Before Glassdoor, salary negotiations were a guessing game. Employers knew the market. Most employees didn't. The result was predictable: information asymmetry consistently favoured the party that had more of it.
Creator sponsorships work the same way.
Brands have media kits, agency rate cards, and years of deal data across dozens of creators. They know — within a fairly tight range — what a newsletter with 30,000 subscribers and a 40% open rate should cost. Most creators don't know that. They set rates based on what a friend charges, what they read in a Discord server, or what felt plausible the first time they had to write a number in an email.
That gap costs creators real money.
What the data actually shows
We built Creator Rates because we wanted to see what the distribution of creator sponsorship rates actually looks like — not the top-line averages that get quoted in industry reports, but the full picture.
A few things jumped out immediately.
The most significant was how spread out rates are, even within the same audience size. Two newsletter writers with 20,000 subscribers and similar open rates can charge wildly different amounts — not because of audience quality, but because one of them happened to start higher and the other never had a reference point to push back from.
The second was how much the "CPM" framing obscures. Quoting a rate in cost-per-thousand-subscribers sounds objective, but a 20,000-subscriber list with a 15% open rate delivers 3,000 opens. A list with a 45% open rate delivers 9,000. Same subscriber count, completely different reach — and the effective CPM (what the brand is actually paying per person who sees the ad) is three times higher for one of them.
Brands know this. Most creators don't calculate it this way.
The Glassdoor model, applied to creators
What Glassdoor did for salaries was simple: create a mechanism for people to share what they actually earned, anonymously, so that the aggregate became useful information for everyone.
The same model works for creator rates. If enough creators are willing to share what they actually charge — not what they think they should charge, what they actually charge — the aggregate tells you where you sit in the market. Not in the abstract, but compared to creators with a similar audience size in your space.
That's what Creator Rates does. You submit your rates; you unlock your position in the distribution. Anonymously — your individual data is never published. The benchmark comes from the aggregate.
It's not perfect. The data is thinner in some niches and platforms than others. But the direction is right: the more creators who contribute, the more accurate the picture becomes for everyone.
Why it matters beyond the individual creator
There's a collective action problem here. If most creators are underpricing — and the data suggests a meaningful share are — then "the market rate" that gets passed around informally is itself depressed. Creators anchoring on that number reinforce it.
Transparency breaks that cycle. When creators can see that their peer group charges $X at the median, they have something to anchor on that isn't their own gut or a friend's anecdote. It shifts the floor.
Glassdoor didn't just help individual employees negotiate better. It changed the baseline. Salary norms became more visible, more contested, more accurate.
Creator rates can move the same way.
What to do with your number
If you haven't checked where your rates sit relative to your peer group, that's the obvious first step. Submit your rates to Creator Rates and see your position in the distribution — it takes about two minutes.
If you're below the median, you have something concrete to work with. You're not undercharging because of your instincts; you're undercharging relative to creators with comparable reach and engagement. That's a more useful thing to know.
If you're above the median, that's worth knowing too. It tells you something about where you compete and what you can reasonably hold on price.
Either way, you're negotiating with information instead of without it. That's the point.