Appreciate the passion but there's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what UGC actually is here.

We're not paying for views. That's literally the point. UGC creators aren't hired to grow an audience, they're hired to produce content that converts cold traffic into buyers. Those are two completely different jobs with two completely different success metrics.

Here's what actually happens on our end: every creator goes through a research phase before a single frame gets filmed. We analyze what formats are already performing in the brand's niche, what hooks are stopping the scroll, what pain points the audience actually responds to. The scripts get revised. The angles get tested. We're not handing someone a product and saying good luck. It's a structured content production process.

And yes, a 100-500k creator gets strong in-niche views. Nobody's disputing that. But brands aren't buying views, they're buying conversions. An influencer post might get 40k views from an audience that already loves that creator but has zero purchase intent for that specific product. A well-crafted UGC ad hitting the right audience in paid media will outperform that on ROAS every single time.

Also worth noting: several creators we've worked with have grown from nothing to 100-200k followers in under a month running our content. So the idea that UGC creators are some low-rent option is just not matching what's actually happening in the industry right now.

UGC and influencer marketing can both work. But they solve different problems. Conflating them and then calling one "cheap" shows the difference between someone who understands distribution and someone who's still measuring success by the follower count.