow list. On TikTok, followers are close to meaningless. On Instagram they still matter a little, but far less than they did. A brand-new account with zero followers can put up a clip that the algorithm decides to push to two million people, while a creator with a million followers posts and reaches forty thousand of them.

So when you pay ~A$20k for one post off the back of follower count, you're paying for reach that the platform no longer guarantees you'll get. You might get a hit. You might get a dud seen by a fraction of their audience. You're buying a lottery ticket at a fixed, very high price.

And here's the quieter shift underneath it. As a consumer, you don't really have "your" handful of trusted people anymore. I get recipes from hundreds of accounts I've never heard of, health advice from people I'll never follow. If a clip passes my gut-instinct sniff test in the first two seconds, I'll watch it and maybe act on it, and I genuinely could not tell you who made it. Influence got spread thin and ambient. The idea that you partner with fifty influential people and that's your reach engine now feels structurally fragile.

The new maths: buy volume, not audiences

Once reach is a lottery, the smart move is obvious. Buy more tickets.

Run the numbers and it gets stark. That single ~A$20k post is one shot. For the same money, you could put a handful of creators on a content retainer. Say you pay a creator ~A$3.5k a month to post a few times a day. That's roughly 60 pieces of content in a month, which works out to something like ~A$50 a video. Even on a brutal hit rate, if two or three of those 60 take off, you've reached more people, more cheaply, with more shots at finding the thing that actually works. And you own a library of content at the end of it instead of one post you rented.

This is the whole game now, and it has a name worth using internally: seeding. Almost everything downstream is just a seeding funnel. You send product to a lot of people, some of them post, and some of those posts drive revenue. The metrics that matter are dead simple and worth tracking like a sales pipeline:

• Packages sent. How many creators did you actually get product into the hands of this month.
• Post rate. What share of them posted. Brief them well and this climbs.
• Revenue (or content) per post. What each post earned you, whether in attributable sales or in an asset you can reuse.

I've seen brands push tagged-content impressions from the low hundreds of millions to well over a billion in a couple of years doing nothing more exotic than seeding with far more people and getting steadily better at briefing them. It compounds, too. Someone you seeded eighteen months ago is often still posting about you for free.

There's a budget reframe hiding in here. Stop thinking of this as the "influencer line" and start thinking of it as volume. A reasonable starting point I've seen is somewhere around 1% of top-line revenue, then scale it the moment the impressions and the content quality justify more. It's far easier to scale a small creator budget up than to defend a giant one-off deal that may or may not have landed.

Treat creator content as ad inventory first

Here's the shift that actually changed how I think about this, and where the real money is.

The mistake is treating creator content as a marketing campaign. The better frame is treating it as paid-social inventory. You're not running a flashy partnership. You're generating a high volume of raw assets, finding the ones that perform, and feeding the best of them straight into your ad account.

The flywheel looks like this. Creators and seeded customers produce a flood of content. You watch what gets impressions and engagement organically, because that's a useful early signal of what resonates. You take the strongest pieces, put light touches on them, maybe a sharper hook, a bit more pacing, a clearer call to action, and you launch them as ads. The organic feed becomes a free, constantly-running creative testing ground, and your paid account gets fed by it.

Be honest about the hit rate. Maybe under 10% of organic posts will ever make a clean ad. But the content is so cheap to produce that it barely matters. At ~A$50 a video, you can afford a low hit rate, because the few that work pay for all the ones that didn't, and you got the reach on the rest for nothing.

The single biggest lever inside all of this is the brief. The old seeding move was to send product with no instructions and hope. The version that works is sending a tight, single-page brief: here's the specific thing we want you to talk about, here's the value prop, here's the common objection to knock down. One brand I rate uses problem-solution briefs to get creators addressing the exact complaint their product usually gets, and the content that comes back is sharper and far more ad-ready than anything unbriefed. Briefing is the difference between content you can use and content you just paid for.

The honest caveat: this doesn't fit every product

Now the part the loud version of this argument skips, because I'd rather you make money than agree with me.

The creator-volume flywheel spins beautifully for some products and stalls badly for others. It works best when the product is close to an impulse buy, has strong obvious value props, and converts fast. That's the world where an affiliate posts, drives a thousand impressions, gets rewarded quickly, and so posts again. The reward loop is what keeps the creators producing. That self-fulfilling cycle is the actual flywheel, and it only turns if the product converts on the first impression.

Now picture the opposite. You sell a ~A$100 considered purchase at full price most of the year. It isn't an impulse buy. It takes several touchpoints before someone commits. An affiliate who drives a thousand impressions for you earns a fraction of what they'd earn driving the same impressions for an impulse product, so they drift off and post about the easy thing instead. For brands like that, the "affiliate flywheel" quietly collapses back into what is really just a pile of small paid deals. Which is fine, as long as you call it what it is and don't expect it to self-perpetuate.

So the question isn't "should I do creator volume". It's "does my product actually feed the loop, or am I going to have to pay to keep it spinning". Both can be worth doing. They are not the same motion, and pretending they are is how brands burn a quarter's budget on a flywheel that was never going to turn.

There's also still a place for the long-form people. A creator on YouTube or a podcast host holds attention for twenty or ninety minutes, and that builds a kind of trust the ephemeral feed can't. Those relationships still accrue real influence, and I wouldn't torch them. The death I'm calling is specifically the buy-a-million-followers-for-one-post trade, not every human with an audience.

So where does that leave you

Strip it back and the through-line is this: stop buying audiences, start buying volume and the right to use what comes out of it. Treat the content as inventory, brief it like you mean it, and measure the funnel honestly, packages out, post rate, revenue per post.

The brands pulling away right now mostly aren't the ones who found a better influencer. They're the ones who quietly turned creator content into a high-volume, ad-fed machine while everyone else was still negotiating one big deal.

So have a look at your own setup and ask the uncomfortable version of the question. If you added up what you spent on creators last year, how much of it bought you a library you can still use, and how much of it bought you a single post you've already forgotten?