What if a creator could walk into a store, pick up a product and pay not with cash, but with their influence? Not in the loose, familiar sense of promising a post or vague exposure, but as a structured transaction in which that influence has already been priced, verified and agreed in advance. It is the kind of idea that initially feels like a thought experiment, yet the closer you look, the more it resembles something the creator economy is already trying to do, just without the systems required to support it.

As Maria Arbalova, CMO at Lydia, puts it, “Right now, the influencer economy runs on estimation and manual negotiation. Brands ship products or allocate spend with no guaranteed return. Creators receive gifted items they didn’t ask for, or spend weeks negotiating deals for campaigns they could have activated in minutes.” What she is describing is a lack of clarity. The transaction exists, but the pricing mechanism is weak, inconsistent and often only understood after the fact.

An Economy Still Pricing Itself After The Transaction

In its current form, the influencer economy operates in a state of delayed pricing. A brand sends out products in the hope of coverage, while a creator agrees to a collaboration without always knowing whether the exchange is worthwhile. The actual value, whether measured in reach, engagement, or conversion, only becomes visible once the campaign has already run. By then, the transaction is closed, and any misalignment has already been absorbed by one side or the other.

Arbalova summarises this dynamic clearly: “Both sides try to agree on value after the fact, deal by deal, negotiation by negotiation. The behaviour exists in fragments — creators are already trading influence for product and for paid partnerships. We’re just replacing the inefficient infrastructure underneath it.” What is being proposed is a system that allows that behaviour to happen with intention rather than approximation.

From Informal Exchange To Defined Value

The closest parallels for how this might evolve do not come from influencer marketing itself, but from adjacent systems that have already solved similar problems. Experiments in other industries have begun to explore what happens when intangible assets are treated as currency.

Kaspersky, for example, created a “ data dollar store ” in which customers could pay for goods using personal data rather than money. The exercise was deliberately provocative, but it exposed a set of questions that feel directly relevant here: how do you assign value to something intangible, how do you verify it, and how do you ensure both sides trust the exchange. These are challenges that already exist in other digital environments where outcomes, trust and user behaviour are constantly evaluated, whether in advertising systems or in sectors where users compare performance and credibility through resources like Casino Guru’s US-facing online casino reviews .

Influence presents a similar challenge. It is measurable, but not in a single, universal way. It is valuable, but only within specific contexts. And, as with data, its worth is often obscured until it is actually used. The difference is that, in the creator economy, this ambiguity is the default.

The Infrastructure Already Exists, Just Not In One Place

If the idea of “paying with influence” feels ambitious, it is worth noting that many of its components already exist in isolation. In digital advertising, for example, much of the complexity that once required manual intervention has already been absorbed by systems. On platforms such as TikTok, brands do not manually select individual creators or pieces of content. Instead, they define budgets, audiences and outcomes and rely on the platform to handle distribution and optimisation.

Recent research conducted by TikTok in partnership with Ipsos highlights how effective this model has become, showing that creator-led content consistently outperforms traditional advertising in both trust and purchase intent. What matters here is the process. The system already knows how to price attention dynamically, allocate spend efficiently and optimise toward outcomes without manual negotiation. The missing step is extending that logic to the transaction between brand and creator itself.

The Friction That Still Defines The System

That gap becomes particularly clear when looking at how creators actually earn. Despite the scale of the creator economy, income remains fragmented and unpredictable, spread across brand deals, platform payouts, affiliate links and direct sales. According to the latest insights from Linktree’s Creator Commerce Report , most creators are still managing multiple income streams simultaneously, with no single system providing a unified or consistent way to capture value.

This fragmentation reflects an ecosystem in which value is created continuously, but only monetised intermittently, often through processes that are slow, manual and difficult to scale. The result is an economy that generates significant activity but struggles to convert that activity into something stable and repeatable.

Removing Negotiation From The Equation

The model being proposed by platforms like Lydia attempts to address this by removing negotiation from the core transaction. Instead of discussing terms for each collaboration, brands define in advance what they are willing to accept in terms of influence, by category, audience and expected outcome. Creators, in turn, are presented with a dynamic view of what their influence is worth across those contexts, effectively giving them a balance they can choose to deploy.

