Two creators with 50K followers can pull 6,000 views or 60,000 on the same kind of post, and on a rate card you pay them the same.

Say you pay creators off a rate card: one tier for 10K to 50K followers, a bigger tier above that, a bump for Reels. Then the post goes live, pulls 6,000 views, and your team can’t say whether the $1,500 was fair. Price influencer deals the way you price media: on CPM, the cost per thousand views.

The math below runs through two example brands:

• You sell a $48 skincare serum and ship within the US, a setup most beauty brands will recognize.

• You run a 40-room boutique hotel in Vancouver and fill most rooms with guests from Seattle, California and Toronto.

Step 1: Find your real Meta CPM, then cut it in half

Open Ads Manager and pull your blended CPM for the last 30 days across prospecting campaigns. Skip your cheapest ad set, or you’ll price creators off a CPM you don’t pay at scale. If you buy on TikTok as well, pull that number and use the lower of the two.

No account history yet? Start from a benchmark and swap in your own number once you’ve got one. Your CPM moves with your industry, the quality of your creative, ad fatigue once your audience has seen the same ad too many times, the season and how narrow your targeting is. A beauty brand bidding in November pays more than a local café in February.

Your target for creator deals is half of that number, so the two example brands land here:

• If you sell the serum and pay $16 on Meta, your creator target is $8.

• If you run the hotel and pay $12, your target is $6.

You can pay above half and still come out ahead. A creator post lands in a feed people chose to watch, and you walk away with an asset you can run as an ad later. Sign deals up to 70% of your Meta CPM, since each one adds reach that doesn’t move with the Meta auction.

Brands that run creators at scale pay less than half. Greg LaVecchia, co-founder of Bloom Nutrition, said on Open Residency that Bloom has run influencer CPMs under $2 for months at a time. As he describes it, Bloom works with a big bench of creators and treats them as a media line, with a cost per view it tracks like any ad channel.

Aim for half your Meta CPM on creator deals. Sign anything that prices out at or below 70% of your Meta CPM.

Step 2: Value the creator on their last ten videos

Open the creator’s profile, write down the views on their last ten videos, and price from those instead of the follower count.

The common advice is to average all ten. If one of them went viral, the average comes out higher than what she pulls on a typical post, so take the median, or drop the highest and lowest and average the eight in between.

For the serum, you’re looking at a creator with 210K followers. Most of her last ten videos landed between 45K and 70K views. One went viral and hit 410K.

With that video in, her average is 94K. Her median sits at 60K, which is what she pulls on a normal week. At an $8 CPM, you’d value the post at $480 on her median. Price on the average and you’d pay close to $750, and most of that gap comes from one viral post two months back.

If she has sponsored posts in the ten, count them. They’re the closest preview you’ll get of how your post will perform.

Step 3: Discount the viewers who can’t buy from you

You pay the same CPM for a viewer outside your market as for a buyer, so cut those viewers before you price the post. Ask the creator for a screenshot of their audience insights: country, gender and age. Give them a day to send it, and pass on any creator who won’t.

The serum creator’s insights show two groups you can’t sell to:

• Viewers outside the US. About 72% of her viewers are American. You ship to the US and nowhere else, so the rest don’t count.

• Men. They make up 15% of her audience, and 92% of the buyers in your order data are women, so you drop that share.

That leaves 37K of her 60K views that can turn into orders. At $8 per thousand, the fair fee is $295.

Only discount gender when your order data backs it up. If a real share of your buyers are men, keep them in.

If you run the hotel, your market is the set of cities your guests travel from: Seattle, California and Toronto. Say you’re comparing two creators. A Vancouver lifestyle creator gets 120K views a video, but most of her audience lives in Vancouver, and few locals book a room in their own city. Count locals at a quarter of their value and you’re left with 54K views that matter, worth $324.

A Seattle creator gets a third of those views, but most of her audience lives in the cities you sell to, so her post comes in at $168. If you run a hotel or other hospitality brand, you’ll feel the pull to book the local creator first, so price both before you sign and you’ll know what each post is worth to you. In some deals the local creator costs less per useful view, and in others she costs more.

Pay for the viewers who can buy from you, and discount the rest before you make an offer.

Step 4: Make the offer with the math on the table

Send the creator your number and show how you got there. A talent manager quotes $1,200 for the serum post. You counter at $295 plus product and walk through the median, the US share and the CPM.

Some creators will pass, and the ones who counter will negotiate from the same math you used.

I add two terms that make the deal fairer for both sides:

1. A view bonus. If the post beats the median within 14 days, pay the extra views at the same CPM, capped at double the base fee. The creator gets upside, and you pay for the views you got.

2. Usage rights. Ask for 60 to 90 days of rights to run the post as an ad. Price them as their own line item so the base fee stays clean.

Leave the creative to the creator. You’ll lose views if you script the post line by line, and you priced the deal on views. Give them the product and two or three facts that have to be true, and let them make the rest theirs. Keep your brief tight on the opening seconds. Our piece on building all four hook layers covers how to brief that without writing the whole video. We run full influencer marketing programs on this model, and this step is where most of our time goes.

Step 5: Score the CPM you got, then put media behind the winners

At day 7 and day 30, divide the fee by actual views and multiply by 1,000. Keep one sheet with these columns: creator, platform, fee, median views at signing, actual views, actual CPM.

• The serum post did 51K views on a $295 fee, an actual CPM of $5.78, so rebook her.

• The Seattle creator did 14K views on $168, an actual CPM of $12 and your full Meta price as the hotel, so don’t rebook at the same fee.

Track discount codes alongside two other signals. A share of your buyers see a post and convert days later through search or a direct booking, and you won’t see them in your code data. Watch branded search on Google and direct traffic in the weeks after a post goes live. If you run the hotel, that means searches for your hotel name and booking-engine sessions from Seattle, California and Toronto.

Take the posts that came in under target, use the usage rights you priced in Step 4, and run them as creator ads from the creator’s handle. I treat the creator fee as what you pay for the first round of reach, and your paid social budget as what you spend to scale the posts that beat your CPM target.

Start with your own numbers this week. Open Ads Manager, pull your 30-day blended CPM and halve it. Then take your last three creator deals and run them through Steps 2 and 3. If you paid far more than the math says, move that difference to creators who price out at or under your target.

If you want us to check those numbers with you, book a free audit, a 30-minute call with no sales pitch. We set your creator fees next to your paid social costs, deal by deal, and flag the ones priced above your CPM target along with the creators worth booking again.