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Rising ad costs, CPMs, and attribution challenges are driving mobile marketers from paid UA to creator-driven organic growth.
For app developers and mobile marketers, the familiar roadmap of optimizing for CPMs, testing creatives, and scaling winners is becoming more expensive. What used to be predictable science of targeting and bidding has evolved into a new art: getting and keeping attention.
Nikita knows the viral landscape intimately. From Unity’s ad network to building a $2M app portfolio to now running an AI-native influencer marketing platform, he’s witnessed the evolution from performance marketing to creator-driven growth firsthand. His insights, shared on
In an episode of Tenjin’s ROI 101 podcast, we host Nikita Zatsepin, founder of Creally, an AI-native influencer marketing platform and a former Unity marketing executive. He shares insights into influencer marketing, consumer apps, and the greater creator economy. In particular, he’ll explain why the micro-influencer movement has a big influence on how apps acquire new users.
Why Creator-Led Growth Is Accelerating
“When we started, our CPM in the US was maybe $2-3 in 2023,” reveals Nikita Zatsepin, founder of Creally and former Unity marketing executive, in a recent conversation on Tenjin’s ROI 101 podcast. “By the end of 2024, the CPM was already $40. The cost increased almost 10x, and obviously it’s really hard to increase your LTV 8x.”
This reflects a systematic shift in the mobile advertising ecosystem. Customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased 4x over the past two years, with nearly 2x growth in 2025 alone. As attribution becomes more challenging post-ATT and privacy regulations tighten, the overall cost of acquiring trackable, attributable users through traditional channels continues to climb.
“If an ad network gets the margin, it means that the advertiser pays for that with their margin,” Zatsepin explains. “Essentially, if you’re playing in the performance marketing space, you are designed to lose. It’s just a matter of time.”
This existential threat is particular for app developers operating with low budgets. When your customer acquisition cost rises 10x but your ability to raise prices remains constrained, you need to find a sustainable solution. An option is to start looking at creator opportunities.
What Is The Creator Economy?
At its core, the creator economy represents a change from centralized content production and distribution to decentralized creation by individuals who build audiences on social media platforms. For mobile apps, this translates into a fundamentally different user acquisition approach: instead of buying pavements from ad networks, brands and companies partner directly with creators who produce authentic content that drives organic discovery.
While traditional paid UA might cost over $40 CPM in competitive markets, creator-driven content that goes viral, can achieve CPM as low as $0.66—and in some cases, consistently under $1.
“For example, with our apps business, we were able to achieve $0.66 CPM in the US for unknown apps, which was pretty damn good. I think the usual CPM that you can think of is from $3-5, something like this,” shares Nikita.
“A whole new subset of consumer products evolved,” Zatsepin observes. “Those guys just don’t do paid UA because they can’t. At the same time they’re extremely effective in terms of making viral videos at scale.”
He brings up the example of Triips, a website that allows you to buy tickets for travel cheaper than through traditional sources like Booking or things like that.” As a consumer app and travel start-up, they typically struggle with paid acquisition due to thin margins. Instead of a competitive bidding war, they got found creators:
“They hired 70 creators—70 students, pretty much—who started their own accounts, like separate accounts. Then they gave them ideas on how to make videos, what videos needed to be made. Collectively, those 70 creators created over 3,500 videos that generated 27 million views, which is a $0.77 CPM, which is great.”
“There’s only one way you can do this, and you need to be very creative in terms of cheap UA channels,” Nikita notes. “Obviously, due to very low margins in travel, you obviously cannot spend on paid ads unless you raised a huge round.”
This isn’t an isolated case, he adds, “resources like Social Growth Engineers document dozens of apps and services achieving similar results through systematic creator partnerships.”
They all share something in common: building content production systems that generate volume at scale rather than relying on more expensive paid acquisition channels.
Influencer Marketing For Apps: Micro-Influencers vs. Macro-Influencers
The creator economy encompasses a wide and diverse spectrum, from macro-influencers with millions of followers to nano-creators with only hundreds. For mobile app marketers, the sweet spot increasingly lies with micro-influencers.
What is a micro-influencer?
- micro-influencer is typically defined as a creator with 10,000 to 100,000 followers.
What is a macro-influencer?
- macro-influencer is typically defined as a creator with 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers.
The reasons for mobile marketing and micro-influencer alignment are both strategic and economic.
