Creators Now Ask Brands for Equity. Few Ask What It Costs Them

Allison Ellsworth did not sound like someone describing a problem. Talking with host Maggie Sellers Reum on the Hot Smart Rich podcast, in an episode published November 11, the Poppi co-founder was talking about Jetty, the everyday hydration drink she and her husband Stephen had launched two days earlier, and about what happened when she started recruiting creators to help sell it. "Every single creator I reach out to to work with," she said, according to Net Influencer's account of the episode, "they ask to get advisory and to invest."

She thinks they are right to ask. "They should really participate in the upside as well," she said. Jetty, she explained, is building what she called "investment plus advisory type partnerships," and she was candid about why creators expect them now: they watched what happened at Poppi. That soda brand worked with Alix Earle and Jake Shane, Ellsworth said, when both were college students with roughly 90,000 followers. Earle later appeared in a Poppi Super Bowl ad and, as Digiday and Net Influencer have both reported, held equity in the company before PepsiCo agreed to buy it in March 2025.

The beauty trade outlet BeautyMatter got there first, a day before the launch, under a headline that summed up the mood: influencers don't just want Jetty samples, they want equity. Jetty itself is a modest bet by the standards of its founders' last one. The Ellsworths have put in about $2.5 million of their own money, according to Net Influencer, BeautyMatter and Modern Retail, and the drinks launched in powder sachets and ready-to-drink bottles at Whole Foods, Target and Amazon.

It would be easy to file this under good news: the people who make brands famous are finally demanding a cut of what they build. That is the frame nearly all of the coverage has used, and it is not wrong so much as incomplete. What follows looks at what a creator actually receives when a fee becomes a stake, why the Poppi story is a poor guide to the odds, what changes about every post a creator makes once they own part of the product, and how this connects to two other stories from the same week that, on the surface, have nothing to do with soda.

Paid at the dock, or on the boat

Start with the literal difference, because it is simpler than the hype makes it sound. A fee is a payment for a defined job. A creator agrees to deliverables, such as two Reels, a Story set and usage rights for 90 days, does the work, sends an invoice and gets paid whether or not the product sells. The brand carries the risk that the campaign flops. The creator carries the risk of not getting the next deal.

Equity is a share of ownership. In most creator deals it is not a lump of shares handed over on day one. It is a grant that vests over time, usually on a schedule with a cliff, meaning the creator earns nothing until a set period has passed and then earns the rest in installments. Digiday, in a September 24 report on the trend, published the benchmarks that Cherub, a platform connecting creators with startups, suggests for seed-stage companies. An advisory-only role with organic posting: 0.1% to 0.3% of the company, vesting quarterly over two years with a three-month cliff. An advisory role with guaranteed content, paid whitelisting and events: 0.25% to 0.75%, two years, six-month cliff. A long-term collaborator or creative director: 0.75% to 3%, vesting over four years with a one-year cliff.

Here is the image worth holding onto for the rest of this piece, and it comes, fittingly, from the name of Ellsworth's new brand. A jetty is where boats tie up. A fee is getting paid at the dock: you load the cargo, you collect your money, you walk home. Equity is getting on the boat. If the voyage goes well, you share in whatever is waiting at the other end. But you also share the weather, you cannot step off halfway across, and nobody can tell you on the day you board how long the crossing will take.

The comparison is useful, but it undersells one thing. On a real boat, everyone aboard can see the sea. In a private company, the creator usually sees much less than the founders and the professional investors do. They rarely see the full cap table, the terms of later funding rounds or the cash runway, and they have no vote over when, or whether, the company sells.

A fee is a payment for work. A stake is a bet on someone else's company, paid for with your audience.

The Poppi story everyone repeats

Every creator equity conversation in 2026 eventually arrives at Poppi, and for good reason. PepsiCo's own announcement, dated March 17, 2025, put the price at $1.95 billion, a figure that included $300 million in anticipated cash tax benefits, plus a possible additional payment tied to performance milestones. A creator who held a slice of that before the sale did well. That much is not in dispute.

