The Creator Economy Doesn't Work for Everyone (Yet)

I'm going to share some numbers that might make people uncomfortable. Good. They should be uncomfortable. I've been uncomfortable with them for two years.

I coordinate creator campaigns. That's my job. I find the right people, negotiate the rates, manage the timelines, make sure everyone gets paid. And in doing that job, I see every single rate card, every single offer, every single negotiation. I see who gets offered what. And I can tell you, categorically, that there is a pay gap.

Let's Talk Numbers

I'm not going to name specific campaigns or creators because that's not fair to anyone. But I can tell you patterns. And the pattern is this: creators from underrepresented communities — Black, South Asian, East Asian, Latinx — are consistently offered lower rates than their white counterparts with comparable audience sizes and engagement rates.

I'm not talking about a small difference. On average, across the campaigns I've worked on over the past 18 months, the gap is somewhere between 20-35%. For the same deliverables. The same audience size. Sometimes better engagement rates.

And before someone says “well maybe it's about the niche” or “maybe the content quality varies” — no. I've controlled for that. I literally made a spreadsheet. (Yes, I'm that person.) Same niche, same quality, same metrics. The gap is still there.

Why It Happens

Part of it is systemic. The algorithm favours certain faces and certain aesthetics — there's been enough research on this that I don't need to relitigate it here. So creators of colour often have smaller followings not because their content is worse, but because the platform literally shows it to fewer people.

And then brands use follower count as the primary metric for setting rates. So the algorithmic bias becomes a pay gap. It's a feedback loop and it's really hard to break.

The other part is just... bias. I've sat in meetings where a brand will look at two creators with identical metrics and say they want to “allocate more budget” to the one with the more “mainstream” audience. Mainstream. You know what that means. I know what that means. Everyone in the room knows what that means.

What “Better” Looks Like (and Why It's Not Enough)

Things are improving. Slowly. More brands are committing to equitable rate cards. Some are specifically allocating budget for creators from underrepresented communities. A few — a very few — are actually auditing their historical spend and correcting for past gaps.

But here's why I say it's not enough: most of this progress is driven by PR pressure, not genuine commitment. Brands started paying attention to this in 2020, for obvious reasons. Some of them have followed through. A lot of them haven't. And the ones who made public commitments and then quietly went back to business as usual? That's almost worse than never saying anything at all.

What We Do About It at Mosaic

I'm not going to pretend we've solved this. We haven't. But here's what we do: we negotiate rates based on deliverables and engagement, not follower count alone. We push back when brands offer lower rates to diverse creators. We have difficult conversations. Regularly.

And honestly? We've lost business over it. There have been brands who've gone with another agency because we wouldn't agree to pay a Black creator less than a white creator for the same work. That stings. Financially and otherwise. But I can sleep at night, so there's that.

Amani always says that the point of Mosaic isn't just to get diverse creators into campaigns — it's to make sure they're valued equally once they're there. That sounds obvious. It really should be obvious. But if it were, I wouldn't need to write this article.

To the Creators Reading This

Know your worth. And I don't mean that in a motivational poster way. I mean literally know the market rate for your deliverables at your audience size with your engagement rate. There are resources out there now — rate calculators, creator communities, transparency databases. Use them. And if a brand offers you significantly less than market rate, push back. Or walk away. Or come talk to us.

The creator economy has the potential to be genuinely democratising. Anyone with a phone and a perspective can build an audience and get paid for their work. That's incredible. But potential isn't the same as reality. And until the pay gap closes — really closes, not just in press releases — we've got work to do.

I'll keep making spreadsheets.