Irem Gonc: How Data Helps Creators Decide What to Post

The creator economy has reached the point where brands treat individual posts as ad inventory. Paid amplification of creator content through direct social partnerships is projected to reach $13.2 billion in 2026, up 48% from $8.9 billion the year before, according to figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) cited by Irem Gonc, who founded inVolo after years briefing and casting influencers for brand campaigns. That money changes what a creator actually sells. It is no longer attention alone. It is proof that a piece of content will keep working once a media budget is pushed behind it. Most creators cannot produce that proof, not because their content fails, but because they have never been taught to read their own numbers. Gonc argues that the gap between what creators post and what performs is a data problem long before it becomes a creative one.

The Morning After Problem

The standard creator routine is to check the numbers the next day, feel good or bad, and move on. Gonc calls this the least useful version of analytics, because it treats a post as a verdict rather than as information. “Data doesn’t tell you what to create. It tells you what your audience already told you,” she says. The questions that matter are narrower and harder: which posts did people watch to the end, which ones did they send to a friend, which topic keeps working every time it comes around.

Answer those and the next post stops being a guess. It becomes a controlled test, same topic with a new angle, or same format with a new topic. That loop is the whole discipline. Gonc built inVolo around it, reading a creator’s own metrics against what is moving in their niche and converting that into concrete ideas for the next piece. She is careful about what the tool is for. “The goal isn’t to automate creativity. It’s to remove the blank page.”

Why Casting Decisions Keep Going Wrong

The brand side has its own blind spot, and it is structural. Without partner-level access to Meta’s tools, an agency cannot pull a creator’s historical performance. What it sees is whatever is public, plus a handful of screenshots the creator chose to send. So casting falls back on follower count, a couple of viral posts, and an engagement rate nobody can verify. Meanwhile, the creator is sitting on years of insights and rarely knows what to do with them. Two parties, both short on the same information, making a decision worth real money.

Then the brief compounds it. A brand selects a creator for what that creator has built, then hands over a script, a tone and a shot list, effectively commissioning its own TV commercial from someone hired for the opposite reason. “Every extra layer of control chips away at that naturalness, and the audience feels it immediately,” Gonc says. That is how campaigns that look correct on a deck fail in the feed. Her conclusion from that work is worth sitting with: creators who can see their own patterns clearly make better decisions without being managed, and they arrive at brand conversations with evidence rather than a media kit.

The Signals Worth Trusting

Brands and creators can open the same dashboard and leave with two different stories. “Brands are looking for proof, creators are looking for validation, and the most flattering numbers tend to win both arguments,” Gonc says. The metrics that she trusts are the ones that reveal intent, because each one costs the viewer something. How much of a video do people watch? How often do they send it to a friend? How often do they save it to return to later? A post with modest reach but a strong share rate is frequently doing more for a creator, and for a brand, than a much larger post people scrolled past. Instagram’s own guidance points in the same direction. In January 2025, Instagram head Adam Mosseri encouraged creators to focus on how people respond to their content, not simply how many people it reaches.

The misleading signals are the loud ones. Raw views from a single viral spike. Follower count. Engagement rates calculated across a handful of posts. Even averages deceive, since one outlier can disguise a flat body of work. Gonc’s method is to compare each post against that creator’s own baseline rather than against anyone else’s highlight reel, and to look across ten posts instead of one. “A peak tells you what happened once. Consistency tells you what’s likely to happen next.” That distinction is precisely what a brand needs before it commits paid spend, which is why creators who can demonstrate watch time, share rate, and saves tend to win budgets that larger accounts do not.

Building A System Instead Of Chasing Updates

Platform rules have moved repeatedly in a single year. In July 2025, Instagram began letting Google and Bing index public posts from professional accounts, turning every caption into something closer to a search listing. In April 2026, accounts that mostly repost other people’s work lost eligibility for recommendations. And a sizeable share of what gets reported as an algorithm update is nothing of the kind. Mosseri’s New Year message about AI and authenticity announced no ranking change, yet it was widely covered as one. Sorting real changes from noise is itself a job, and for most people, Gonc notes, keeping up already is one.

Her answer is not to track everything. It is to have a system that surfaces what is changing: which formats are working now, which trends are worth joining, what competitors are doing, and which platform updates genuinely affect reach. There is also an unglamorous commercial point creators overlook. In a Northwestern Medill survey, 54% of marketers named securing usage rights as a barrier to integrating creator content into paid media. Being clear and flexible about licensing upfront removes one of the largest obstacles between a post and an ad budget. Visibility was once bounded by the size of a billboard or a magazine’s readership. Now it is effectively unlimited, and the ground shifts constantly. “Get the system and the tools right, and what’s left is the part no algorithm can replace: being original.”

Follow Irem Gonc on LinkedIn for more insights on creator analytics, influencer casting, and brand partnership strategy.