Data for Me, Not for Thee

Memo #2: If creators are judged by conversion, shouldn’t they see the numbers?

Welcome to Creator Economy Dispatch, where research meets reality. Insights, interviews, and observations on how creators, brands, and platforms actually work together—part case study, part cultural commentary.

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The creator economy now runs on ROI. And yet? Creators are playing without a scoreboard, while everyone else keeps score.

After campaigns wrap, brands demand numbers: reach, likes, saves, shares, clicks, even qualitative feedback. Sharing those metrics is often written into creators’ contracts. But what information do creators get back?

Almost nothing.

The data flow is typically one-way. Creators are asked to send screenshots: Instagram insights, story replies, swipe-up metrics, podcast downloads. Sometimes even DMs. The information is disparate, manual, and often unverifiable. The burden of reporting falls on the creator. The results, if they exist, stay with the brand.

And those are often the numbers that matter most. Not impressions or likes, but conversions. Sales driven. Click-through rates. New customers acquired. That’s what creators need to see if they’re being judged on performance. But they rarely do.

Maybe the asymmetry isn’t nefarious. Maybe brands genuinely don’t have the attribution mechanisms to know exactly who drove what. Or maybe they do, and prefer to keep the numbers close to the chest. After all, who wants to admit when a campaign didn’t work? And who volunteers to level the playing field when it’s already tilted in their favor? In an economy obsessed with performance, silence is often easier than accountability. And in a system built on metrics, the real power is in deciding which ones, if any, get shared.

But is that sustainable? In a transactional, market-driven system that claims to reward performance, how long can creators be expected to operate without true visibility into the results?

Right now, brands hold the wallets. That gives them leverage. But that leverage depends on creators continuing to accept an information deficit in exchange for opportunity.

That tradeoff has held for a while. It may not hold much longer.

The shift won’t come because creators suddenly gain access to brand data. It will come because they control something buyers can’t replicate: high-trust, high-engagement distribution. In a fractured media landscape, creators own some of the only channels where people still pay attention. That scarcity makes them harder to replace. Brands may keep the data. But creators hold the demand. And in any market, that is what drives power.

Some brands are already adapting. I’ve spoken to teams that proactively share sales data and post-campaign reporting, treating creators less like placements and more like partners.

As more tools emerge to close the loop—from affiliate analytics to automated reporting—the imbalance becomes harder to justify. The brands that win will be the ones that treat creators not as interchangeable vendors, but as strategic partners. And that starts with sharing the numbers.

Because creators aren’t just asking to be paid. They’re asking to see the impact they’re being judged on. In an economy built on ROI, that’s not a luxury. It’s the cost of entry.