I wasn’t running a study. I was watching because a brand had asked me to choose between roster signings and I wanted to see which model held up over time.
One ran an art channel. Tutorials, process videos, the occasional studio tour. She had 90,000 subscribers when I started the tracker and she’d had the channel for four years. The other ran a B2B finance channel. Spreadsheet walkthroughs, SaaS reviews, the occasional founder interview. She had 22,000 subscribers and had been at it for fourteen months.
Six months in, the art channel went dark. Three weeks ago I got a message: she’d accepted a teaching position and was going back to part-time uploads. The finance channel closed her third $40K integration of the quarter and turned down two more.
The art creator wasn’t worse at her craft
Her thumbnails were sharper. Her edits were tighter. She had a more loyal audience on the metrics platforms measure — watch time, returning viewer rate. She just happened to be operating in a vertical where almost no brand pays to reach her audience, because the audience isn’t a buying audience for the products brands have budget for.
Finance is the opposite. Software companies will pay $30K to put their dashboard in front of 22,000 small business owners. Almost no brand will pay $30K to put their product in front of 90,000 art hobbyists, because the hobbyist’s annual spend on the product category is too low to justify the CAC.
90K Art Channel (4 years)
- Sharper thumbnails, tighter edits
- Higher watch time and return rate
- ~$0.40 CPM on AdSense
- Almost no integration inbound
- Went dark; creator took a teaching job
22K Finance Channel (14 months)
- Plainer thumbnails, looser edits
- Lower watch time and return rate
- ~$14 CPM on AdSense
- Software brands actively bidding
- 3rd $40K integration of the quarter
The brief that keeps coming back
Most brand managers I work with intellectually know this. Then they send a search brief that starts with “minimum 100K subs, open to vertical.” Three of those have crossed my desk this quarter.
Each time I push back. Each time the manager initially resists, because the size filter is easy to defend internally. Nobody got fired for hiring a creator with a million subs. Plenty of people got their campaigns underperform behind a million-sub creator whose audience didn’t convert.
The steelman of the size-first approach
It’s real and worth saying out loud: in some verticals scale genuinely is the variable.
Lifestyle, entertainment, gaming for certain brand categories. If you’re a snack food brand, a 2M gaming creator probably outperforms a 200K one for the same dollar. The size filter isn’t always wrong. It’s wrong in any vertical where the audience-to-buyer conversion is gated by the vertical itself.
That’s the line. Scale matters when most of the reachable audience is a plausible buyer. Scale is a distraction when the vertical filters out the buyer before size ever gets a vote.
The fix is one extra question
Before “how big,” ask: does this vertical have a buyer for what we sell?
If the answer is no, no creator size fixes that. No engagement rate, no demographic match on the media kit, no “but they’re a great storyteller” argument. The math runs from the buyer backward, and if there’s no buyer at the end of the chain, every other variable is decoration.
I’ve watched a 22K creator out-earn a 90K creator 35 to 1 because she picked the right hill. I’ve watched brands pay six figures to the wrong hill because the brief never asked which hill it was on.
What was the first filter on your last creator search — size or vertical?