What is striking is how little anyone outside the deal actually knows about the creator side of it. Digiday described Earle as becoming a "strategic equity investor" in Poppi in 2024 and gave no stake size, valuation or terms. Neither Earle nor Poppi has published the size of her holding, and none of the coverage we reviewed reports one. The most famous creator equity win of the decade is, in its specifics, a number nobody has published.

That pattern is older than Instagram. When Coca-Cola bought Glacéau, the maker of Vitaminwater, for $4.1 billion in 2007, 50 Cent's stake became the founding legend of celebrity equity deals. Nearly two decades later, published estimates of what he made still range from about $100 million to $400 million, and he has not publicly confirmed a figure. The legend has been told so many times that the uncertainty around its central number has quietly dropped out of the retelling.

None of this means those deals were not lucrative. It means the evidence base for "take equity, not cash" is a handful of famous exits with undisclosed terms. You hear about Poppi because it sold. You do not hear about the creator who took advisory shares in a beverage startup that quietly ran out of money, because there is no press release for that. Statisticians call this survivorship bias. Creators would recognize it from their own world: it is the same reason every growth guru's advice comes from someone who went viral, never from the far larger number of people who did exactly the same things and did not.

Ellsworth, to her credit, does not oversell it. She described Poppi's playbook of founder-led, digital-first marketing, creator gifting and celebrities on the cap table as "table stakes" now that so many brands copy it. That is a quietly important admission. If every new consumer brand offers creators a slice, the slice stops being a differentiator for the brand and starts being the price of entry for the creator, and the creators most likely to be offered it are the ones who have not broken through yet. When brands ask her for introductions to Earle and Shane today, she told the podcast, her answer is that they are too big now and the brands should go find the next talent.

The proof that creator equity works is a few famous wins whose terms nobody has published.

The turn: a stake changes who the post is for

Here is the part almost nobody is questioning. The usual debate is about money: is equity a better deal than a fee? The more interesting change is about the audience.

Listen closely to how Ellsworth described what she wants from creator investors. According to Net Influencer, she said they should be able to post about Jetty without brand approval, so they can work it into their lives naturally rather than labeling every post as paid. From the brand's side, that is the whole point. A sponsored post reads like an ad. A post from someone who simply loves the drink reads like a recommendation, and recommendations are what move product.

But a creator who owns part of a company is not simply someone who loves the drink. The Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides, revised in 2023, are built around exactly this situation. The FTC's guidance describes a material connection as one that a significant minority of consumers would not expect, and its plain-language guide for influencers lists financial relationships among the ties that must be disclosed, adding that "financial relationships aren't limited to money." Its business guidance goes further on wording: saying you were "paid" is not good enough, the FTC notes, if you are an employee or co-owner. Net Influencer flagged the same tension in its write-up of the Jetty interview.

Put those together and the problem is plain. The feature that makes a creator-investor's post valuable to the brand, that it does not look like an ad, is the very feature the disclosure rules exist to remove. Owning equity does not reduce a creator's obligation to tell the audience about the relationship. If anything it raises the stakes, because an owner's interest in the product's success is larger and longer-lasting than a one-time fee. A fee buys a post. A stake gives the creator a reason to keep recommending the product for as long as they hold the shares.

Instagram's own tools do not settle this either. The FTC says outright that a platform offering a built-in disclosure feature, like Instagram's paid partnership label, is "no guarantee" that the label is effective, and that it is "always best to add your own disclosure." The agency also points out that Instagram truncates longer captions after the first two or three lines, so a disclosure buried below the fold may not count. Anyone who has studied how to write Instagram captions that hold attention knows the first line is prime real estate. Disclosure has to live there too.

The deeper risk is not legal. It is the thing the whole arrangement is designed to monetize. A creator's audience follows them because it believes their recommendations are their own. Equity, by design, blurs the line between "I like this" and "I own this." Once followers learn, after the fact, that a favorite creator owned a piece of the drink they kept mentioning, every earlier recommendation gets reread in that light.