“Up to 80% of creators never had a brand deal,” Zatsepin reveals. “Most creators who have deals are big ones with agencies, so brands can communicate well with those. But with micro-creators, it’s really hard to reach them and find them.”
Micro-influencers represent a relatively untapped source and come with many advantages:
- Micro-influencer rates are more affordable
- They usually charge $10-$30 per video versus hundreds or thousands for macro-influencers.
- Micro-influencers are more authentic
- They engage with a smaller audience, often translating into higher engagement and trust.
- Micro-influencers are more scalable
- You can partner with 50 icro-creators for the cost of one macro deal.
- Micro-influencers are highly motivated
- Without established brand partnerships, they’re motivated to perform.
The main message here is that micro-influencer rates remain drastically undervalued relative to their potential impact. A brand spending $15K monthly can recruit 30-50 micro-creators producing 900-1500 videos.
Micro-Influencer Examples: What Success Looks Like
Successful micro-influencer examples all share common characteristics and strategy. They’re not one-off partnerships or celebrity endorsements. Rather, they are systematically embedded within consumer apps and viral content production machines.
Take the personal development app category, where Nikita’s team operated. “It was subscription-based apps targeting the personal development niche—personality assessment tests, compatibility analysis, things like that, mostly targeting females,” he explains.
The strategy? It looked similar to Triips. He recruited students who were creators as a side gig, provided clear creative direction on pain points and value propositions, and incentivized them with performance bonuses for videos that beat their median view counts.
The pattern extends across verticals:
- Finance apps partnering with personal finance micro-creators
- Fitness apps working with trainers building their social presence
- Productivity tools collaborating with study/work-from-home creators
- Gaming apps leveraging gameplay commentary creators
It’s distinct from traditional influencer marketing in scale and systematization. These aren’t really campaigns, they’re ongoing content engines producing hundreds of new assets each month.
Influencer Marketing for Startups and Smaller Studios
For startups, indie developers, and smaller game studios, the creator economy represents something more profound: a more affordable way to compete with massive enterprise budgets.
“There’s only one way you can do this, and you need to be very creative in terms of cheap UA channels,” Zatsepin notes when discussing low-margin businesses. “Obviously, you cannot spend on paid ads unless you raised a huge round.”
The typical startup playbook is to raise some sort of capital, pour it into paid advertising, and then optimize for CAC payback. Influencer marketing for startups, particularly through micro-creator networks, offers a fundamentally different way of doing things.
- Lower capital requirements: $10-15K monthly vs. $100K+ for meaningful paid scale
- Earlier profitability: Cheaper acquisition enables profitable growth at smaller scale
- Organic compounding: Viral content continues driving installs long after posting
- Brand building: Authentic content builds awareness beyond direct response
Using the micro-influencer approach does require different capabilities. Rather than bidding and buying traffic, you’re building a content production system. So instead of optimizing bids, you’re managing creator relationships. In place of A/B testing landing pages, you’re testing creative concepts and getting feedback through creator networks.
Paid vs. Organic UA in Influencer Marketing: The Attribution Challenge
Comparatively, the change to influencer marketing and utilizing an army of creators does have a significant trade-off: attribution.
“Tracking basically kills viral potential,” Zatsepin warns. “How it works: why are you paying Facebook, or why are you paying TikTok Ads, or why are you paying Google? You effectively pay them to distribute your tracking link to the customer. You’re paying them [so] that they will find a proper customer for your product, and they will distribute a tracking link to them.”
On the other hand, when “you are going directly to creators, you are not paying TikTok or you are not paying YouTube—you’re paying directly to the creator. It means that the media platform doesn’t really want this to happen ideally.”
As a result, “content with heavy tracking is often punished by the platform. It just doesn’t really go viral. There are a lot of different workarounds on how to mitigate this…I don’t really want to touch on this—it’s a deeper topic. However, the problem is that if you’re going to go viral, then you probably need to give up on tracking.”
For marketers accustomed to attribution and tracing metrics on real-time dashboards, that presents a problem for measurement.
“I usually try to say to teams: there is a cost to be paid. You’re either paying $40 CPM and you go to Facebook, or you pay $5 CPM, but sorry, there will be no tracking, or it will be quite limited. So it’s basically a sacrifice that needs to be done. It’s up to you to decide.”
This paid vs. organic UA debate in influencer marketing essentially comes down to this question according to Nikita. But, which one is better?
Leading teams are choosing the latter and adapting their measurement approach. “Most people measure incremental uplift,” Zatsepin explains. “You can see the increment in organic growth coming from a particular date. Brand queries usually go up when you are promoting something through influencers.”
