Issue #48: Upfront 💎

Issue 48
September 17th, 2026

I have never been inside an upfront, but I have read the coverage every May for something like fifteen years, because the ritual is genuinely strange once you describe it out loud. A network rents a theater, walks a season of shows across a stage, and advertisers commit billions of dollars to programming nobody has watched yet. It works because everyone in the room agrees on what is for sale. A thirty second spot is a thirty second spot. A rating point is a rating point. The whole thing runs on having a unit.

On Tuesday the IAB held the first one of those for creators. YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Twitch and Substack each took the stage in a Midtown conference space, the room was invite-only media buyers, and the number on the wall was $44 billion. And the most useful thing that happened all day, at least from where I sit, was the IAB's president standing up and explaining, more or less, why the room could not buy yet.

I don't think that was a stumble. I think it was the point. The buy side has spent two years saying creators are a real channel (I wrote about the IAB making it official back in Issue #30), and this week it finally sat down to do the paperwork and found out there is no unit. Nobody agrees what a view is. Nobody agrees how to measure whether it worked. And a lot of creators are, in the buyer's own words, hard to buy.

That third one is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the only one of the three you can fix yourself, and because the rest of this week's news reads like a bunch of different people rushing to propose a unit before the IAB picks one.

In this issue:

Let's dig in.

The creator economy got its first upfront on Tuesday, and the headline announcement was a survey about why deals keep breaking.

Some background, because the event itself is new. The IAB, which has run the NewFronts for digital video for well over a decade, announced last October that it was adding a CreatorFronts to its fall calendar. The pitch was to connect brands "with creator-led solutions grounded in authenticity, culture, and influence," which is the kind of sentence trade bodies write, but the structure underneath it was the interesting part: an invite-only marketplace day for qualified brand marketers, media buyers and agency people, with the platforms presenting to them. That is an upfront. It is the sell side pitching the buy side, in one room, on a schedule, with the expectation that money moves afterward.

It happened on September 15 at Convene on Madison Avenue, the first day of a three day run with the Podcast Upfront and the PlayFronts, and the anchor of what the IAB is calling Global Creator Week across 17 of its markets. The IAB's own framing is that U.S. creator ad spend hits $44 billion this year, growing four times faster than the media industry overall. YouTube, Meta, TikTok, Twitch, Substack, Fox and The Washington Post were on the presenter list. YouTube sponsored the closing reception. If you wanted a picture of the creator economy dressed up in television's clothes, this was it.

Here is what actually happened on stage, as Digiday reported it. IAB president James Douglas used the event to announce something called the Trusted Creator Brand Deal Initiative, and the first thing the initiative does is run a survey of where creator and brand deals break down across the supply chain. The early friction, per Douglas, comes in three places: what counts as a view, how performance gets measured, and whether creators are easy to buy. His line for it was that "improvisation is easy when a market is small. But at $44 billion, it's going to break." The IAB says it will use the survey results to set Q4 priorities and then work toward standardized measurement guidelines and creator pricing frameworks.

I want to take the three blockers one at a time, because they are not equally yours.

The view problem you already know about if you have been reading this for a month. YouTube changed what counts as a public view on August 24, Agentio measured the gap less than two weeks later and found that only about 60% of the new public views were engaged, and Agentio was on the CreatorFronts stage this week. So the buy side heard, from a company that sells creator ads, that the most visible number on the biggest platform now overstates attention by roughly 40%. That is not a creator's problem to solve, but it is a creator's problem to disclose, and I will come back to that.

The measurement problem is where the platforms did most of their talking. Meta's presentation was aimed squarely at the finance office, with Karin Tracy citing a 19% reduction in cost per action from creator commerce, and Ultra Pouches CMO Ankur Goyal made the case for treating creators as a creative production resource rather than a distribution buy. That framing matters more than the numbers, because it is the CFO's language. A CFO does not fund a channel because it is authentic. A CFO funds a channel that reports a cost per outcome in the same format as the other channels. Right now most creator work cannot do that, and the platforms know that if they build the reporting, the budget flows through them.

