Creator rate benchmarks from real engagement on 1,187 accounts: fair ranges by follower tier, fully recomputable

Key finding: Measured from real average engagement on 1,187 accounts: per 1K followers, small accounts command a 43% premium over large ones. Fair range = average engagements per post × CPE (0.5) × 0.7–1.4 — the formula is public and recomputable.

Nearly every public rate card prices by follower tier — so much for a nano, so much for a micro. The flaw: followers can be bought; equivalent engagement cannot. We start instead from what a post actually delivers — engagements — and compute fair ranges across 1,187 accounts with 30-day average engagement data.

The formula is fully public: average engagements per post × cost-per-engagement (CPE, 0.5 here) × 0.7–1.4. The same arithmetic is printed on the Koinon Fair Score certificate we issue to creators — both sides see the same math.

Fair ranges by follower tier

The per-1K-follower column is the point. If linear follower pricing were right, that column would be flat. Measured: per 1K followers, small accounts command a 43% premium over large ones — a bigger following carries a larger share of silent followers who never see the content, so paying a big account at a small account's per-follower rate means paying for dormancy. The exact multiple recomputes daily; the table on this page is authoritative.

How to use it

When a creator quotes you: ① take their average engagements (likes + comments + shares) over the last 10–15 posts; ② multiply by the CPE you can justify (it varies widely by category — high-ticket B2B can exceed 1, FMCG often sits below 0.5); ③ the fair band is ×0.7 to ×1.4. A quote above the band leaves room to negotiate; below it is good value if the metrics are genuine. Or skip the arithmetic with the rate estimator.

Metric and limits

· This page uses only engagement data whose metric is confirmed as a 30-day average (engage_avg). We never convert peak-post numbers into a pseudo-average — there is no measured conversion factor, and inventing one inflates everyone's price. · 100.0% of the sample comes from Douyin, so discount cross-platform extrapolation: absolute values differ elsewhere, but the collapse of per-follower pricing with size is structural. · CPE is an assumption, not a market price: substitute your own number for 0.5 and the whole table scales proportionally.

Methodology

The sample is 1,187 creator accounts indexed and validated inside Koinon Link. It is not every creator on these platforms, and it is not a random sample — it comes from our keyword-driven collection, which skews toward AI software, e-commerce and gaming.

"Suspected inflated" is our own anomaly detection, not a platform-official flag: it looks at whether follower growth arrived in vertical steps, whether the engagement-to-follower ratio sits far outside the normal band for that platform and size tier, and how templated the engagement looks. It means "worth a manual check", not "this account is definitely cheating".

All figures are recomputed daily; this page shows the most recent run.