Latest / Influencer Marketing with Fexingo: Creators, Sponsorships, and Modern Endorsement Deals / Why Influencers Are Now Buying Their Own Influencers
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this beauty influencer — let's call her Mia — who has 2.3 million followers on Instagram. She's established, she's got brand deals with L'Oreal and Glossier, the whole thing. But a few months ago, she started doing something quietly different. Luna: Different how? She launch a product line? Lucas: No — she started paying smaller influencers to promote her. Not as an affiliate, not as a brand partnership. She hired them to post about her, to talk about her content, to drive traffic to her page. She became the brand, and the micro-influencers became her media buy. Luna: Wait — so instead of a brand paying her, she's paying other creators to promote her personal brand? That's like a reverse sponsorship. Lucas: Exactly. And it's a growing trend. We've talked a lot on this show about how influencers are acting like media companies — buying billboards, buying podcast ads, running their own data clean rooms. This is the next logical step: they're buying their own influencers. Luna: And it's not just beauty, right? I've seen fitness accounts do this too. A trainer with a million followers paying twenty girls with ten-thousand followers each to post transformation photos and tag her. Lucas: Exactly. And the numbers are real. We got our hands on a breakdown from a talent manager who worked with Mia. Over six months, she spent about forty thousand dollars — payments between two hundred and fifteen hundred dollars per post — to about fifty different micro-influencers. Luna: And the return? Lucas: She tracked it using a custom affiliate link and a promo code. Her estimate was that she generated about one hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars in earned media value — that's a 3.2x return. But more importantly, her follower growth rate doubled in that period, and her engagement rate on organic posts jumped from 3.1 percent to 4.7 percent. Luna: So it works. But here's the thing I keep coming back to — this is what brands do. Brands pay influencers. If influencers start paying other influencers, where does that leave the brand-influencer relationship? Is it still a partnership, or is it now a competition? Lucas: That's exactly the right question. And look — we talk about these dynamics every week on this show, and if these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, I'll just say this: we deliberately keep this podcast ad-free. No sponsors, no mid-rolls. If that's something you value, the link to support is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep this independent. Luna: Totally. And it's exactly because we can dig into these nuanced shifts without worrying about upsetting a sponsor. Back to Mia — the legal side is interesting too. When a brand pays an influencer, the FTC requires a clear disclosure — #ad, #sponsored. But when an influencer pays another influencer, the rules are murkier. Lucas: Right. The FTC guidelines say that any material connection between an endorser and the party being endorsed must be disclosed. If Mia is paying a creator to post about her, that's a material connection. But in the sample we looked at, only about 30 percent of the posts had any disclosure at all. Some had a vague '#collab' or '#partner', which doesn't meet the standard. Luna: And what's the rationale from the influencers doing this? I talked to a talent manager who represents a few of these micro-influencers. She said her clients view it as a paid endorsement, just like a brand deal. They treat it professionally. Lucas: Exactly. So the infrastructure is already there. Contracts, invoices, briefs. Some of these deals even specify the exact caption, the time of posting, and the hashtags to use. It looks exactly like a traditional sponsorship — just with an individual instead of a corporation. Luna: That's wild. And it's not just individuals. I've seen influencer agencies — the ones that represent mid-tier creators — start offering 'promotion packages' where they bundle three or four of their clients to boost a single creator's profile. It's like a media network, but for people. Lucas: Right. And that's where it gets really interesting. Because if you're a brand like L'Oreal, you're now competing for the attention of these micro-influencers with the influencers themselves. And the influencers might actually be better clients — they're more responsive, they understand the content, and they pay faster. Luna: Do we have any sense of how widespread this is? Is it a few hundred creators, or is it becoming a structural part of the ecosystem? Lucas: We don't have a census, but we can look at signals. One data point: the number of creator to creator payments processed through platforms like GRIN and AspireIQ — which are influencer marketing platforms — has grown about 140 percent year over year. That's not just brands paying creators anymore. Some of those payments are creator to creator. Luna: And the platform themselves are starting to notice. Instagram now has a feature where you can boost a post from another account — effectively paying to promote someone else's content. That's essentially a built-in tool for this behavior. Lucas: Yes. But the twist is that Mia didn't use that feature. She paid for organic posts, not boosted ones. She wanted the endorsement to feel authentic, not like an ad. That's the whole point — the earned media value is higher when it looks like