Although the measurement isn’t perfect, teams that are able to quantify incremental wins and losses are benefiting from dramatically lower acquisition costs.
Creator vs. Influencer: What’s the Difference?
As the creator economy matures, the terminology itself is evolving. While “influencer marketing” remains the dominant term, “creator marketing” is increasingly used to signal a different approach.
Why does the creator vs. influencer distinction matter?
Influencers traditionally focus on their personal brand and audience. Partnerships involve promoting products to their existing followers. The value proposition is access to that pre-built audience.
Creators increasingly focus on content production. Their value isn’t just their follower count. It’s their ability to create engaging content that can go viral beyond their immediate audience. The platform’s algorithm, not just their followers, determines reach.
For mobile marketers, the distinction is critical. Partnering with a macro-influencer means you’re essentially buying access to their audience, it’s like consumer apps buying a placement. With micro-creators at scale you’re building a content engine. Those individual videos can reach far beyond the creator’s follower count through algorithmic distribution.
“In TikTok, content is the only metric that is important for the platform,” Zatsepin explains. “TikTok doesn’t really look into how large your account is. If your video sucks, it will suck on a large account or on a small account. And the same goes the other way. If you have a new account but with a really nice video that is very well-designed, polished, and posted, it will go viral for sure.”
This is why micro-creators can deliver outsized ROI on certain platforms: their content quality, not their follower count, determines performance.
Micro-Influencer Rates
Understanding the current going rates for micro-influencers is essential for budgeting and forecasting. The market remains fragmented and it’s largely unstructured. In a sense, this creates opportunities for informed buyers.
Based on Zatsepin’s experience managing creator networks at scale, micro-influencer rates (10K-100K followers) are:
- Fixed fee per video: $10-30, with students and side-giggers typically at the lower end
- Performance bonuses: Additional compensation for videos that beat the creator’s median views
- Revenue share: For proven top performers, revenue sharing based on attributed conversions
- Bulk purchases: Buying 5-10 videos upfront (especially during off-peak seasons like October) before high-demand periods
What drives pricing:
The key differentiator isn’t follower count—it’s performance metrics. “Never take a look at followers,” Nikita emphasizes. “A creator will always try to sell you followers. You will always need to buy median views.”
In addition, he also suggests providing incentives for remarkable performance.
Micro-Creators Meaning: The Future of App Marketing
So, what do micro-creators actually mean for the future of mobile app marketing?
In essence, micro-creators represent the democratization of user acquisition. Whereas traditional paid UA concentrates power with platforms and enterprise advertisers, creator-driven growth distributes it across thousands of individual content producers.
For app developers, this means:
- More accessible growth: You don’t need $500K marketing budgets to enter and compete
- More sustainable economics: Sub-$1 CPMs enable profitable growth at smaller scale
- More authentic engagement: Users discover through trusted voices, not ads
- More creative testing: Hundreds of concepts tested monthly vs. dozens
It also demands new capabilities:
- Content production systems: Brief templates, quality standards, approval workflows
- Creator relationship management: Sourcing, vetting, onboarding, paying at scale
- Performance analytics: Measuring incrementality, not just last-click attribution
- Creative direction: Understanding what concepts resonate across platforms
“I treat influencer marketing pretty much as creative testing,” Zatsepin explains. “You know in paid UA how it works—you create 50 videos, you put it on Facebook, you see what sticks. With creators, it’s essentially the same.”
Also for those investing efforts into the creator economy, it all seems worth it when you’re producing 10-20x more content at a fraction of the cost. Another thing to consider is the added value of organic distribution built in.
Last Thoughts for Mobile Marketers
Successful mobile marketers are diversifying beyond paid UA into creator-driven organic growth.
This is a fundamental restructure for how businesses and apps are already acquiring their customer base. As attribution becomes more challenging, privacy regulations tighten, and platform costs increase, the competitive advantage shifts to those who can build authentic relationships with users through content and community.
The creator economy, specifically the micro-influencer opportunity, isn’t replacing paid UA. Rather, it’s an essential complement for consumer apps that want sustainable, profitable growth.
For apps unable to compete in paid auctions, it’s often the only viable path. On the other hand, for more established apps watching CAC climb month over month, it’s an increasingly attractive alternative. But, for the entire ecosystem, it represents a more sustainable model where value flows from consumer apps, to creators, and brands alike.
