How to read a public creator.

The catalog in this magazine is the Public Influencer Directory and Creator Database. It is a stack of public cards I could read: a username, a link outward when I have one, and the figures that were on the card. A name if it was there. A subject line. A place. Followers, average views, an engagement percent. Sometimes a comparison with a median. Sometimes a split of audience by country, age, and gender. Sometimes a few picture addresses. If a field was empty, the page leaves it empty. I do not write a biography to cover a hole, and I do not sell an inbox that was never on the card. I used to be the person waiting on the other side of a number like these. I keep them in the open so you do not have to guess, and so I do not get to invent the rest.

What follows is how to research a person with that kind of record. It is the method I want a reader to use, including on my own pages. The journal has the longer argument about the ratio. The methodology has the sort. This page is the procedure: what to look at, in which order, and what to write down before you decide you know what someone is worth.

What a number can, and cannot, tell you

A public figure’s numbers are a description of an audience at the moment someone counted it. They are not a character, and they are not a quote. Followers tell you the scale the platform was willing to print. Average views tell you something closer to recent attention, and only if the average is of a real window of posts rather than one lucky film. An engagement percent tells you a ratio between those worlds. None of the three tells you whether the person answers mail, whether the audience buys anything, whether the posts are theirs, or whether the count was bought. None of them is the fee. If you needed the fee, you will have to ask, with these figures in front of both of you. I will not type one in.

They also cannot tell you the usage rights or the mood of the last campaign. Those facts are not in this table, so a page that implied them would be a fiction. A blank is a blank. Treat it as missing evidence, not as a zero and not as a compliment. A brand that treats a blank as “cheap” and a creator that treats a blank as “premium” are making the same mistake from opposite chairs.

What the numbers can tell you is narrower, and useful. They put a person on a scale you can compare with another person who was read in the same way. They show whether the large account is quiet, or the small account is loud. They give you a date: the updated time on a row is when I read the card, not when the person last posted. A figure without that date is a rumour with a decimal point. Read the date before you quote the count, and do not set a fee from March against a view count from today without saying so.

Two people with the same follower count are not the same kind of read. One may have a name, a picture, an audience split, and a median mark that is a short number. The other may have a username and a hole. The fuller card is not a better person. It is a card you can check. The thin card is a reason to go and look at their own page, or to stop, not a reason to invent the rest and then pay the invention.

Followers, views, and the ratio

Read the three figures as a set. Followers are cumulative and slow. They flatter longevity and they flatter anyone who paid for the appearance of longevity. They are a poor clock. A person can keep a million followers and barely be watched this month. Average views are the better clock I have, and they are still an average: one post that travelled can lift them, and a quiet month can drop them, while the follower count sits there looking stable. If views are a small fraction of followers, ask whether the audience is old, bought, or simply elsewhere. If views dwarf followers, the work is travelling outside the follower graph. That can be a healthy sign. It can also be one film. The average will not tell you which, and I do not have the posts to split it. Do not pay a “viral” premium for an average you have not opened.

Engagement is the percent on the card. I did not rebuild it from likes and replies of my own. A ratio gives a small room a fair chance: twenty attentive people can outrank two million quiet ones, and sometimes they should. A ratio also flatters noise. A tiny audience and a burst of replies can print a number that looks like devotion. The other way is as common. A very large audience prints a modest percent that is, in absolute replies, a crowd. This is why a profile still shows followers and average views beside the rate, when I have them. One column is a poor portrait, and it is a poor way to price.

Some rates sit above one hundred percent. A handful sit far above it, into numbers no ordinary reading of replies-over-followers can support. I do not correct them. A correction, without the posts, would be a guess I had typeset, and then someone would negotiate against the guess. I print the recorded figure, and I keep those extremes off the lead of the issue. The lead has to be a person with a believable audience, not the winner of a broken column. If you are sorting a list of your own, decide in advance what you will do with a rate you do not believe, and write that decision down. Quietly dropping the number, and quietly trusting it, are different acts. Neither of them is “the market rate.”

