17M views does not mean 10x value

We’ve watched creators go viral with completely random content and multiply their rate overnight because, “bro, I got 17M views.”

Like… cool. But does that audience actually matter to brands?

Virality is attention, and attention is a lease. It expires in an afternoon. The people who watched a random edit for six seconds were never shopping; they were resting their thumb.

Relevance is different. A creator with forty thousand followers who actually uses the product, talking about it the way she talks about everything else, moves more than a stranger with four million reading a brief.

So here’s how we read a campaign. Did the right people see it, not just a lot of people. Did it give them a line they could repeat to someone else. Did anything happen afterwards that would not have happened otherwise.

If the answer to the third is yes, the view count is a nice bonus. If not, it was a very expensive fireworks show.