The metric
Real Reach
Real Reach is the median views of a creator’s recent posts — the number of people a placement with them actually reaches. It is the unit we budget, forecast, and rank against. It is not their follower count.
Why not followers?
A follower count is an account’s lifetime accumulation — people who tapped “follow” once, many of whom never see a given post and some of whom no longer exist. It is the influencer industry’s vanity metric: easy to inflate, weakly related to how many humans a sponsored post will reach, and the number most tools still rank on.
When we measured actual views against follower counts across a large sample of creators, the gap was not small or consistent — it widened sharply with size. Large accounts routinely reach a fraction of their followers per post; anchoring a forecast on followers over-states the audience of older, bigger accounts by an order of magnitude or more. Budget on followers and you systematically overpay the wrong creators.
Why the median of recent posts
A single viral hit (or a single flop) is not what your placement will do. The median of recent posts is the typical outcome — resistant to one spike skewing the picture, and current rather than a lifetime average. It answers the honest question: if you book this creator for one post, how many people realistically see it?
For multi-platform creators, Real Reach sums the per-platform medians. When a creator has too little recent posting history to be confident, we say so rather than print a false-precise number.
How to use it
Treat Real Reach as the top of the funnel — the audience a placement buys you. Everything downstream (clicks, customers, revenue, profit) is forecast from it against your store’s economics, and it’s one of the inputs to AcuScore. If you only change one habit: stop budgeting against followers.