The third one, buyability, is the one I underlined. The buy side is saying, out loud, that a meaningful share of the creators it would like to pay are hard to find, hard to price and hard to transact with. Not unappealing. Hard. That is a very different complaint from "creators are too expensive" or "creators don't perform," and it is the one that a creator can fix alone, this week, without waiting for a standards body.

Now the part where I try to be fair to the IAB. This is what standards bodies do. The IAB is the organization that helped give display advertising its standard ad sizes and, alongside the MRC and the agencies, a working definition of a viewable impression, and both of those made a messy market buyable at scale. It is clearly trying to do the same thing here, and a market at $44 billion probably does need it. The honest caveats are that the survey is preliminary and the methodology has not been published, that $44 billion is a projection rather than a receipt, and that a bigger market does not automatically mean better margins for the people in it. When a standard lands, prices in the middle of the market tend to cluster around the benchmark, which is great if you were below it and painful if you were above it. But the alternative, which is the status quo, is a market where the CFO's money only reaches the handful of creators with an agency that can vouch for the numbers. Everybody else is improvising, and the IAB just told you what happens to improvisation at scale.

One more thing worth noticing about this week: almost every other story in this issue is somebody proposing a unit. YouTube shipped a TV co-viewing number and told creators to pitch with it. Two media analysts released a creator ranking with its own engagement formula. Meta put a price on the tools that make a creator's profile legible to a buyer. None of those are neutral. Each one would very much like to be the standard the IAB eventually blesses, and each one is built by a party that benefits if it is.

The bottom line: two of the three blockers the buy side named on Tuesday are somebody else's problem. The view definition will get settled by platforms and standards bodies, and measurement will get settled by whoever builds the reporting the finance office trusts. The third one is yours, and it is the one to fix before Q4 money moves, because the window where being easy to buy is a competitive advantage is exactly the window before there is a standard that makes everybody easy to buy. The pro-tip at the bottom is a one page version, built in the IAB's own order.

Three data points that tell a bigger story.

On Monday Evan Shapiro and Shira Lazar released the Affinity 100, a ranking of creators by what they are calling an Affinity Quotient, and the formula is the story. Per Shapiro's own write up, the score is likes plus comments plus twice the shares, divided by views, across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat over a 30 day window from August 4 to September 3. The top creator on each platform gets a 100 and everyone else is scored relative to them. Blair Imani, a historian and educator, is number one. B. Dylan Hollis, who bakes vintage recipes, is two. A pastry chef is three. MrBeast is 85, Mark Rober is 90, and Charli D'Amelio is 100. Shares are weighted double because, in Shapiro's words, they "have a higher propensity for fandom," which I think is right. A like costs nothing. A share puts your name on it. Now the caveats, which are real: the list is sponsored by Whalar Group and its software arm Foam, the underlying data is not auditable, and the qualifying pool was creators who already rank in the top 50 by followers on a major platform or appear on an industry list, so this is a ranking among people who already made it, not a discovery tool for the rest of us. What it is, in the context of this week, is a sell side proposal for a unit. The IAB said nobody agrees what a view is worth. Here are two people saying a share is worth two likes, showing their work, and putting the biggest names in the industry in the bottom fifth to prove they mean it. You can run that exact formula on your own last 30 days this afternoon, and if the number is good, it belongs on the page I describe at the bottom.

