Creators told MrBeast's model to go further: why equity deals are replacing flat fees

The Digiday report that circulated in late 2025 captured something marketers had been sensing for a while: the flat-fee creator deal, once the standard unit of influencer marketing, is under pressure. Creators with real audience leverage are asking for equity, board observer rights, or angel entry points. Some are getting them. The conversation has moved fast enough that "creator-as-partner" is now the default framing at most influencer marketing conferences. The consensus is forming.

Creator equity deals as a structural upgrade, not just a negotiating tactic

The consensus view runs like this: creators have built genuine media assets and taken on genuine business risk, so they deserve a share of the upside they generate. Platforms like Primary Venture Partners and consumer brands like Olipop have already experimented with giving creators equity alongside or instead of fees. MrBeast's Feastables is the most cited example of a creator building a brand from scratch rather than endorsing someone else's. The argument is that a creator with a financial stake in a company will produce better, more authentic content, hold the brand accountable, and stay engaged longer than someone who cashed a check and moved on. All of that is defensible.

There is also a legitimate market efficiency argument. If a creator drives $4 million in first-year revenue for a CPG brand and was paid $80,000 for a campaign, someone captured enormous value without sharing it. Equity corrects that imbalance. From a pure incentives standpoint, aligned compensation structures do tend to produce aligned behavior.

Does giving a creator equity actually improve your marketing returns?

The honest answer: sometimes, but the mechanism is less clean than the trend suggests.

The core problem is attributionattributionA framework for assigning credit to the touchpoints that contributed to a conversion, so you can measure which channels and interactions actually drive results.View full definition →. Creators are excellent at generating awareness and shifting consideration. Connecting that to long-term equity value, which accrues over years and depends on a hundred non-marketing variables, is a different calculation. When you hand a creator a 2% stake, you are not just paying for content performance. You are making a bet on product-market fitproduct-market fitThe moment your product genuinely solves a real problem for a well-defined market, so users retain, refer and pay willingly.View full definition →, operations, distribution, and timing. The creator has little control over most of those. Startups fail for reasons that have nothing to do with social reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition →, and a creator who accepted equity instead of cash may eventually feel deceived, which damages the brand relationship more than a flat fee ever would.

There is a second-order effect here that the consensus skips: equity deals concentrate risk for both sides. A brand that has given equity to six creators now has six minority stakeholders who may have conflicting views on positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition →, pricing, or a future M&A event. From a governance standpoint, that is not trivial. Theframeworks you use to structure agency and partner relationships matter here. Equity without governance clarity is a liability disguised as a partnership.

The AI layer compounds this. HubSpot (a CRMCRMCustomer Relationship Management: software and strategy to manage and analyse customer interactions throughout their lifecycle.View full definition → and marketing automationmarketing automationUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → vendor, so take their framing with appropriate skepticism) has published research noting that AI tools are reshaping creator workflows at pace, compressing the production cost of content and making it harder to attribute audience loyalty to a specific creator versus the platform algorithm. If a creator's reach becomes algorithm-dependent in ways neither party can predict, pegging long-term equity to that reach is a fragile bet.

There is also a class problem inside this trend. Equity deals favor creators who already have enough leverage to negotiate them: the top 0.1% with genuine audience lock-in and strong legal representation. For the mid-tier creator, who drives more measurable niche ROIROIReturn on Investment: the ratio of net profit to the cost of an investment. A 300% ROI means each dollar invested returns $3.View full definition → for most brands, the equity conversation is largely theoretical. CMOs who chase the headline deal with a mega-creator may be ignoring the performance value of a coordinated mid-tier program, which often delivers stronger CACCACCustomer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers gained in a period. It measures how efficiently you grow.View full definition → efficiency.

What CMOs should actually do when a creator asks for equity

Treat it as a capital allocation decision, not a media buying decision. That means involving your CFO and legal team before any term sheet discussion, not after. Equity granted to a creator has dilution implications, cap table consequences, and potentially vesting schedules to design. Your marketing org probably has none of the infrastructure to run that process cleanly.

Before agreeing to any structure, be clear on what you are actually buying. If the value is audience access and content production, a performance-linked fee with bonus triggers tied to revenue milestones can get you most of the incentive alignment without the governance complexity. Reserve true equity for creators who are genuinely co-creating the product or brand identitybrand identityThe visual, verbal and cultural elements that define how your brand presents itself: logo, colours, tone of voice, and values.View full definition → at the founding stage, not those being brought in after a Series A to add reach.

If you do pursue equity, put a vesting schedule on it tied to content deliverables and audience retention metrics, not just time. A creator who receives equity and then goes quiet because their attention shifted to another deal is a scenario you need contractual protection against.

On measurement: before you restructure your creator compensation model, make sure you have the analytics foundation to support it. Understanding the realrelationship between CAC, LTVLTVLifetime Value: the total revenue (or profit) a customer generates throughout their entire relationship with your business.View full definition →, and what creators actually contribute to each is a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Too many brands that have rushed into equity arrangements have done so without a baseline understanding of what their creator-driven cohorts actually convert and retain at.

Finally, watch Olipop and similar DTC brands closely. They have more creator equity experiments running than almost any other category, and by 2026 we are starting to see early signals on what those structures produced in terms of retention versus pure paid channelspaid channelsVisitors arriving via paid ads or sponsored placements, where you pay a platform to display your message rather than earning visits organically.View full definition →. The results are not yet conclusive, but the data will be.

The creator equity trend is real and the underlying economics are sound in specific conditions. The mistake is treating it as a universal upgrade to the media deal model. It is a capital structure decision that happens to involve a content creator, and it should be evaluated with the same rigor you would apply to any minority investment.