Is paying influencers in free products ever okay?

“Asking an influencer to promote your brand for free clothes is like asking a plumber to unclog your toilet for free plungers,” reads one Instagram post from F*** You Pay Me (FYPM), an app that describes itself as Glassdoor, but for influencers.

Scroll through the rest of FYPM’s Instagram account, and you’ll find more posts echoing the same sentiment: that free products are a tool influencers need to do their jobs, not appropriate compensation. Or, to put it bluntly, influencers can’t pay their rent with free plungers.

As the influencer-marketing industry continues to grow and mature, experts in the space are debating if gifts—long a form of compensation for creators—are fair payment. Many we spoke with said that it’s not as simple as gifting versus not gifting, but agreed that paying influencers with cash instead of swag is becoming the new industry standard.

Got a bad idea

Lindsey Lee Lugrin, co-founder and CEO of FYPM, told us that, for influencers, it often comes down to personal preference—brands shouldn’t automatically assume that influencers are happy to receive gifts without a check.

“I think where brands go wrong is assuming that that’s okay, or that’s the standard,” she said.

For one, making that assumption can be insulting, according to Lugrin. She said what “gets [her] going” is when a brand tries to act like an influencer is getting a really good deal for exchanging, say, 10 Reels, 20 IG posts, and full usage rights in exchange for…toothpaste.

“A startup wouldn’t go to an engineer and be like, ‘Hey, we don’t have any money. Will you work for free?’ No, that just doesn’t happen,” Lugrin explained. “You’re asking somebody to do something for you that takes hours,” she continued. Influencer work isn’t just the time it takes to make the content—it’s also the time it takes to learn how to create the content in the first place, alongside skills like video editing and shooting, plus learning how to grow and maintain a following, she said.

What’s more, if a brand offers to compensate an influencer by offering gifts alone, it could appear in a post after all…just not the good kind. Lindsey Gamble, associate director of influencer innovation at Mavrck, told us he’s heard tons of stories of creators posting screenshots of DMs from brands only offering free product. “Think about brand safety and just protecting your brand,” he said.

Gamble also argued that this method simply isn’t the norm anymore. “The market is definitely changing, where it’s more standard for creators to receive a product or service along with monetary compensation,” he said, adding that this is not only reflective of increased demand for creators, but also because most people just want to get paid for all the hard work they’re doing.

“If someone comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we want to gift you this, and we need this in return,’ we immediately make it clear: we do not offer posts for trade,” Danielle McGrory, founder of PR and influencer marketing agency Communité, which works with influencers such as Katie Sturino and Nicole Berrie, told us. Brands are welcome to send packages along anyway, she said—Communité just can’t guarantee posts in return.

Exceptions

Some creators, however, are totally fine with getting paid in free product alone. As Gamble put it, marketers wouldn’t offer it if there weren’t people out there agreeing to it.

Ali Fazal, VP of marketing at Grin, told us that “Every creator, regardless of audience size, is a business. And every brand is a business,” adding that “both businesses have to find the terms advantageous. If those terms are advantageous to the creator, and they’re advantageous to the brand, then there’s no problem with that being the transaction that they embark upon.”

Additionally, some creators might be interested in a gift if the product or service being offered is considered expensive, according to Kayley Reed, founder of influencer marketing agency Hermana Agency. She said products like Dyson’s $600 Airwrap hair styler, or services like hotel stays, could work for some influencers. When you break down the amount of time it takes to produce the sponcon, let alone all the back-and-forth involved in dealmaking, accepting pricier gifts in exchange for content might not seem like a bad deal to some influencers, she added.

“People are often exploited in these gifting contracts, because they’re spending X [amount] of time, X number of hours producing content for something that, at the end of the day, they could have just been working those hours and then went on and bought the product, and they’d save money,” Reed told us.

Christen Nino De Guzman, founder of Clara, a platform similar to FYPM, told us that although there are instances where a gift could suffice as payment, the best practice is to pay creators with money. “In general…brands should pay creators,” she said.

Perhaps Lugrin put it best when she said that free products are tools influencers need to do their jobs, adding that “It’s not payment…unless the person is really hyped about it and wants it as payment, I guess.”