Creator media needs better performance measurement. But performance is an outcome question. Commission is a payment model. Treating them as the same thing creates problems for advertisers, agencies and creators.
“Performance” sounds like one of the least controversial words in advertising.
Of course advertisers want performance.
They should know what happened after they invested. Agencies should be able to evaluate results. Creators should understand what worked. Better information should help everyone make better decisions the next time.
The problem is not performance.
The problem is what the word can come to mean in creator marketing.
Performance can quickly become shorthand for conversion.
Conversion can become shorthand for attributable sales.
And attributable sales can become shorthand for paying the creator a commission.
Those are three different decisions.
Treating them as one risks narrowing the value of creator media before we have even decided what the campaign was supposed to accomplish.
There is no single definition of a successful creator campaign because there is no single reason advertisers use creators.
Some campaigns are designed to reach a new audience.
Some aim to build awareness or strengthen trust.
Some are intended to increase consideration.
Some need traffic, leads or sales.
Often, a campaign is expected to contribute across several of those objectives.
Recent IAB research illustrates the point. In its 2025 study of creator advertising, building brand awareness and reaching new audiences were the two most commonly cited campaign goals, followed by enhancing brand reputation and trust. Driving online sales and conversions was also important, but ranked fourth.
Yet when the same research asked about campaign KPIs, overall ROI came out on top.
IAB called attention to the disconnect itself: marketers are frequently measuring creator campaigns against a performance metric that does not directly capture the brand-building objectives they say they are pursuing.
Public source: IAB — Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy
That is not an argument against ROI.
It is an argument for alignment.
If the objective is awareness, performance should tell us something useful about awareness.
If the objective is consideration, performance should help us understand consideration.
If the objective is sales, sales performance becomes much more relevant.
Measurement should follow the objective — not redefine it after the campaign has already run.
The distinction becomes even more important when performance affects creator compensation.
There are at least three questions in any creator campaign:
What are we trying to achieve?
How will we determine whether it worked?
How will the creator be compensated for participating?
Those questions influence one another, but they are not interchangeable.
A campaign can be measured rigorously without making the creator's entire compensation variable.
A creator can receive a fixed fee while the advertiser still evaluates sales.
A campaign can include a performance bonus without pretending sales are the creator's only contribution.
And a commission-based structure can make complete sense when the campaign is deliberately designed around commerce and the creator agrees to that model.
The mistake is not commission.
The mistake is assuming that because an advertiser wants better performance data, creator compensation should automatically become commission-based.
Affiliate marketing has an important role in the creator economy.
For the right creator, product and campaign, a tracked link, code or attributable conversion can create a clear commercial relationship between promotion and outcome.
Creators can be excellent affiliate partners.
But creator marketing encompasses a wider range of objectives.
The same creator who generates sales may also introduce a brand to a new audience, create reusable content, improve consideration, provide social proof, generate attention or contribute to brand perception.
That contribution does not disappear because it is difficult to express through a last-click sale.
Nor does every creator campaign need to become an affiliate campaign in order to become more accountable.
The more useful objective is to improve our understanding of what creator media actually contributes.
Sometimes that contribution will be commerce.
Sometimes it won't.
Even when sales are the objective, attribution requires context.
A creator may influence a person who purchases days or weeks later.
Someone may see creator content and subsequently search for the brand rather than use the creator's link.
Paid media may amplify the content.
Retargeting may contribute later.
Another channel may receive the final click.
The product could be out of stock.
The offer, landing page, price, checkout experience or broader media plan can all affect what happens after the creator has done their part.
This is why measurement is difficult across advertising generally — and why creator marketing is no exception.
IAB's 2026 work on creator measurement describes continuing challenges around fragmented metrics, siloed platforms, proxy-based ROI and attribution. Its earlier advertiser research similarly found that marketers struggle not only with attributing sales, but with measuring long-term impact and attributing brand lift.
Public source: IAB — Creator Economy Measurement Landscape
A sale is valuable information.
It is not necessarily a complete explanation of value.
