The Campaign Network Simulator
Each orb is a creator orbiting your brand hub. Drag to rotate. Change budget, creator count and tier — the network and the economics update live.
Four Numbers That Run Every Campaign
CPM — Cost per 1,000 impressions
CPM = (spend ÷ impressions) × 1,000. Creator campaigns are judged against paid-ads CPM. If Meta ads cost ~$12 CPM and your creator campaign lands at $8, the campaign beat paid media on raw delivery.
Engagement rate
Nano creators (1k–10k followers) often see 4–8% engagement; macro creators (500k+) often drop below 1.5%. Smaller audiences trust harder — which is why many campaigns fan out across many small creators.
Reach overlap
Two creators in the same niche share followers. Real deduplicated reach is usually 70–90% of the naive sum. Good campaign tooling estimates overlap so you do not double-count.
Cost per engagement
CPE = spend ÷ (likes + comments + shares + clicks). For conversion-driven campaigns, CPE and cost-per-click matter more than impressions — attention you can act on beats attention you can only count.
Worked Example: $25k, two strategies
Same budget, opposite structures. Assumptions: nano creators average 8,000 reach per post at $250/post with 6% engagement; one macro creator delivers 900,000 reach for $25,000 at 1.2% engagement.
| Metric | 25 nano creators | 1 macro creator |
|---|---|---|
| Spend | $6,250 (rest reserved) | $25,000 |
| Raw reach | 200,000 | 900,000 |
| CPM | $31 — but… | $28 |
| Engagements | 12,000 (6%) | 10,800 (1.2%) |
| Cost per engagement | $0.52 | $2.31 |
The macro buy wins on reach; the nano swarm wins on engagement cost by ~4.4× — and leaves $18,750 to boost the top-performing posts. This is why professional campaign managers obsess over tier mix, not follower counts.
Why "Infrastructure for the Creator Economy" Is a Real Problem
Coordination cost grows superlinearly
10 creators means 10 contracts, 10 content approvals, 10 payment schedules and 10 reporting threads. At 100 creators, manual ops collapse — the same reason ad networks and DSPs emerged for banner ads in the 2000s.
Measurement is fragmented
Each platform reports differently (views vs. impressions vs. unique reach). Campaign management software normalizes metrics so a TikTok view and a YouTube view can sit in one dashboard honestly labeled.
Payments and compliance
Creators are global contractors: tax forms, currency conversion, disclosure rules (like FTC #ad requirements in the US). Infrastructure layers automate what agencies once did with lawyers and spreadsheets.