I’ve been getting DMs from people who want me to make content about their product, and I haven’t answered them, which I kept filing as a scheduling problem right up until that stopped being believable. I open the message, I look at the product, I close the app. Last week I published a whole post about why everything I make is free, and I meant it, but there’s a piece I left out. Free resources don’t pay for anything, and if CMH ever pays for itself it will probably pay through this exact mechanism: someone giving me money to talk about their thing.

My hesitation isn’t principled in a way I could defend to anyone. Mostly I don’t believe in the product. Half of them I’d never heard of before the DM arrived, and a few I had heard of and quietly think are junk. Sitting underneath that is a vaguer thing where I’m not sure I believe in advertising generally, which is a much bigger claim and one I’d lose an argument about fairly quickly, because I buy things, and I’ve bought things because someone I follow mentioned them, so I’m not standing outside this pointing at it from anywhere clean.

So I went looking to find out whether this is just me being precious about a page with a modest following, and the answer seems to be no. CreatorIQ and influencers.club surveyed a little over five thousand creators across a hundred regions this summer, and 42% of them reported tension between what their audience wants and what brands are asking them to make. Among creators with 500,000 or more Instagram followers it goes up to 53%. That’s the part I had wrong in my head. I’d assumed this was a small-account problem, a thing you feel before you learn to be professional about it and then stop feeling. It gets worse with scale.

What turns it into a bind rather than a preference is the money underneath. In the same survey, 46% of creators said brand deals are the bulk of their income, 67% earn under ten thousand a year from content, and 35% named the lack of consistent brand deals as the single biggest barrier to growing. So the people feeling the tension most sharply are also the people least able to afford turning the work down. Nobody’s failing morally there, that’s just what the arrangement is.

Then there’s the figure I keep coming back to. Only 15% of the creators surveyed said they fully trust sponsored content from other creators when they’re deciding what to buy. Creators, about each other. People who know exactly how these deals work and what the brief probably looked like, and fifteen in a hundred of them still believe what they’re seeing.

The audience numbers are bleaker. BBB National Programs ran an influencer trust index last year with around 3,700 US consumers, and traditional advertising came out ahead: 87% said they trust advertising overall against 74% for influencer content, and 26% said they don’t trust influencers at all, compared with about 11% who say that about ads. Which knocked out the assumption my squeamishness was built on. I’d been carrying around the idea that a creator recommending something is the less cynical version of an ad, a softer form of the same transaction, and people appear to think the opposite.

I’ve been sitting with why that would be, and the best I have is that a television ad never pretended to be anyone’s opinion. Everyone in the room knows it’s an ad, that’s the entire deal, nobody’s trust is on the table. Whereas the DM says it wants a video. What it’s paying for is the part of this that isn’t currently for sale, the bit where if I say I use something, I use it. You can only sell that once, and you don’t find out you’ve spent it until later.

Where I’ve got to, for now, is that I’ll probably say yes to something eventually, and I’d rather decide the terms while nothing is on the table than while an invoice is. The nearest I have to a rule is whether I’d have made it anyway, without the money, and calling that a rule is generous; it’s a feeling with a job title. The DMs are still sitting there unanswered. I keep telling myself that’s a position.

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