Advertising has long had ways of thinking about performance beyond an immediate transaction.
Reach and frequency can tell us whether media reached its intended audience.
Brand-lift research can examine changes in awareness, recall, favorability or purchase intent.
Traffic and search behavior can provide signals of consideration.
Sales-lift methodologies can examine incremental commercial outcomes.
None of these measures is universally superior.
They answer different questions.
Nielsen, for example, measures advertising effectiveness against upper-funnel outcomes including awareness, favorability and purchase intent, while sales-lift methodologies address incremental purchase outcomes.
Public source: Nielsen — Brand Lift
That is a useful principle for creator media:
Performance should be defined by the job the media was asked to do.
The goal should not be to find the one metric that proves creator value.
It should be to use the right evidence for the question being asked.
None of this means creators should be insulated from outcomes.
Performance bonuses, affiliate commissions and other incentive structures can align interests when they are appropriate to the campaign.
Creators themselves participate in these models.
But there is a difference between sharing upside and transferring an advertiser's entire outcome risk onto the creator.
Commission-only arrangements can make creator income dependent on factors beyond the creator's creative work: attribution methodology, product availability, pricing, site conversion, promotional strategy and the rest of the media journey.
Creator preference research provides at least some evidence of that tension. In a 2024 survey of 198 creators, Later found substantially greater willingness to participate in fixed-fee campaigns than commission-only campaigns.
Public source: Later — Creator Compensation / Affiliate Survey
That should not be interpreted as a universal rule that creators reject performance compensation.
It suggests something more useful:
Compensation models need context too.
A commerce creator with an established audience, strong historical conversion and transparent reporting may willingly structure a partnership differently from a creator being hired primarily to introduce a brand to a new audience.
The objective matters.
The relationship matters.
The information available matters.
Better measurement cannot simply create a more sophisticated black box.
If performance data is going to influence how creators are selected, valued or compensated, creators should have greater visibility into what that assessment means.
What objective was the campaign designed to achieve?
Which metrics matter?
What information is being used?
Over what period?
What factors are being compared?
What does the advertiser believe happened?
What does the creator get to see?
Greater transparency does not mean every party needs access to every piece of proprietary information.
It means the rules of evaluation should be intelligible.
This matters for advertisers too.
A performance score with no explanation of what produced it is not much better than the vanity metrics the industry is trying to move beyond.
Better intelligence should make decisions clearer, not simply make the algorithm more complicated.
The same principle applies to creator value.
There is an understandable desire for a cleaner answer to a difficult question:
What is this creator worth?
But a single universal performance metric is unlikely to provide it.
Creator value can depend on audience, content, creative quality, distribution, rights, category, timing, historical evidence, campaign role and what the advertiser actually needs the creator to accomplish.
A creator who is highly effective at building trust in a complex category may not be the creator with the highest directly attributed sales.
A creator with enormous reach may not be the best choice for a conversion campaign.
A smaller creator may be exceptionally valuable in a specific community.
Context does not make creator valuation weaker.
It makes it more credible.
At Xrossworld, our emerging view is that better information can help the market develop a more informed understanding of creator fair-market-value.
But fair-market-value should not mean reducing a creator to one score.
It should mean having better context for the decision being made.
Creator media should become more accountable as it grows.
Advertisers should demand better evidence.
Agencies should be able to compare outcomes and learn from campaigns.
Creators should have more insight into how their work is being evaluated.
And better data should help the market make better decisions about where value is being created.
None of that requires us to define performance as commission.
It requires us to define performance more carefully.
Start with the objective.
Choose measurements that actually relate to it.
Be clear about what the data can and cannot prove.
Design compensation deliberately rather than allowing the measurement model to dictate it by default.
And give creators greater visibility into the information being used to assess their contribution.
Creator media does not need a weaker definition of performance to protect creators.
It needs a more sophisticated one.
Creator media is becoming an established media channel. The next challenge is building an operating model that can support how it is bought, priced, measured and learned from at scale.
Read →Perspectives on creator media, infrastructure and the market around it.