A story from the same week shows how quickly an audience notices when a sponsor reaches inside the content. Bloomberg reported on November 12 that Bill Simmons had ended The Ringer's ChatGPT segments, the "brought to you by ChatGPT" bits that had run since spring on The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Ringer Fantasy Football Show. In August, Awful Announcing and others had documented the backlash after a segment in which the chatbot picked a defining game of Russell Westbrook's career; the top post on the show's subreddit that day read, "The ChatGPT of it all kind of makes me want to stop listening." Simmons told Bloomberg that "our audience just didn't like them." Net Influencer's review of the feed found no ChatGPT ad copy in the 35 episodes published since August 25.

That was not an equity deal, and it is not a perfect parallel. But it carries the same lesson. Audiences tolerate ads that are clearly ads. What they punish is the feeling that a commercial interest has moved into the part of the relationship they thought was genuine.

The post a brand wants from a creator-investor is the one that hides the investment. That is the one the rules forbid.

When the boat sinks

The cautionary tales are less often repeated, so they are worth setting down plainly.

When the crypto exchange FTX collapsed into bankruptcy in November 2022, some of its most famous promoters turned out to have been paid largely in its stock. The New York Times reported, citing people familiar with the arrangement, that Tom Brady's endorsement deal was worth about $30 million, paid almost entirely in FTX shares, and bankruptcy filings listed him as holding more than 1.1 million common shares. The stock was wiped out, and investors went on to sue celebrity promoters, Brady among them. The same reporting said the deal's terms meant taxes were owed on at least some of the stock, even though it ended up worthless. Equity paid for promotion did not just go to zero; it arrived with a tax bill and a lawsuit attached.

The other lesson from that era is about disclosure, and it played out on Instagram. In October 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Kim Kardashian had agreed to pay about $1.26 million to settle charges that she promoted a crypto token called EthereumMax on Instagram without disclosing that she had been paid $250,000 to do it. Then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler used the case to warn that a celebrity endorsement "doesn't mean that those investment products are right for all investors." A soda brand is not a crypto token, and a creator's advisory stake is not a securities promotion. The principle still travels: when money stands behind a recommendation, regulators expect the audience to be told.

The ordinary failure mode is quieter than either case. It is not fraud. It is a perfectly honest company that simply does not make it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how long new private-sector business establishments survive in the United States. For establishments opened in March 2015, about 79.6% were still operating a year later, about 50.2% after five years and about 34.6% after ten. Those figures cover every kind of new business, from restaurants to software firms, not venture-backed beverage brands specifically, so they are a rough base rate rather than a forecast. But they make one point no Poppi anecdote can: the typical outcome for a new venture is not a billion-dollar sale.

A fee can disappoint you. Equity can cost you, in taxes, in lawsuits and in your followers' trust.

The money is flowing the other way, too

If creators are trying to get a stake in brands, investors are trying to get a stake in creators. On November 13, H.I.G. Capital, through its small-cap and growth arm, announced that it had formed a new company called Waveborn and bought Jake Rosen Entertainment, a New York creator management agency, as its first acquisition. H.I.G.'s announcement says JRE represents more than 400 exclusive creators and has completed more than 24,000 brand deals, with nearly 100 new ones a week. The plan, according to the release and to Net Influencer's report, is to keep buying: combine talent management, brand relationships, content production and creator monetization under one roof. The price was not disclosed.

"Creators are displacing traditional media," Eric Tencer, a managing director at H.I.G. Growth, said in the announcement, adding that "brand dollars are finally catching up to attention and consumption." Jake Rosen, JRE's chief executive, said joining Waveborn would let the agency "scale the business for both creators and brands."

One small detail in the release is worth noticing. In one place it describes JRE's roster as having more than one billion combined followers. In another, it says more than 800 million. It is probably a matter of which accounts or which date got counted, and it changes nothing about the deal. But it is a reminder of how soft the central unit of the creator economy remains, even in a document announcing a private equity acquisition. Followers get counted, recounted and summed across platforms in ways that rarely match. Anyone who has worked on getting real Instagram followers rather than inflated ones knows the gap between a headline count and an engaged audience can be enormous.