a genuine recommendation. Luna: So we're back to the disclosure issue. Because if it looks genuine but isn't, that's deceptive. The FTC has been cracking down on influencer disclosures in general — they sent warning letters to a bunch of influencers last year. But I wonder if they're tracking this particular inversion. Lucas: It's a blind spot. The FTC's guidance is written for the traditional brand-influencer relationship. When the endorser and the beneficiary are both individuals, it's harder to enforce. And honestly, the platforms don't have great tools for it either. Instagram's paid partnership tag requires a brand partner — it's not designed for one creator to tag another as a paid partner. Luna: So the regulation is lagging. That's typical, but it creates risk. If a creator gets fined for non-disclosure, that's a big hit — especially for a micro-influencer who might have made only a few hundred dollars from the deal. Lucas: Right. And that's why some of the bigger creators are actually being more careful. Mia, for example, now requires her paid creators to use #ad in the first three lines of the caption. She's trying to stay ahead of the rules. Luna: It's a smart move. But it also changes the nature of the content. The whole reason she's paying micro-influencers is for that organic feel. If you put #ad on it, you lose some of that magic. So there's a tension there — compliance versus performance. Lucas: Exactly. And that tension is the core of this episode. We're seeing a structural shift where influencers are becoming both the product and the advertiser. They're internalizing the entire marketing funnel. And that has implications for how brands think about their own budgets. Luna: If I'm a brand manager, I'd be asking: should I redirect some of my influencer budget to paying creators to promote my influencer? Or should I just hire the micro-influencers directly? The intermediary — the macro-influencer — adds cost. Lucas: But it also adds reach. Mia's 2.3 million followers are a different audience than a micro-influencer's ten thousand. And when Mia pays a micro-influencer, she's effectively buying access to that micro-influencer's trust with their audience. That trust is hard to replicate with a direct brand deal. Luna: So it's a new kind of arbitrage. The macro-influencer monetizes their brand equity by buying smaller audiences and bundling them. It's almost like a media buying agency, but for individuals. Lucas: Yes. And we're starting to see agencies that specialize in this. There's one in Los Angeles called CreatorX — they don't represent talent. They help influencers run these campaigns. They manage the payments, the contracts, the performance tracking. It's a whole new service category. Luna: And what's the typical price range? For a micro-influencer with, say, five thousand engaged followers, what would a macro-influencer pay? Lucas: From the data I've seen, it's roughly fifty to two hundred dollars per post for the smallest tier. For a nano-influencer with one to two thousand followers, it can be as low as twenty dollars. But the macro-influencer is often buying in bulk — they'll pay five thousand dollars for a package of fifty posts across different accounts. That's a hundred dollars per post average. Luna: And how do they measure success? Is it just follower growth, or are they tracking actual conversions? Lucas: The sophisticated ones are using unique discount codes or affiliate links. Mia's campaign had a specific promo code — 'MIAMAGIC' — that gave 10 percent off her merch. That let her directly attribute sales to each micro-influencer. She found that some with smaller followings but higher engagement actually outperformed the ones with larger followings. Luna: So it's a performance-based model. That's closer to how brands think. It's not just about vanity metrics. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the key takeaway here: influencers are adopting the same tools and strategies that brands use. They're no longer just talent. They're becoming media buyers, campaign managers, and brand strategists all rolled into one. Luna: So where does this go next? In a year or two, do we see top influencers launching their own 'influencer networks'? Like a talent agency, but for their own brand? Lucas: I think that's already happening. There are a few mega-influencers who have quietly built rosters of smaller creators they work with regularly. They don't call it a network, but functionally, that's what it is. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see more formal structures — maybe even an influencer-owned platform that matches creators with other creators for paid promotions. Luna: That would be a game-changer. It would disintermediate the brands entirely in some cases. Imagine a beauty influencer who doesn't need a brand deal because she's making money from promoting other influencers. The entire sponsorship ecosystem flips. Lucas: And that's the long arc. We're moving from a world where brands pay influencers to a world where influencers pay each other. Brands become just another customer in a creator to creator economy. It's early, but the signals are there. Luna: I'm going to be watching this closely. And I think a lot of brand marketers should too. Lucas: Absolutely. Next week, we're going to look at how this is affecting the pricing of traditional influencer sponsorships. If influencers are willing to pay two hundred dollars for a post that a brand might pay five hundred for, where does that leave the market? It's going to be interesting.