Million-Pound Posts Reach Fewer People Each Year

A deodorant brand paid an influencer one million pounds to post on Instagram.

The post looked like a casual endorsement, like discovery, like the thing that made the influencer famous in the first place. It was the ability to find something true and share it, unfiltered, to millions of people who had come to trust their taste. The brand's chief executive went on record explaining the economics. The rate reflects audience size and engagement, market value, and the influencer's power.

What it actually reflects is the opposite. Five years ago, an influencer with that audience size might have charged fifty thousand pounds for the same post. The growth in rates has been steep and consistent while engagement metrics have moved the opposite direction.

Less of the audience sees the post. Of those who do, fewer interact with it. The algorithm distributes content to smaller percentages of followers year after year—while the price climbs. Brands are paying exponentially more for demonstrably less reach, and this is not a market functioning normally.

Brands are paying exponentially more for demonstrably less reach.

This is a market in collapse pretending to be booming. A brand cannot admit that influencer marketing delivers diminishing returns because the entire sector's valuation depends on the fiction that these channels still move the needle. Influencers cannot admit that their reach has eroded because their rates would crater immediately. So both parties collude in a kind of economic performance art. The rates climb to signal health, the payments prove value, and the proof consists entirely of the payments themselves.

It is a closed loop that only functions if nobody opens it.

This mirrors something you have likely done in your own work—continued investing in a channel, a method, or a relationship because walking away would require admitting the previous investment failed. The sunk cost is real. The future cost of honesty is higher. So you pay a little more next time, hoping the next payment will be the one that breaks the spell and proves you were right all along. The market does not collapse.