Performance-Based Creator Deals Sound Fair. They're Not.

Everyone in the industry is calling it progress.

Flat fees are out. Performance-based deals are in. Brands are demanding accountability. Creators are getting "skin in the game." The model is fairer, more aligned, built for the modern creator economy.

I've sat in rooms where these structures were written.

Here's what the press releases leave out.

For about a decade, brand deals worked like media buys. Creator posts. Brand pays flat fee. Nobody knew exactly what happened next, and nobody really had to.

That model is collapsing. Engagement rates have dropped roughly 40% over three years as AI-generated content floods feeds and audience attention fragments across more platforms than anyone can track. Brands want ROI. Fair enough. So they changed the deal structure.

Performance-based partnerships now come in a few flavours: pure commission (you earn per sale or install), hybrid (a floor payment plus performance upside), and affiliate-forward (the affiliate link becomes the primary compensation mechanism rather than a bonus). In 2026, these aren't niche experiments. They're increasingly the standard offer for mid-tier creators. The 100K to 1M range where the real disruption is happening.

The framing around this shift is almost universally positive. Brands say it creates accountability. Creator economy commentators say it aligns incentives. It sounds like the industry grew up.

It didn't.

Here's the thing performance deal advocates don't say out loud: the creator controls the content. That's it.

Everything that happens between your post and the conversion?

That's the brand's domain. The product quality. Not you.

The landing page that your link points to? Not you. The checkout flow, the pricing, the current promotional offer, the competing ads the brand is running simultaneously? None of it. The platform algorithm on the day your content goes live? DEFINITELY not you.

I ran campaigns at HYPR where we drove serious results. We exceeded all McDonald's campaign goals by 3x, Amazon Prime hit 2.9 million impressions. In those campaigns, we controlled strategy and execution. But even we couldn't control what happened on the brand's end of the funnel once traffic arrived.

When someone accepts a flat fee deal, the brand absorbs the conversion risk. When that same creator signs a performance deal, they absorb it instead. That's the actual transaction happening under the surface of "fairer, more aligned incentives."

If TikTok changes its algorithm the week your campaign launches (which they do, regularly, without warning) you earn less. If the brand's product page is converting at 1.2% instead of the 3% they told you to expect: your problem. If seasonality tanks impulse purchases the month of your post: also your problem.

None of these variables are in your contract. All of them are outside your control.

Brands shifted to performance models for a real reason: 50% of marketing leaders say they still can't accurately measure influencer ROI. That's a real problem.

But here's what's interesting — the solution they landed on wasn't to fix their measurement infrastructure. It was to make the measurement problem the creator's problem instead. If you only pay for results, you don't need to prove the results are attributable. The creator either converts or they don't.

This is not conspiracy. It's a rational business decision. If I can push ROI risk to my supplier, I will. Every brand in every industry does this when they can get away with it.
The issue is that creators are accepting the framing "performance deals are fairer" without interrogating the mechanics. The deal is fair if the creator controls all the variables that drive performance. In almost every performance deal structure I've seen, they don't.

There's a version of performance deals that actually does work: when the creator has direct influence over the full customer journey. Owned products. Direct-to-consumer brands they co-founded. Categories where the creator is the product and the audience relationship is the asset. MrBeast's Feastables being projected at $520M while his media company ran at a loss makes the point precisely. The business that worked was the one where he owned the conversion funnel, not just the audience.

That's a fundamentally different structure than posting an affiliate link and hoping the brand's checkout doesn't leak.

None of this means creators should refuse performance deals. It means they should negotiate them correctly.

Three questions to ask before signing:

What's the conversion rate history on this exact product/landing page?
Get the data. If they won't share it, the baseline they're expecting you to beat is fictional.

Is there a guaranteed floor?
A floor payment is non-negotiable. You're absorbing risk on variables you don't control — the floor is compensation for that. If there's no floor, it's not a deal. It's an unpaid content assignment with a lottery ticket attached.

What attribution model are they using?
Last-click attribution, where your promo code only gets credit for the final touchpoint, will undercount your contribution almost every time. Ask how multi-touch attribution works, specifically for your channel.

The creator economy is maturing. Flat fees are genuinely going away. The question isn't whether to engage with performance structures, t's whether to engage with them on your terms or theirs.

Know which variables you control. Price the ones you don't.

Aiden Hiko is co-founder of HYPR, a creator marketing agency with offices in Gold Coast, Melbourne, Los Angeles.