Is a big influencer worth more than a small one?

Creators sell reach, because reach is the number they can see. It is also the number that predicts the least about whether anybody buys.

The arithmetic that makes small work

Take a local trade business and two options.

A macro account, 100,000 followers, nationally scattered. Perhaps 2% are in your area, so 2,000 people could plausibly use you — and they are seeing a post about a business they have no reason to remember.

A local micro-creator, 3,000 followers, almost all within fifteen miles. Nearly all of them could use you, many recognise the street in the photograph, and the recommendation reads as a neighbour rather than an advert.

The second costs a fraction of the first and produces more enquiries. That is why the doctrine here is micro-first, and why the scoring reflects commercial effectiveness and brand safety rather than ranking by follower count.

It is the same arithmetic that makes buying followers actively harmful: the denominator matters, and relevance is the thing that survives it.

What no tool can see

A creator's real audience quality lives in their own analytics. Third-party estimates of engagement rate are modelled from public interactions, and they miss the numbers that actually matter — saves, shares, audience location, how many followers are real.

So every score here is a labelled estimate over the inputs you supplied, and it never fabricates audience, engagement or conversion data. That is a narrower claim than the competing products make, and it is the true one.

The honest route is to ask. A screenshot of the last thirty days takes a creator a minute, and a creator who will not share it has answered a different and more useful question.

Disclosure is in the brief, not left to the creator

Every brief carries mandatory ad disclosure.

The reason it is baked in rather than reminded: the obligation sits with the brand as well as the creator, so a missing disclosure is your problem too, and relying on each creator to remember is relying on the least experienced person in the arrangement.

It also works better. Audiences assume a post is paid anyway, and a creator who says so plainly keeps the trust that makes the post worth buying.

What to pay

Not a rate card. Pay from the same arithmetic as any other acquisition cost: what is left after variable cost and the margin you protect.

For a commission arrangement rather than a flat fee, the published bands apply and there is no follower gate on the entry tier — which exists precisely because the person about to become big is the cheapest person to work with.

The invite is still a marketing message

An outbound invite derived from this needs consent and obeys the cap of five touches in seven days. A creator outreach campaign is not exempt from the sending rules because the recipient is a creator.

The question to ask any creator

How many of your followers are within twenty miles, and what did your last five posts save or share?

Those two numbers decide it, and neither of them is reach.