Net Influencer and the social listening firm dig published a format index on Saturday built on 58,037 U.S. TikTok posts from the first half of the year, and two numbers in it point in opposite directions. Videos with a purchase tag rose 55% in volume and fell 41% in relative engagement, landing around a 1.4% rate against a 6.4% average across the sample. Meanwhile photo carousels were the only high volume format that gained both share of posts (up about 20%) and engagement against the average (up about 15%), and 59% of those carousels came from accounts under 10,000 followers. The usual caution applies: this is a proprietary sample, not TikTok's data, and their engagement definition is likes plus comments over views, so it ignores saves, shares and, notably, sales. A shop tagged video could be converting at a rate that makes its engagement irrelevant. But I would not bet on that being true across 58,000 posts, and the direction is hard to argue with. Audiences are running their own diligence on what is buyable, and the content built to sell is the content they scroll past. The format small accounts are winning with is the one with no shop tag on it. If a brand wants to buy your TikTok audience, the honest pitch is probably the carousel that got shared, with the product in it, and the purchase tag somewhere other than the thing you are asking them to engage with.

Sydney Sweeney posted a 60 second spot for the sports prediction platform Novig on September 9, appearing nude behind strategically placed sports equipment, and Variety reports, citing Social Blade, that her Instagram gained about 50,000 followers over the first three days and then lost 136,848 on Sunday and another 68,000 on Monday as women athletes, including four time Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus, called out the sexualization of women's sports. Perspective first: that is under 1% of a 25.7 million follower account, the figures come from one third party tracker, and nobody can prove every unfollow was the ad. She is also an actress, not a creator, and she will be fine. The reason it belongs in this issue is the mechanism. Three weeks ago I wrote about a $5.4 billion AI company paying two filmmakers to say nice things and their audiences sending the invoice. This is the same invoice, except now it is a line on a chart that a brand's research team can pull in ten seconds, because Social Blade is exactly the tool they use to vet you. Buyability runs in both directions. The IAB is asking whether a buyer can transact with you. Your audience is deciding, in real time and in public, whether you are allowed to be bought for that. At 25.7 million followers, 1% is a news cycle. At 40,000 followers, 1% in two days is a trend line that shows up in someone's diligence, and you will not get to explain it.

What the platforms shipped this week and why you should care.

YouTube has added two private metrics to Analytics, Views (Co-Viewed) and Unique Reach, that estimate how many people were watching together on one TV screen, and Tubefilter's read is that the intent is explicit: creator liaison Rene Ritchie described it as a platform backed number to use when negotiating brand deals. YouTube says viewers watch over a billion hours a day on TV screens. It has not said how the co-viewing figure is estimated, and declined to explain when asked.

Why this matters for creators: This is YouTube proposing a unit, two weeks after it made the public one looser. Use it, but label it. In a pitch, Co-Viewed is "an estimated household figure YouTube models for TV playback," it sits on its own line, and it never gets added to your view count. Paired with your engaged view number, it is genuinely useful, because it tells a brand that the living room is part of your audience, and living room attention is the thing television buyers already know how to price. Presented as a bigger reach number with no asterisk, it is the thing that gets you caught the first time a brand's analyst asks what it means, which, given the room the IAB just assembled, they are about to start doing.

Back in June I flagged Meta's creator and business subscription tiers when they launched, mostly for the $49.99 plan that bought you placement. On Tuesday Meta wrapped the whole stack under a brand called Meta One, started rolling it out globally, and attached a number: more than 50 features, and 15 million subscriptions and trials so far. The creator and business bundles run from Essential at $14.99 a month through Advanced at $49.99, Expert at $149 and Max at $499. Essential gets you story scheduling up to 30 days out, links inside organic posts and Reels, exportable analytics and deeper audience insights, a verified badge, team access without sharing your password, and impersonation protection. Meta says the core apps stay free.

Why this matters for creators: Two features on that list are worth pricing on their own. Links in organic posts and Reels is the obvious one. If you run any affiliate or brand link on Instagram, $14.99 a month to move it from the bio into the post pays for itself the first time a brand asks for click through, and the exportable analytics are the other half of the buyability problem, since a buyer wants your numbers in a file, not a screenshot. The one to sit with is impersonation protection, because The Guardian spent the weekend documenting creators whose faces are being used in AI generated ads they never made, running on Meta's own platforms, and the protection against that is now a line item in a subscription. I would pay it. I would also notice what it means that the professional layer, the part that makes you legible to a buyer, is the part that costs money now.

