Nielsen Gave Brands Two Creator Numbers. Most Only Buy the First.

A post from the team at OUT loud came across my LinkedIn feed last week with exactly one reaction on it.

One. For a post citing Nielsen data that has direct budget implications for anyone buying LGBTQ+ media.

I've been doing this long enough to know that engagement and importance are barely related, and this is a clean example. So credit where it belongs — OUT loud surfaced it, and I'd rather amplify a competitor's good research than watch it disappear into the feed. What follows is my read of the same Nielsen numbers, restated for the person who actually has to build the media plan.

The Two Numbers

From Nielsen's Reconnecting with LGBTQ+ Audiences, published June 2025 and built on the company's work on ad attitudes:

LGBTQ+ audiences reached through influencer media are 47% more likely to buy products endorsed by influencers.

They are 52% more likely to buy a product when a brand advertises in content featuring diverse creators.

Read quickly, those look like the same finding stated twice. They're not. They describe two entirely different mechanisms, they cost very different amounts to capture, and the industry has spent three years acting almost exclusively on the smaller one.

Restating Both for a Media Plan

Here's the same data with the columns a buyer actually needs.

Nielsen Finding	What You're Actually Buying	How It Scales
47% — more likely to buy influencer-endorsed products	An endorsement. A named person putting their credibility behind your product	Linearly, at best. Every additional creator is another negotiation, another rate, another approval cycle, another set of usage rights
52% — more likely to buy when a brand advertises in content with diverse creators	Adjacency. Your message inside content the audience already trusts — no endorsement required	Across the whole network at once. One buy can sit alongside dozens of creators without contracting any of them individually

Now sit with the arithmetic for a second. The mechanism that is harder to buy, slower to execute and more expensive per unit tested five points lower than the one you can purchase as straightforward media.

That's not an argument against creator partnerships. I'd run both, and most good plans do. But if a brand only has budget for one motion this year, the research points at the one most brands treat as the afterthought.

Why the Creator Channel Works Here At All

Three things stack, and they're all in the same body of research.

The audience is disproportionately there. Nielsen found LGBTQ+ audiences are 50% more likely than the general population to spend three or more hours a day on social media. Whatever your view of that as a lifestyle matter, as a media fact it's decisive.

There's a deficit to correct. 63% of LGBTQ+ audiences say they feel misrepresented in media and advertising, and 60% want more representation. That's a credibility gap brand-produced creative struggles to close on its own — and one that content made by people inside the community closes almost automatically.

The alternatives have narrowed. The major platforms no longer offer orientation-based targeting, and Google's personalized advertising policy restricts advertiser-curated audiences in this category. I've written about that structural gap at length. Creators and LGBTQ+ publishers are now among the few remaining ways to reach this audience deliberately rather than hoping automated delivery stumbles into it.

Put those together and the creator channel isn't a nice-to-have in this market. It's one of the load-bearing options left.

The KPI Problem

Which brings me to the part of OUT loud's argument I want to underline hardest, because it's the one that gets nodded at and then ignored on the actual brief: community-building, not follower count, is the non-negotiable creator KPI.

I'd go further. Follower count isn't a weak KPI. It's a misleading one, and the engagement data shows it inverting.

Across every major platform, engagement rates fall as audience size rises. 2026 benchmarks put micro creators (10K–100K followers) at two to three times the engagement of macro creators on every platform measured. On Instagram static posts, nano accounts run roughly 3.5–6% while mega accounts sit at 0.5–1%. On TikTok the spread is 9–15% down to 1–3%.

So a buyer optimizing for followers is, with impressive consistency, optimizing away from the thing Nielsen actually measured. The 47% and the 52% both describe a response — people acting on something they saw. Response comes from relationship. Relationship is what a community has and an audience doesn't.

How We Actually Vet This

These are the questions we run before we'll put a creator in front of a client across the #ILoveGay network. None of them is exotic. All of them are more predictive than audience size.

1. What share of the audience is actually LGBTQ+ — and can you show me? This is the first question and it disqualifies more candidates than anything else. A large general audience with queer-adjacent content is a different product from a genuinely LGBTQ+ community, and it should be priced differently.

2. Does the creator reply? Open the comments. A creator who answers is running a community. A creator who broadcasts is running a channel. Both can be worth buying; only one produces the response effect the research is measuring.

3. Do the same names keep showing up? Recurring commenters are the single most underrated signal in this business. They mean people come back, which means the audience is real and the trust is durable.

4. What happens on the unsponsored posts? Compare engagement on paid content against organic. If it falls off a cliff, the audience is tolerating the brand work rather than accepting it — and the endorsement effect you're paying for isn't there.

5. How many brands this year? A creator running a partnership every week has trained their audience to scroll past sponsorships. Scarcity is part of what you're buying.

6. How long have they held this community? Tenure matters in a market that has watched a lot of people arrive for a Pride cycle and leave. Creators who were here in 2019 are a different proposition from creators who arrived last June.

The Part That Makes This a Buying Opportunity

Here's the number that reframes everything above. Industry figures cited by the ANA put LGBTQ+-targeted media in only about 34% of marketers' plans — against a consumer base representing roughly $1.4 trillion in annual US spending power and $4.7 trillion globally.

Two-thirds of the market isn't competing with you for this inventory. In a media environment where every efficient channel gets arbitraged within about eighteen months, that's an unusually durable gap — and it exists mostly because the category still gets filed under "Pride planning" instead of "audience reach."

It won't stay open forever. It's been open longer than I expected already.

The Takeaway

A post with one reaction was carrying research that should change how brands build creator briefs. That's the media environment we're all working in, and it's why I keep restating good numbers rather than chasing new ones.

So, restated one more time, for the plan:

Buy the environment before you buy the endorsement. It tests higher, it costs less, and it doesn't depend on any one person's calendar.

Then buy the endorsement — from creators chosen on community, not size. Composition, reply behavior, repeat commenters, tenure. Put those four in the brief and the follower minimum will start to look like what it is: a proxy somebody reached for because it was easy to count.

And do it while two-thirds of the industry still isn't in the room.

Our 2026 LGBTQ+ Marketplace Guide maps the LGBTQ+ media and creator landscape in depth, and our influencer and content marketing work covers how we build and vet these rosters.