📉 You Are Not an Influencer. Stop Measuring Like One.

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Hey Reader,

A creator recently polled 792 of her followers and asked them a simple question: when do you stop liking a creator you follow? She fed the responses into Claude and pulled the top five reasons.

5️⃣ Number five was politics.
4️⃣ Number four was saying one thing and doing another.
3️⃣ Number three was feeling out of touch with normal life.
2️⃣ Number two was losing authenticity, everything starting to feel scripted and performed for views.
1️⃣ And number one, by a significant margin at 28%, was when a creator does nothing but sell. Too many links, too many ads, the whole feed feeling like a commercial.

A second creator then analyzed this data and named something worth borrowing: the influencer cliff. The moment when fans fall out of love with an internet figure they once held dear, either gradually or suddenly and spectacularly, usually triggered when a creator tries to cross from platform-level popularity into a viable business in the outside world and the seams start to show.

Both videos are worth watching here & here. But I want to push back on something, because neither video makes a distinction that I think is critical.

This data is describing influencers. Not creators. And if you are reading this newsletter, you are probably not an influencer, even if you have been quietly measuring yourself against influencer outcomes and wondering why the math does not work.

An influencer's entire business model is their public image. The audience IS the product. The parasocial relationship IS the inventory. Which means the second that relationship fractures, whether from a brand deal that feels inauthentic, a values misalignment, or simply too many links in the bio, the business fractures with it. There is nothing underneath. No ecosystem, no owned list, no body of work that compounds independently of the algorithm. Just the attention, and then the cliff when the attention goes.

A creator who runs a real business is operating in an entirely different category.

The content you make supports the marketing and branding efforts of your real revenue lines. Your podcast, your YouTube channel, your newsletter, none of those are the business. They are the distribution system for the business. And that distinction changes everything about how you measure success, build your audience, and think about monetization.

You are not the product. Unless you are a celebrity. And celebrity is a dying industry.

Here is the pattern that comes with a very predictable and expensive invoice attached. Someone builds an audience using influencer tactics because those tactics are visible, easy to copy, and they do generate numbers. The numbers feel like proof. Then comes the reckoning: the audience they built is tuned in for entertainment and parasocial comfort, not outcomes. They are resistant to being sold to. They are essentially useless for the business goals that motivated the whole operation. So now there is a rebuild, on a different platform, with different positioning, at a cost that is often ten times higher than if they had started with a clear business foundation in the first place.

That is not one person's story. That is a pattern. And the invoice is always a surprise to exactly the people it should not surprise.

The data from these reels is useful, but not in the way most creators will read it. Most will read it as a list of things to avoid so they do not lose followers. Do not be too political. Do not sell too much. Do not seem out of touch.

That is the wrong takeaway entirely.

This data describes an audience that wants to suspend reality. That came for entertainment and parasocial comfort. That will turn on you the moment you try to run a business in front of them. If that is your audience, that is a positioning problem. Not a content problem.

The influencer model is dying because it was never a business. It was a popularity contest with a monetization layer bolted on. The people falling off the cliff right now are not falling because they made mistakes. They are falling because there was never anything underneath the audience to land on.

You do not have to be famous to have a thriving media business. You do not have to win a popularity contest. You do not have to build a parasocial relationship so carefully calibrated that any whiff of commerce shatters it.

What you have to do is be clear about what your content is for, who it is serving, and how it connects to a real revenue line that you own and control.

Being a creator should not mean competing in a popularity contest. Quantity of audience does not get you quality. And quality is what converts.

You will never see me selling pipe dreams around here because a podcast, a YouTube channel, a paid newsletter, none of those things are the point in isolation. The point is whether what you are creating is building a business or just building an audience that will eventually want you to perform for free forever and get mad when you try to pay your bills.

Those are two very different outcomes. Only one of them is worth your time.

👉 Check out the Dojo and learn to build content that functions as a profit center, not a popularity contest.

👉 Or join us for our Claude Design workshop this month and start reclaiming the time going into the content hamster wheel so you can redirect it toward the work that moves your business forward.

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🗞️ Gossip From the Creator Trenches

⭐️ The Celebrity Ceiling Is Cracking

The whole notion of celebrity is losing its gravitational pull and the creator economy is where name recognition is taking a seat at the head of the table. Gen Z is the first generation that grew up without movie and television stars anchoring cultural notoriety, which means the attachment to traditional fame as the only path to influence is genuinely generational and genuinely fading. If you can decouple "celebrity" from "media presence" you are more than halfway to monetizing your content far more effectively than the old model ever allowed. The scale that feels intimidatingly big is not actually big anymore. It is just accessible. Yes, even for your courses and your webinar funnel.
🔗 Examples of how to take back control​

💸 Profit First. Community Second. In That Order.

This comes up in the quiet and private spaces at Sasquatch Media Grounds more than almost any other topic, especially with women and marginalized creators, and I am going to say it plainly here too. You cannot sustainably give to causes, communities, or audiences you have not yet funded yourself to support. Profit before pledge is not selfish. It is structurally sound. If your content is eating cash instead of generating it, the question worth sitting with honestly is whether you have built your show around your profit first or whether you skipped that step entirely in service of generosity you cannot yet afford. Watch this one and answer the question it asks you.
🔗 Start with yourself​

💰 The Brand Deal Era Your Size Has Been Waiting For

The sponsorship pendulum is swinging back and if you have been watching large list influencers dominate brand deals for the past decade and assuming that world was not for you, pay attention right now. Brands are quietly losing faith in big reach with low engagement and actively searching for smaller, more intimate, highly engaged audiences instead. That is you. The era of brand deals specifically designed for micro creators is back on the menu and learning how to set up the infrastructure to receive those deals is the work happening inside the Dojo right now.
🔗 See what they're doing​

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🤖 Your Promo Content Shouldn't Take This Long

Claude Design just dropped... and we're already putting it to work.

On May 27th, Everett Cento (the person who quietly runs the AI engine at Sasquatch Media Grounds) is teaching a live workshop on how to use Claude Design to generate polished, on-brand social content from your actual brand assets.💨 Faster.💨 Without the token-limit wall.💨 Without starting from scratch every single time.💨

This is not a "here's what AI can do" hype session. This is hands-on, your-brand-in-the-tool, walk away with a working system in two hours + at least one (if not more) quality posts ready to schedule.

It's open to everyone 🎉 Dojo members, you already have this. Everyone else, tickets are $97 and the recording comes with it.

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Let's Hang Out If traditional networking makes you want to fake an emergency exit, this one is different. The Awkward Handshake Collab Lab is a structured two-hour event designed around one radical idea: showing up with a real ask and a real offer instead of a stack of business cards and a rehearsed elevator pitch. Join Megan and me on May 28th in Vancouver, WA and spots are capped under 50 so it stays intentional.

Participate + Join In: My friend Rachel Allen is running a podcast pitching workshop on May 27th and she is the real deal… a master copywriter who books herself on 50+ shows a year and actually teaches you how to make those guest spots convert into clients. I am already working with Rachel to bring her into the Dojo for a special session this summer, but if you want in now the workshop is $297 and includes a replay.