I've gotten this question probably hundreds of times over the last year. And just this week, three different DMs asking the same thing: why does it feel so much harder to get brand deals than it did a year or two ago?

Maybe your inbox used to overflow with inbound interest. Maybe brands are still reaching out, but the budgets they're quoting are a fraction of what they used to be. Either way, something feels off.

Here's the thing — you're not imagining it. I'm seeing this across the creators I coach too. And it's worth understanding exactly why it's happening, because once you do, the fix becomes a lot clearer.

Reason #1: Your Follower Count Stopped Meaning Anything

Five or ten years ago, when I was running my influencer marketing agency, brands would hand us RFPs with one primary criterion: find someone with at least 100,000 followers. The logic made sense at the time. A six-figure audience was a reasonable signal that someone had real reach and real engagement.

Then people started buying followers. Tens of thousands of them, for a couple hundred bucks. Brands started getting burned — paying for big audiences only to discover three comments on the post and a demographic that had nothing to do with their actual customer.

So brands got smarter. They started investing in software to audit audience authenticity and demographics. They stopped using follower count as a proxy for influence.

The result? Your follower count is now table stakes, not a differentiator.

The real metric is viewership. Two creators — one with 10,000 followers, one with 50,000 — can be getting the exact same average views per post. If you're ever in a negotiation where a brand is trying to compare you to someone with a bigger audience, that's your move: at the end of the day, it's about eyeballs. Who is actually seeing this?

You can justify your rates based on reach, not follower count. And that reframe can be surprisingly powerful.

Reason #2: The Supply of Creators Has Exploded

COVID accelerated this, but the trend was already happening: the barrier to entry for content creation has basically collapsed.

A decade ago, the pool of creators a brand could realistically partner with was pretty defined. YouTubers, bloggers, Instagram lifestyle influencers. Now? A brand like Crest can hire a dental hygienist with 8,000 TikTok followers to talk about their toothpaste — and that video might outperform a polished YouTube integration. The platforms have made publishing trivial. Consumers have demonstrated they're perfectly happy watching lo-fi content. Highly produced video no longer commands a premium by default.

From where you're sitting, that's frustrating. From where the brand is sitting, it means they went from a handful of potential partners to hundreds or thousands. And more supply means more price pressure on you.

But here's your superpower in this environment: professionalism.

The new wave of creators who've been doing this for a year or two don't have the battle scars yet. Brands who've tried partnering with them often find out the hard way — missed deadlines, off-brief content, mispronounced brand names, radio silence on revision requests. It's a nightmare.

You've been through that. You have a process. You submit concepts in advance for brand approval. You have a collaborative revision workflow. You know how to make their life easy.

That's not a small thing — that's the difference between a brand wanting to work with you again and quietly removing you from their list. Flex that experience. Make it obvious in every touchpoint that working with you is going to be fundamentally different from working with someone who's figured out how to hit "post" but has no idea what a creative brief is.

Reason #3: Your Pricing Strategy Is Working Against You

This is the one you might not want to hear.

When brands reach out with a scope of work, most creators do the same thing: they spit back a number. "$2,000 for a YouTube integration." "$1,500 for a newsletter mention." Whatever it is. And in the past, that worked fine — because there weren't that many creators to compare you to.

Now there are hundreds. And the moment you quote a single number, you've handed the brand everything they need to drop you into a spreadsheet next to 99 other creators and compare you exclusively on price. You are now a commodity. They look at your follower count, your viewership, your platform, your price — and they pick whoever fits inside their cost-per-acquisition math.

You don't win that game by having a better number. You win by refusing to play it.

Here's what to do instead. When a brand reaches out, don't immediately quote. Say something like: "This sounds like a really exciting campaign. Before I send over rates, I'd love to learn a bit more about what you're trying to accomplish. What would a win look like for you?"

That one question does something most creators never do — it signals that you actually care about their outcome, not just your check. And a brand that was about to add you to a spreadsheet suddenly thinks: this person is invested in the result. Let's have a real conversation.

From there, you can ask deeper questions. What's their goal — awareness, content assets, conversions? Are they dealing with supply chain or tariff headaches affecting their marketing budget? How do they see themselves relative to competitors? And once you understand all of that, you can come back with something that actually surprises them: "Based on what you've told me, I actually don't think a YouTube integration is the best move for your goal. I think you should sponsor my in-person event / private community / newsletter in this specific way, because here's why it gets you closer to what you actually want."

That is how you extricate yourself from spreadsheet hell. That is how you become the creator they want to have a real conversation with, instead of just another line item.

The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

If you used to have a flood of inbound and it's dried up — you cannot keep doing the same thing and expect it to come back. The market shifted. Waiting for your inbox to look like it did in 2022 is not a strategy.

What this probably looks like in practice: building an outreach strategy. Going back to brands you've worked with in the past with a relationship recap that reminds them of the results you drove together. Proactively pitching your dream brands instead of waiting for them to find you. Treating sponsorships like a business development function, not a passive revenue stream.

The creators who are still doing well in this environment aren't doing anything magical. They just stopped waiting and started moving.

If your sponsorship revenue has stalled and you're not sure exactly where to start, that's what Wizard's Guild is designed for — we look at your actual situation, your actual inbox, and build a specific plan to get things moving again. And if you want the full framework for thinking about brand deals as a business, Sponsor Magnet has all of it.

The market is harder. It's also full of creators who are going to give up and go passive. That's your opening.

What's felt like the biggest shift in your sponsorship conversations over the last year?