Creator pay gap issue heats up

The ‘F***k you pay me’ movement aiming to expose the creator pay gap.

Earlier in the year AiMCO hosted a small discussion group of creators to discuss what they love about being a creator, along with the things that  most vex them. Well, the issue of what to charge and also of being ghosted when they pitched for projects was a very hot topic.

While some creators may have started out by working for little (or no payment) it’s clear that isn’t a viable business model in the long term and nor should they offer up their talent and hard won audiences for free.

However, the issue of being paid and how much is a hot topic globally, especially in the UK and more recently in the USA.

The issue of pay disparity and the movement for transparency in creator payment gained momentum in the UK in mid 2020 when  Adesuwa Ajayi established an Instagram account, Influencer Pay Gap that allows influencers to post what they are paid, how they are treated and – crucially – to compare with their peers. Other sites that are attempting to address the issue include Brands Behaving Badly and We Don’t Work For Free.

More recently in the USA a site labelled FYPM, the acronym being for the more in your face title F**k You Pay Me, has been established. Lindsey Lee Lugrin herself a creator, teamed up with Isha Mehra, a former Facebook data scientist to establish the site to help creators understand and navigate market deals. You can read an interview with Lurgin here in The New York Times.

The difficulties inherent in such sites is that brand engagements are rarely identical, so that benchmarking payment to influencers is complicated given deals are increasingly sophisticated and nuanced. Costs vary by timeline, by platform and vertical, by content type and additional usage rights deals. High engagement rates can make up for smaller followings.

As Scott Guthrie has quite rightly indicated in his Fourth Floor blog when he covered the issue:

‘ All this considered, brands may be unfairly ‘outed’ in the process, condemned in the court of public opinion for low-balling influencers when not all factors are understood. Noble in its intentions, FYPM runs the risk of positioning itself as judge and jury, while relying on a disgruntled online community to meter out retribution. As such, the site might produce pay vigilantes if its methods and available mechanisms are not refined.’

 We will be watching to see how things play out.