The Influencer Follower-Count Era Is Ending

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to The Debris from The Business of Fashion where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young.
For years, the clearest sign that an influencer had made it was the number sitting at the top of their profile, follower count. More followers meant more reach, more brand deals, and usually more money. But social media doesn't work that way anymore. TikTok's For You page, Instagram's suggested posts, and other algorithmically curated feeds mean creators can reach huge audiences without those people ever following them.
At the same time, affiliate marketing is giving brands a clearer picture of who actually drives engagement and sales with smaller creators often performing particularly well. So if follower count is no longer the defining measure of influence, what replaces it? BoF's US editor, Diana Pearl, has been reporting on how brands and creators are rethinking the value of an audience. Welcome back to The Debrief, Diana.

**Diana Pearl** (1:11)
Thanks for having me.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:13)
So we should start probably with the metric itself, follower count. For a long time, that was the defining shorthand for a creator's value. Why was that so important?

**Diana Pearl** (1:23)
You have to remember, influencer marketing is still a relatively young industry. Like it's only been a thing at all, I'd say for like a little over 10 years, and then it's really only become this huge behemoth in the last five to six years. So because of that, at the beginning, there wasn't many options available when it came to determining who the best creator was to partner with, how effective a certain creator could be. The follower count is like right there. It's at the top of your profile.
Advertisers do a lot of times think about reach. You think about television advertising. Obviously, you think about the demographics of the audience you're trying to reach. But there's a reason the Super Bowl is the most expensive ad slot in a novel of advertising. It's because it's a big audience. So usually, it just goes with the standard thinking of big audience means they make more money, more success, et cetera. So really, it was more a product of the fact that the industry hadn't really matured yet. And obviously, it's still going through that maturing process. But we're in a very different place in the industry now. And I think it's just caused influencer marketers, brands to just think differently about how do we really determine and judge success.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (2:36)
And there's probably a more basic factor at play here. It's like being in high school, the popular person. Like even if there was, there were probably a lot of people that never thought they were going to make a business out of it, to your point that it's about 10 years into being a full on industry. It was just, you looked cooler if more people were paying attention to your page, regardless of anything else. And fashion and retail obviously care a lot about who's cool and popular.

**Diana Pearl** (2:58)
Totally. And I don't think that's fully gone away. Like there's a cache in having a lot of followers and that still exists. But now I think that just the business reasoning behind just choosing, you know, for a partnership or a campaign, choosing the influencer with the most followers, it's just a little weaker now that there's so much more data that brands can look to to determine who to partner with.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (3:21)
And that's sort of a nice segue into my next question, because something I've been saying sort of anecdotally to friends in the industry, but also just like in my personal life, there's a lot of people with a lot of followers now. At some point, you've got to start to filter out what kind of, or the value of each number across the board. Like if 10 people have a million followers, you have to now qualify that one million.
So the chatter around a macro influencer versus a micro influencer, I remember that existing very early on, even if we weren't labeling them as such, it was based on conversion. Like someone can have millions of followers, but if you are a fashion brand or retailer, that million doesn't mean that those people are going to convert. What's actually new today about making the number less important? What are some of the things that are newer?

**Diana Pearl** (4:09)
For a long time, it was just hard to determine which influencers were the top converters for you. LTK, which is the incumbent influencer monetization platform, for a long time, they didn't offer a ton of data around who was driving sales for you, just that influencers on the LTK platform were driving sales. But you couldn't see which individual creator that was unless you were running a paid partnership with them. ShopMy really changed that. They offer brands a lot more insight into which creators are actually driving sales, even if they're not running a paid partnership. So you can just notice, oh, this one girl is linking to us a lot, she's driving a lot of sales. She only has 40,000 followers. It's maybe not someone that you would have come across organically or found on your own, but she's a really big, strong advocate for our brand and an effective advocate for our brand.