When a creator decides to “spend” that balance, the transaction triggers a pre-defined contract. Content requirements, timelines and performance expectations are already set, and the platform handles execution, verification, and reporting. As Nok Orrason, founder of Lydia, explains, “The idea came from a conversation with Hafþór (The Mountain) Björnsson. He was frustrated by the process of negotiation, paperwork, reviews, approvals, meetings, delays, just to promote products he already likes. We thought, if your influence clearly has value, why isn’t it something you can use directly?”

What disappears here is both friction and uncertainty. Both sides know the terms before the transaction takes place. Whether that certainty can be sustained in practice is where things become more complicated.

When Influence Starts To Look Like Currency

The idea of “paying with influence” becomes more compelling the moment you stop treating it as a metaphor and start viewing it as a system. The behaviour already exists. Creators exchange attention for products, fees and long-term partnerships. Today, that exchange is negotiated manually, priced inconsistently and only fully understood after the fact.

It is a clean idea. It is also where the complexity begins.

Influence does not behave like a traditional currency. Its value is unstable, shaped by timing, platform dynamics and audience behaviour. A creator who performs strongly in one campaign may deliver very different results the next. Pricing that variability in a way both sides trust remains one of the hardest problems in the creator economy.

There is also a question of control. Automated systems work well in performance advertising, but much of creator marketing still sits closer to brand building. In those cases, brands are buying both outcomes and how those outcomes are delivered. Removing negotiation may reduce friction, but it also removes a layer of creative and strategic input many brands still value.

For creators, the trade-off is equally nuanced. Standardising pricing may improve speed and predictability, particularly at scale. At the same time, it risks compressing upside. The ability to shape deals and capture premium value based on context is part of what makes the current model attractive, especially at the top end.

What emerges is not a simple move from inefficiency to efficiency, but a tension between two models. One is bespoke, relationship-driven and variable. The other is systematised, scalable and predictable. Lydia sits firmly in the second camp, bringing the logic of programmatic systems into a space that has historically resisted it.

If it works, the implications are meaningful. It could reduce friction, accelerate deal flow and make value more legible. But it depends on solving problems the industry has yet to crack, particularly around measurement, attribution and trust.

For now, paying with influence looks less like a new currency and more like an attempt to standardise a market that has always been fluid. Whether that unlocks growth or simply reshapes where value sits remains an open question.

Pricing Influence Means Pricing Context

The biggest challenge, however, lies in valuation. Influence cannot be reduced to a single number, because its effectiveness depends entirely on context. A creator who drives strong outcomes in one category may have little relevance in another, meaning that value must be calculated relative to audience, category, and expected behaviour rather than follower count alone.

As Arbalova notes, “A sports creator might carry real weight in a Nike context and almost none in a Microsoft one, so influence has to be priced within verticals.” This introduces a more dynamic model of pricing, one that resembles how advertising inventory is valued based on audience and placement. In such a system, a creator’s “balance” is not fixed, but changes depending on where and how it is applied.

When Influence Becomes Spendable

If this model reaches scale, its implications extend beyond efficiency. It changes how influence is understood within the economy. Rather than being an input into marketing campaigns, it becomes something closer to a medium of exchange, contextual, measurable and deployable.

For creators, this means moving from passive participation in brand ecosystems to a more active role as economic actors, able to use their audience relationships directly rather than waiting for opportunities to monetise them. For brands, it represents a move away from broadcasting messages toward defining outcomes and allowing systems to allocate value accordingly.

Perhaps most significantly, it reduces the distance between influence and transaction. At present, that distance is filled with negotiation, intermediaries and delay. If influence becomes directly spendable, that gap begins to close and with it, the distinction between attention and economic value becomes harder to separate.

At that point, the idea of paying with influence no longer feels speculative. It begins to look like a natural extension of a system that has been operating this way all along, only now with the infrastructure to support it.