On a subject page, a place page, a list, and a subject in a place, my order is engagement, then average views, then followers. Nulls go last. A tie falls to the username, so the page does not shuffle between reads. That order is mine. The source pages did not hand me a rank number. If you would have sorted by the size of the room instead, the directory will do it: the sort on the directory can be engagement, followers, average views, or the date I read the row. Use the sort that matches the question. Do not let the first order you saw become the question, and do not tell a creator they “ranked third” as if a third party had awarded it. I ordered the page. I am happy to be disagreed with.

The audience mix

When the card carried it, I draw the audience as rules: countries, age bands, and a gender split. These are the composition of the people said to be watching, not a biography of the person on the card. A bar that says most of the audience is in one country does not prove the creator lives there. A gender split is not the creator’s identity, and it is not a filter. I do not let a reader shop the book by gender, age, or ethnicity. The charts stay on the person. If a brief asked for “women 18 to 24 in one country,” the chart can tell you whether the card claimed that mix. It cannot tell you whether those people buy.

Read a mix as a set of shares, and notice what is missing. “Other” is a real bucket, not a rounding error you should delete. A missing age band is a missing band. If the percents do not add to a hundred, leave them untidy. The tidy version would be yours, and the card would no longer be the evidence. A dominant country is a fact to put next to the language of the work and the place line on the profile. A Copenhagen name with a heavily American audience may be an English-language practice, a platform that skews that way, a stale card, or a mismatch. The chart cannot pick among those. It can stop you assuming the audience is the city in the location field, and then paying a local fee for a room that is not local.

Do not average two people’s mixes in your head and call it a market. A 70 percent share of one country on a small account is a different fact from the same share on a large one, because the underlying crowd is a different size. If you need the size, multiply only when you are willing to say that you did, and that the follower count and the share may have been counted on different days. I do not do that multiplication on the page. The bars are the JSON I stored.

Why a median comparison matters

A raw percent has no peer. Thirteen percent engagement might be ordinary in one subject and rare in another, and you cannot see which from the percent alone. A comparison with a median is the card’s attempt to say where the person sat against a middle. Plus thirteen percent is a fact I can show. It means the card claimed they were that far ahead of whatever middle it used. It does not mean I assembled the peer group and will show you the names. I did not recompute it. When you write “ahead of the median,” write it as a mark from the card, not as a study I conducted, and do not turn “ahead” into a multiplier on the fee unless you can say whose middle you mean.

The value of the comparison is the question it forces: ahead of whom, and by a number you can read. A sentence in that column would be a claim, so I omit sentences. The value three hundred percent, and the mark three hundred percent and upward, sit on far too many rows to be a measurement that a crowd of people landed on the same extraordinary ratio. That pattern is a ceiling in the source. The median tool leaves the ceiling out. On a profile I still show the printed characters, and I say they are capped. If you are ranking people by how far they sit ahead of the middle, drop the ceiling or you will crown a printing limit.

A median is only as calm as the set behind it. A middle taken across a vast, mixed directory is not the middle of a craft. A middle of a thin subject moves when one person enters or leaves. I open a subject page at two people, which is enough to be a page and not enough to be a stable middle. Use the median mark as a check on the raw percent, then go and look at the actual peers on the subject page. “Others who used the same line” means the cleaned phrase matched. It is not a private graph of similar taste, and it is not a set of people who charge the same.

Whether the person is who the card says

I do not confirm identity. A row is a username and the fields that travelled with it. Your check is a few public comparisons, done in the open, not a hunch and not a paid dossier. Start with the outward link on the profile, when I have a public https address. Leave my site. Look at the name they use, the handle, and what they actually posted recently. The subject line on my card is the cleaned phrase from the directory, and some of those phrases were scrapes that kept the rest of a page. I cut the tail. What remains can still be a job title, a slogan, or a word they have not used in a year. If you are about to pay for a subject, check that they still do the work.

If a picture loaded, compare the face with the page you opened. If the address failed, you get initials, not a substitute face. Initials are a monogram so the layout does not collapse. They are not identification. Do not search the web for a famous person with the same initials and decide the row is them. I will not have done that for you, and I do not want the credit if you do.