Waveborn and Jetty sit on opposite sides of the same trade. A private equity firm buys the agency layer because that is where brand dollars flow through. A creator asks a brand for shares because they have seen how much value their posts can create. Both are claims on the same underlying asset: the attention and trust of an audience that nobody, including the creator, can own outright. The difference is in who can lose what. An investor who overpays for an agency loses capital. A creator who overpromotes a product they own can lose the audience itself, and with it, every future deal.

Instagram, for its part, is pulling the same lever from a third direction. Business Insider reported late last month that it was offering select creators large payments for long-form work, which we covered in detail when we argued that Instagram's $500K long-form checks are not a pay plan. And when it launched its Effect Builder tool on November 9, the reward on offer was attribution, which is why we wrote that it gives creators a byline, not a business. Platforms, brands and investors are all experimenting with what to pay creators in: cash, credit, ownership. Only one of those can be spent today.

Everyone wants a piece of the audience. Only the creator can lose it.

The numbers, and what they can and cannot tell you

The figures in this story come from very different places, so it pays to keep them apart.

On Jetty: the $2.5 million in founder money and the launch date of November 9 are reported consistently by Net Influencer, BeautyMatter and Modern Retail. Jetty has no outside investors yet. Ellsworth said its first outside round could come from "celebrity influencers" or "strategics," meaning corporate investors, but she did not say how much equity Jetty is offering creators or whether any creator will join that round.

On deal terms: Ellsworth described two partnership structures without naming either partner. One is tied to deliverables, with one to two TikToks a month, a set number of quarterly appearances, a production day and possible use in ads. The other is with a "thought leader" who is less active on social media and would make a "best effort" to mention Jetty on a podcast and a book tour. Notice that the first structure is, in practice, a content contract. Equity is being added to work that, a few years ago, would simply have been invoiced.

On stake sizes: the Cherub ranges reported by Digiday are suggestions from one platform, not market data. Still, they are useful for a worked example. Take a creator offered 0.5% of a seed-stage brand, in the middle of the range for an advisory role with guaranteed content. Suppose the company raises two more rounds, and each one dilutes existing holders by 20%. That 0.5% becomes 0.32%. If the company eventually sells for $200 million, the stake is worth about $640,000 before tax and before any liquidation preferences are paid out, and that money arrives only when the sale closes, possibly many years later. If it sells for $20 million, the same stake is worth about $64,000 at most, and preferred investors may be paid first. If it never sells, the stake is worth nothing. Those numbers are illustrative, not drawn from any real Jetty offer, but the shape is the point: the percentage on the offer sheet is the largest that number will ever be.

What the numbers cannot tell you is the figure that matters most to a creator weighing an offer: what the fee would have been. A clear way to judge any equity offer is to ask what the brand would pay in cash for the same deliverables, and then ask whether the stake, after vesting, dilution and the real odds of a sale, is plausibly worth more. Most offers never put those two numbers side by side.

The percentage on the offer sheet is the largest that number will ever be.

What we know, and what we don't

We know creators are asking for equity, because the person receiving the requests said so on the record, and because BeautyMatter reported the same pattern independently before the launch. We know Poppi sold for $1.95 billion and that Alix Earle held equity before the sale. We know the FTC treats financial ties as material connections that must be disclosed, that its guidance addresses how a co-owner should word that disclosure, and that it does not consider a platform's own label automatically sufficient.

We do not know the size of any creator's stake in Poppi or Jetty, or what any of those stakes paid or will pay. We do not know how common equity-for-content deals actually are across the industry; the evidence so far is a collection of interviews and announcements, not a survey. And we do not know how audiences will react as more of these deals surface, though the Ringer episode suggests they are paying closer attention than brands sometimes assume.

It is also fair to say that equity can be a genuinely good deal. Some creators have real influence over a product's success, and a stake aligns their interests with the brand's over years rather than weeks. The quarrel here is not with equity. It is with the idea that equity is simply a better-paid version of a sponsorship, rather than a different kind of relationship with different risks.

