Creator agency fees: only 42% are fully transparent

October 4, 2026 · 9 min · Free, with full transcript

Where does creator budget actually go, and why do hidden agency margins, AI content measurement and publisher-sold GEO all arrive in the same week? The position here is that each one is an intermediary being asked the same three questions: what unit was counted, who counted it, and how much money passed through to the people doing the work. The ISBA poll, TrinityP3's 35% versus 60% talent split, SPUR's five telemetry events, Future and Ziff Davis selling GEO, the Ahrefs llms.txt data and MIT Sloan on Alturas Capital Partners all sit in that frame. You leave able to audit an invoice on unit, counter and pass-through, test an AI visibility vendor against cited, displayed and engaged, and write an AI use declaration into creator contracts.

Listen to the podcast

9 min

Chapters

Key takeaways

  • Demand creator invoices split into five lines: talent fee, usage rights, production, platform fees and agency margin, since a bundled number can leave talent as little as 35% instead of 60%.
  • Score every line item on three columns: the unit being counted, the counter who counts it and whether you can reproduce it, and the percentage that passes through your building.
  • Ask your AI visibility vendor whether it can report against SPUR's five events of retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed and engaged, and treat a single blended score as an opinion rather than measurement.
  • Do not rely on llms.txt, since Ahrefs found 97% of files across 137,000 domains got zero requests in May 2026 and Google confirmed it does not support it.
  • Add an AI use declaration to creator contracts covering ideation, editing, voice and likeness, then decide which of those still earn full rate.
Read the full transcript

Host:This is Leaders Insights. On the table: Only 42% of advertisers can see their creator agency fees, and that number explains the week. A marketer in London is staring at a creator invoice this week, one number, two million pounds, and she genuinely cannot tell you how much of it reached the person who made the videos.

Expert:And if she polled her peers, she'd find she's in the majority. ISBA — that's the UK's main advertiser trade body, the brands' side of the table — had a consultancy poll its media leaders. Only 42% said their creator agency fees were fully transparent.

Host:Forty-two. What's the rest?

Expert:Twenty-one percent said partially transparent, and 37% said they simply didn't know. Think about that last group. More than a third of serious advertisers cannot answer a basic question about where their money went.

Host:Let's slow down for the exec who's new to this. What does "fully transparent" even mean on a creator deal?

Expert:It means your invoice breaks into parts. The fee to the talent, the usage rights — what you're paying to keep running the content — the production cost, the platform fees, and the agency's own margin. Five lines. When those get rolled into one number, you can't see the margin, so you can't argue with it.

Host:And when it's one number, where does the money actually land?

Expert:Here's the figure that should ruin someone's afternoon. The consultancy TrinityP3 says a bundled deal can leave as little as 35% for the talent. Unbundle the same work, bill it line by line, and talent can get up to 60%.

Host:Put that on the two million.

Expert:Thirty-five percent is seven hundred thousand to the creators. Sixty percent is one point two million. The gap is five hundred thousand pounds on a single budget.

Host:That's a salary line. Several, actually.

Expert:And here's the part people miss. That five hundred grand isn't a negotiation. You don't haggle it down. It's a disclosure you either have or you don't. Nothing about the calculation needs a new agency. It needs an invoice with a pass-through column.

Host:One caveat I want to put to you straight. The people shouting about this — the consultants — they'd quite like to be paid to fix it, wouldn't they?

Expert:They absolutely would, and Digiday said so plainly. But the structure doesn't care about their motives. We watched this exact film with programmatic a decade ago — automated ad buying where the middle took a slice nobody could see. Then principal media. Creator just grew too fast for anyone's procurement team to keep up.

Host:So that's figure one, 42%. Now, four separate things landed this week and you keep insisting they're the same story. Convince me.

Expert:Because every one of them is an intermediary — a middleman between a brand and its audience — being asked the same three questions. What did you count, who counted it, and how much of my money passed through to whoever did the work.

Host:Give me the second one. There's a publishing group that released a technical standard.

Expert:SPUR — Standards for Publisher Usage Rights, a coalition founded in March 2026 by the BBC, the Financial Times, The Guardian, Sky, The Times, with the Associated Press joining as the first US member. They published a content telemetry standard. "Telemetry" just means measuring what happens at a distance and reporting it back.

Host:Reporting what, exactly?

Expert:What AI systems do with your journalism. And this is the useful bit — they break AI content use into five events. Content retrieved, grounded, cited, displayed, and engaged. Five verbs.

Host:Why should a CMO care about a publisher licensing fight?