Then try the username, in quotes, somewhere other than this site. You are looking for a second public page that uses the same name and the same face, or for a clear statement that the handle moved. Two similar names are not one person. Search here is literal: a name or a username, not a guess that two spellings are the same life. A location line is a string I split on commas into a city, sometimes a region, and a country. It is not a proof of residence. The audience’s country is not a passport.

If the outward page disagrees with the card, believe the disagreement. Write down which field disagreed, and the date. Do not average the two stories into a smoother one. A creator who has changed name, city, or subject is ordinary. A card that names a different person than the link is a bad join, and the honest note is that the join failed. I would rather you record the failure than repair it with a biography, and I would rather you not pay the biography.

How to keep a note

A note is what stops a later you from remembering a number and forgetting its limits. At the top, write the question you actually had: a subject, a city, a scale, a person you were asked about, a fee you are trying not to invent. Numbers without a question will answer a question you did not ask. Under that, write the username, the date you looked, and the date on my row. Then the three figures, in the same order every time: followers, average views, engagement. Then the median mark, including the words “capped” or “absent” when that is the case. Then the audience mix in one sentence, not a screenshot you will misread in a month. Then the URL you opened off my site. Then the blanks. A blank you did not record will return later as a fact you think you saw, and it will walk into the deal.

If you are comparing two people, use the same fields for both, or use the compare tool and copy from that. Do not set a follower count from March beside a view count from today without saying the dates. Do not compare my engagement sort with a rank you remember from another site and call the difference a discovery. It is two orders. Name them. Do not average them into a third number and call it fair.

Keep the note short enough to finish. A list of twenty names you looked at is a document. A dump of every username in a subject is a directory, and I already publish that, with its count. If you only needed the people above a certain follower shelf, the tiers are the shelves I named: Margin, Column, Feature, Cover, Issue. They are a way to see the shape of the book. They are not a grade, and a row with no follower count is uncounted rather than forced onto a shelf. Say which shelf you used, or your note will pretend the cut was natural.

When you quote me, quote a name, a figure, the date, and a link. That is ordinary reading. Copying the magazine into a product that sells contact details is not, and it is also a waste of effort: the contact details are not here.

What not to trust

Do not trust a tier as a certificate. Do not trust a high ratio as a recommendation, or a low one as a scolding. Do not trust either of them as a prediction that someone will reply, or as a price. Being on a page is not a contract, not a membership, and not a sign that I have met the person or written to them. I do not introduce people, and I do not take a fee when two of them work together, because I do not make the introduction. There is no checkout and no escrow hiding under a button. There is no button.

Do not trust a price. There is no price in the table. Do not trust a package, a review, or a split of followers by network. I do not print those, because I am not going to perform a column I do not have. Do not trust a biography. If you needed a life story, you will not find it here, and you should not build one out of a niche word and a city.

Do not trust the position on a list as a rank the source conferred. The number beside a name is my order. Do not trust the three-hundred-percent ceiling as a feat. Do not trust a single average of views as a steady rate of work. Do not trust followers alone when views are missing, and do not trust views alone when you have not asked how wide the audience is. A mismatch between a huge follower count and a thin view count is a question about the audience. It is not, by itself, a proof of fraud. I cannot see a purchased follower, and I will not pretend a formula on this page can.

Do not trust a way of sorting people by race or ethnicity. A list whose only subject is a race or an ethnicity is not published. There is no filter for it. Gender and age, when I have them, are audience charts on the person. Do not trust an email address you think a directory of this kind ought to have. The absence is the policy. The disclaimer says the rest in fewer words: public statistics, not an endorsement, and not a guarantee of who will write back.

A note on the shelves, for a reader who wants the older names. The rows in the Public Influencer Directory and Creator Database were read from public directories already on the open web, not from a private file of inboxes. A person can still see which ones: the broad public directory of category, topic, country, and city pages; the ranked lists published under the name Sup; the TikTok boards at Buzzlytics; the ranking tables at TokRanks; the open cards at CreatorFanBase; the top tables kept by Social Blade; and the public UGC Creator Database. I do not reprint their sentences, and this is not a row of their marks. The date on a profile is the date I read that card.