Opinion: After more than a decade working with creators, Day Management founder Genevieve Day explains why follower counts matter less than many marketers think—and what businesses should be measuring instead
In 2015, I founded one of the country’s first digital-talent agencies, Day Management. I have been working in the creator economy since… well, before it was called the creator economy.
When I began my career, it was all about bloggers and flat-lays and monochromatic outfit posts in a pre-TikTok world. I’ve watched the shift from bloggers to influencers to creators, while I’ve been managing talent, building careers and facilitating global brand campaigns. For much of that decade, I watched the industry chase one particularly seductive vanity metric: follower count.
Two scenarios often play out. Brands are chasing clout and credibility, so they gravitate towards creators with massive followings, hoping visibility will translate into sales. But without looking closely at who makes up that audience, those campaigns can underperform despite the impressive numbers.
Meanwhile, smaller creators with highly engaged communities often blow brands away with their ability to move the needle, proving that influence is measured less by reach than by trust.
The obsession with followers
So how did we get here? And why, in 2026, are brands, and us too as founders, entrepreneurs and consumers, still being distracted by a metric that doesn’t matter?
The early influencer market was built on borrowed logic from traditional media. Reach was the currency of broadcast advertising, so reach became the currency of creator partnerships. Brands asked for it. Agencies benchmarked against it. Talent managers, yes even me in the early days, led with it in every pitch.
Creators felt this acutely. The follower count became the factor that determined who got meetings, who got campaigns, and who got taken seriously.
The industry’s obsession with the metric saw creators making content designed to go viral and gain followers, at the expense of their own audience. Virality over depth. Style over substance.
The metric that matters
The antidote to all of this is focusing on community. A quote that I saw written down once, and can’t stop referencing, is “a stadium full of people who don’t care is worth less than a dinner table of people who do”.
I’ve seen brand deals for someone with an audience of 20,000 out-earn creators who have millions of followers. In one recent campaign, a creator with fewer than 10,000 followers attracted a level of brand interest usually reserved for accounts several times larger. All because of the relationship they had built with their audience.
A tightly defined, deeply trusting audience is a huge advantage. It’s harder to replicate, and significantly harder to erode. In a crowded market, your community quickly establishes your unique selling point.
What does this look like? It’s the flood of comments on your posts saying how your content makes them feel heard. It’s the “dark data” of post shares populating your audience’s group chats. It’s the people in the street who stop creators to say hi and grab a selfie.
It’s also what every brand wants when you strip away the vanity metrics. They want access to a group of people who trust the person recommending something enough to act on it.
The creators who perform the best are often those who treat their audience as a community rather than a number. Chef and content creator Conor Curran (850,000 followers) and Sydney lifestyle creator Lucy Neville (40,000 followers) have different audience sizes, but both have built highly engaged communities that trust their recommendations and actively participate in their content.
Building social media engagement
Now how can you do this for our own businesses and personal brand? Quality audiences don’t happen by accident. They happen when you’re clear about who you’re talking to.
If you’re looking to enrich your own audience, moving them from a follower count to a real and robust community, the advice is simple. Write or post with a specific person in mind. What do they already know? What are they struggling with? What would make them stop scrolling and read?
Say the thing other people are thinking but not saying. Resonance comes from recognition. When someone reads something and thinks, that’s exactly it, that’s when they share it, save it and follow for more. Invest in relationships, not just reach. Reply to comments. Have real conversations. Be the kind of person whose work people genuinely want to share.
Rethinking influence
For brands, the implication is equally clear. Don’t discount the mid and micro-creators. Their engagement rates and conversion stats alone should make you pay attention. The brief shouldn’t start with a minimum follower count, but with the audience behaviour you need to move.
The creator economy is maturing, and maturity means more sophisticated measurement and strategy. The brands investing in long-term creator relationships rather than one-off reach plays are already seeing the difference. The same goes for talent agencies building rosters around audience trust rather than vanity metrics
Because the size of your audience right now is not the measure of your potential. In fact, the follower count was never really the point. It was always the relationship – and the people behind it.
Genevieve Day is the founder and CEO of Day Management, one of Australia’s first influencer talent agencies, and a Forbes Australia 30 Under 30 alumnus.
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