Expert:Because those five verbs are the first honest vocabulary for AI attribution that wasn't invented by a vendor trying to sell you a dashboard. "Cited" and "displayed" and "engaged" are different things worth different money. Almost every AI visibility tool on sale today mashes them into one score.

Host:Does the standard actually bind the AI companies?

Expert:It binds nobody. It's voluntary, and as of publication no AI company had accepted the invitation to help govern it. SPUR invited OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft onto an advisory board. Google said it "engages on various topics." The others didn't reply.

Host:So it's a rulebook for a game nobody's agreed to play.

Expert:For now. But here's your test. Ask your own AI visibility vendor whether it can report against those five event types. If it can't tell "cited" from "displayed," you're not buying measurement. You're buying an opinion with a logo on it.

Host:Third thing. Publishers are now selling AI visibility as a product.

Expert:GEO — generative engine optimisation, making sure AI answers mention you. A year ago it was barely on a rate card. Now Future has more than 30 GEO clients and renewals. Ziff Davis says it has several. One publisher exec told Digiday it's already making money.

Host:And the conflict there is—

Expert:Your media partner sells the visibility it also measures, with no third party counting. Same shape as an agency that books the creator, sets the fee, and reports the result. The scorekeeper owns the scoreboard.

Host:There's a technical fix floating around for this — a file publishers put on their site to talk to AI. Does it work?

Expert:You mean llms.txt, a little text file meant to tell AI models how to use a site. Short answer, no. Ahrefs looked at 137,000 domains — and Ahrefs sells SEO tools, so flag that — and found 97% of those files got zero requests in May 2026. Google's Gary Illyes confirmed Google doesn't support it. One of their people compared it to the keywords meta tag, which is the SEO equivalent of a rotary phone.

Host:Meanwhile the vendors are shouting about all of this.

Expert:Semrush — SEO and AI visibility software — ran a whole string of pieces this week on answer engine optimisation and AI audits. Treat that as product marketing, not evidence. When the company selling the cure publishes the diagnosis, read it with gloves on.

Host:Fourth thing, and the one you called underrated. MIT Sloan on in-house AI.

Expert:A real estate firm, Alturas Capital Partners, moved its lease work away from outside lawyers using generative AI. Saved hundreds of thousands, compressed weeks of work into far less. Everyone read it as a lawyer story.

Host:And you read it as—

Expert:An agency pricing story. Once a client can produce a passable version of the deliverable themselves, a bundled fee with a hidden margin stops being defensible. The only margin that survives is attached to work the client genuinely can't check or maintain alone.

Host:Isn't that just doom for agencies?

Expert:No, and Sloan makes the honest counterpoint. Bringing work in-house looks cheap until someone has to check every output, fix the mistakes, rewrite prompts every time the model changes, clear compliance. Those costs pile up until they rival the original fee. That's the real case for keeping an agency. But it's a case your agency should make in units, not in adjectives.

Host:Give me the thread tying all four together in one line.

Expert:Visibility, attribution, and trust in middlemen are all being rebuilt on the same brick — event-level evidence of what the middleman actually did. For every line item, name three things. The unit, what's being counted. The counter, who counts it and can you reproduce it without them. And the pass-through, what percentage leaves your building.

Host:And if a line fails all three?

Expert:Then it's not a cost. It's margin wearing a cost's clothes, and you should price it as risk.

Host:One more uncomfortable one. SharkNinja says 70% of its content comes from creators. Billion impressions on one product last year. If that's the engine, what's the exposure?

Expert:That AI has quietly crept into the creator process — editing, voice, likeness — and most brands don't measure it. If 70% of your content is creator-made and an unknown slice is AI-assisted, your disclosure, your brand safety, and your fee logic all sit on something you're not tracking.

Host:So the fix is a contract clause.

Expert:An AI use declaration covering ideation, editing, voice and likeness. Then decide which of those you still pay full rate for. You don't pay studio rates for a filter.

Host:We're near time. One thing the listener does Monday morning. Not a framework. One move.

Expert:Pull your three largest creator invoices from the past year. Try to fill in the three columns yourself — unit, counter, pass-through. Whatever you can't fill becomes the agenda for your next partner review. The teams that write this into contracts this quarter set the price of creator and AI work for three years. The teams that wait keep buying one number and hoping.

Host:What we read for this one: , Digiday, Semrush (vendor — SEO/analytics tools). We'll leave it there. The CMO self-assessment at mba-training.com will tell you where you really stand.

Read and go deeper