How much does it pay off when the creator is genuinely in your niche?

13.59% more engagement and 81.39% more views, when you pick creators on the brand's product niche rather than on reach. That comes from a 2025 sector analysis by archive.com, and it's the figure that sits closest to our entire model.

The precision is suspiciously exact for something that turns on taste and context, mind; read it as an order of magnitude, not a guarantee. The direction holds, and the reason isn't mysterious. Someone follows a triathlete because they do triathlon themselves. A pair of goggles in that context isn't an interruption of the feed, it's a tip. The same goggles on a lifestyle account with ten times the followers is an ad among other ads.

In practice that means this: reach is the easiest variable to select on and the least predictive. So we look at discipline and training behaviour first — how that selection works is described separately — and only then at follower count. A runner with 1,800 followers who runs four times a week is more useful to a running brand than a general fitness account with 20,000.

It's also why we build a squad per discipline instead of rolling out one broad sports list.