Before you trade a fee for a stake

If a brand offers equity, or you are thinking of asking for it, a few questions do most of the work. This applies whether you have 9,000 followers or 900,000, and whether you are building toward influencer marketing as a full-time business or treating it as a side income.

1. Get the cash number first. Before discussing equity, ask what the brand would pay in cash for the same deliverables. If the offer is equity instead of a fee rather than on top of one, you are investing your work in their company. Price it like an investment, not like a perk.
2. Read the vesting and the cliff before the percentage. Ask what happens if the brand ends the partnership early, if you stop posting, or if the company is sold before your equity vests. A generous percentage with a long cliff can be worth less than a small one that vests quickly.
3. Ask how many shares exist and what kind you are getting. A percentage only means something against the full number of shares. Options are not shares, and common stock sits behind investors' preferred stock in a sale. If the brand will not answer, that is an answer.
4. Disclose like an owner, every time. Owning part of a brand does not exempt you from disclosure because nobody paid you for that particular post. Put it in the first lines of the caption or in the video itself, in plain words, and do not rely on the platform label alone. Your business account settings will not make that call for you.
5. Keep your recommendations honest about competitors. The easiest way to burn trust is to stop mentioning a product you used to love because it competes with one you own. Your audience will notice before you do.
6. Measure what the partnership does to your audience. Watch saves, shares and comment sentiment on posts that mention the brand compared with your other work. Our guide to Instagram analytics covers the basics. If engagement on those posts keeps sliding, the stake is costing you something the cap table does not show.
7. Get professional advice before you sign. A lawyer for the agreement and an accountant for the tax treatment cost money upfront. Both cost less than discovering, as some celebrity promoters did, that worthless stock can still come with a tax bill.

Who is actually on the boat

The reflex after a story like Jetty's is to cheer: creators have spent a decade being treated as interchangeable ad inventory, and asking for ownership is a sign of maturity. Some of that cheering is earned. The creators who helped make Poppi famous were early, and the ones who held equity were rewarded for it.

But the most valuable thing a creator brings to any deal is not their posting schedule or even their follower count. It is the fact that their audience believes them. A fee rents that belief for a campaign. A stake ties it to a company for years, through every funding round, every pivot and every bad quarter, and sometimes in ways the audience cannot see. That can be a fine trade. It is just not the same trade, and it deserves more scrutiny than a celebratory headline gives it.

So the useful question for a creator is not "should I take equity?" It is "what am I putting on this boat, and can I afford to lose it?" For a brand, the money it puts in is capital. For the creator, the cargo is the engagement they spent years earning, and the trust underneath it. Before stepping off the jetty, it is worth knowing which of the two you are risking.

FAQ

What is a creator equity deal?

An arrangement in which a brand gives a creator ownership in the company, usually shares or stock options that vest over time, instead of or in addition to a cash fee for content and promotion. The creator profits only if the company is sold or goes public at a good price.

Do I have to disclose that I own equity in a brand I post about?

In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides treat financial relationships with a brand as material connections that should be disclosed clearly, close to the endorsement itself, and the FTC notes that "paid" is not adequate wording for a co-owner. It also says a platform's built-in label is not a guarantee of adequate disclosure, so adding your own plain-language disclosure is the safer route.

How much equity do creators typically get?

There is no standard. Benchmarks suggested by the platform Cherub and reported by Digiday range from about 0.1% to 0.3% for advisory-only roles, 0.25% to 0.75% when guaranteed content is included, and 0.75% to 3% for long-term creative partners, all with vesting schedules and cliffs. Real offers vary widely.

Is equity better than a flat fee?

Sometimes, but not by default. A fee is paid now and does not depend on the company's success. Equity can be worth far more if the company sells well, but it can shrink through dilution, pay out only years later, or end up worth nothing, and US government data shows roughly half of new business establishments close within five years. Comparing the offer against the cash fee for the same work is the clearest test.