Are Talent Managers & Managed Services Gouging Creators?

Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

At the end of each show, I offer you up the opportunity to ask a question or throw out a topic you’d like my take on to inspire a show. You’re always welcome to do that by emailing me. The address is [e-mail]. I love it when you do because it gives me a good topic to talk about and it probably helps your fellow listeners and Winfluence community folks learn, too.

I also have people in the industry reach out about trends and problems they’re seeing. When one piques my interest, that topic becomes a show as well. Today’s is one of those.

Sam Mendel and Saranga Pagadala are two young whippersnappers who have dreamed up a different take on an influencer marketing platform, but one that is informed and inspired by what they see as an industry issue. They reached out and said talent agents and managed services are taking too much of an influencer’s earnings.

As you can imagine, that raised an eyebrow on this face. I work with talent agents all the time. They provide a valuable service to their clients, the end creators, so they can focus on creating. But when Sam and Saranga said they’ve seen up to 40% commission rates, I asked them to tell me more.

We spent some time going through the issue and touched on CashU which is their new entry into the influencer marketing space. You can find it at textcashu.com. As you can probably guess, it’s an influencer marketplace and discovery platform that operates mostly as a text platform. Worth checking out if you’re a creator or company looking to engage micro- and nano-influencers.

They had some interesting things to say. I’d be interested to hear if your experiences align with theirs and what you think after you listen today.

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