IMDb and IMDbPro added Digital Creator as a profession last Thursday, with six sub-professions: Streamer, Vlogger, Video Essayist, Video Creator, Gaming Creator and Influencer. For the first time you do not need an existing film or television credit to claim a page. IMDb CEO Nikki Santoro's framing was that "producers, casting directors, studio executives and brand partners need a reliable way to find" internet native talent. The option is currently limited to IMDbPro Premium members, and there is no evidence yet that a listing drives deal flow.

Why this matters for creators: This is the findability half of buyability, and it comes from the directory Hollywood already uses. If any part of your plan involves being cast, commissioned, or booked by someone who came up in television, claim the page, and pick the sub-profession for the work you want next, not the one you do most. Put a representative's contact on it, or your own booking email if you have no rep, and link it from the profile a brand actually lands on. Then treat it as what it is, a listing and not a strategy. The Tubi and Disney commissions we have covered this summer went to creators whose formats were already proven on their own channels. IMDb will make you easier to find. It will not make you worth finding.

Build the buyability page. One page, three sections, in the IAB's own order.

The buy side just published its complaint list, so use it as a spec. The goal is a single page where a buyer can go from "found you" to "signed" without needing a phone call, and it is organized around the three things the IAB says break: the view, the measurement, and the transaction.

Section one is your view definition, and it is one line per platform. Something like: "YouTube: I report engaged views. Over the last 90 days my public to engaged ratio is 1.6 to 1, so a video showing 100,000 public views delivered about 62,000 engaged views." Then the same for Instagram (plays versus reach, say which), and TikTok (first frame views, say so). If you have the new YouTube Co-Viewed figure, it gets its own labeled line as a modeled household estimate, never folded into a total. The point of this section is not that your numbers are large. It is that a buyer who reads it never has to ask what they mean, which is the exact question the IAB says is stalling deals. Include one screenshot of the analytics screen each number came from, so the page is evidence rather than a claim.

Section two is measurement you can deliver without the brand's help, because most of the measurement problem the IAB described is brands waiting on data they cannot get. Commit to three things in writing. A post campaign report at day 7 and day 30, using the same metrics as section one, delivered on a date. A link or code that you control, which on Instagram now means a link inside the post rather than the bio, and on YouTube means a tagged product or a UTM you built. And one audience response number that is yours: a shares per view rate over the campaign window, which is the Affinity formula from Signal Watch run on your own posts, or a comment poll result if you are on TikTok. Attach a blank version of the report so the buyer sees the format before they buy.

Section three is the transaction, and this is where most creators are hard to buy without knowing it. A rate card with three deliverable bundles, not a rate on request. A usage term stated on the card, for example 30 days organic on your channels included, paid usage and whitelisting priced separately, so the number that swings most from deal to deal is the one you defined. A way to pay you that does not require the brand to onboard you as a vendor, which usually means an invoicing tool that takes a card. A W-9 or the local equivalent already in the folder. Stated turnaround times. And one contact email that a stranger could find from your profile, your IMDbPro page, and the enhanced profile Meta is now selling, all pointing at the same address.

Then send it before Q4 budgets lock. Digiday's in and out list for Q4 says what is in is longer, operational brand relationships and clearer contracts, and what is out is the one off endorsement. A buyer who wants a relationship needs to be able to see, on one page, how the relationship would work. Most creators are competing for those budgets with a media kit that answers "who are you" and nothing else. This page answers "how do I buy you," and for the next few months, until there is a standard, that answer is rare enough to be an advantage.

That's all for this week. Go make yourself easy to buy: write the one page before the Q4 money moves, and make sure the first number on it is one nobody has to ask about. And if someone forwarded this to you, sign up to get your own issue every Thursday.