Ronit Cohn, the founder and CEO of Cohn Talent Group, has spent more than 15 years watching the industry price creators by the wrong variable, arguing that a creator’s value has less to do with reach than with fit. It is a belief that shows up in how she talks about nearly every part of the business: what brands measure, how they price creators, and how they still sort them.

Cohn Talent Group, the Los Angeles-based firm Ronit founded in 2019, followed stints managing brand partnerships at Interscope Records, running the career of YouTuber Michelle Phan, and leading creator partnerships at Fullscreen under WarnerMedia. The firm operates as a boutique creator management and advisory practice, working across personal brand strategy, content strategy, business development, brand partnerships, career guidance and coaching. Her roster, she says, collectively reaches more than 150 million fans a day across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X.

That belief, that a creator’s value has more to do with connection than scale, is the thread underneath everything else she says about the state of the business.

Brands Are Still Paying for Views, Not the Reactions That Move People

Ronit has said publicly that sharing, not watching, is the metric that actually reflects whether content works. Brands, she notes, have not caught up. “They’re paying for the traditional numbers,” she says. “I don’t think they measure the emphatic responses in the comment section, or the sharing.”

The distinction matters because a view is easy to buy, in her framing, while a genuine reaction is not. She argues that content only proves itself when it generates a strong enough response to move someone to comment on it or share it, rather than simply being seen.

The habit she most wants brands to break comes from that same blind spot. “Read the comments,” she says. “Many brands and influencer agencies overlook the comment section, and that’s a missed opportunity. It’s where you gain deeper insights into the audience you’re paying to reach. More importantly, what fans are saying in the comments is often the clearest indicator of how much trust and genuine affinity they have for that creator.”

The Biggest Creators Are Losing Deals Over Their Own Follower Count

In conversations with several influencer agencies, Ronit says she was surprised by how they build campaign proposals for brands. “Some shared that they’re selling programs based on predetermined follower count tiers, so once the campaign is approved, the creator recommendations are often built around fulfilling those agreed-upon audience-size requirements,” she says.

Photo: Ronit Cohn with Jessica Kaylee, Sean Sotaridona, and Kayla Rose-Gibson at Cannes

She has experienced the downside of that firsthand, as some of her biggest creators were excellent fits for campaigns but never made it into consideration because they fell outside the target follower range.

“It can actually be a disservice, the larger you are,” Ronit says. Her recommendation is that campaigns get built around the best creator for the job, not the creator who happens to fit a predetermined follower range.

She points to a speed-dating brunch for brands and creators hosted this year at Cannes by Dhar Mann and Shira Lazar as a small, informal step toward matching people by fit instead of size.

The Real Sorting Variable Isn’t Category. It’s the Audience.

Part of the industry’s habit is classifying creators by content category, beauty, fitness, gaming, and building pitches around that label. Ronit does not think that the habit is broken. “I don’t think it’s broken,” she says. “I think I just have an eye for the future.”

That view, she says, comes from 15 years of testing it herself, launching products and attempting to build direct-to-consumer revenue with the creators she has represented. What she has learned pushes her away from sorting by niche or genre and toward a different variable. “It shouldn’t be based on niche or category or genre,” she says. “It’s really based on how the audience perceives that creator.”

The distinction, category versus audience perception, is the same argument as the metrics problem and the follower-count problem, restated a third way. In each case, the industry is pricing and sorting creators by something easy to measure instead of the thing that actually determines whether a partnership works.

Photo: Ronit Cohn and Jessica Kaylee

The Playbook Comes From What Killed the Record Labels

Ronit’s read on where the industry goes next borrows directly from a collapse she watched happen in music. “Part of the reason why the record labels failed is that they didn’t own the relationship with the audience,” she says. Creators, by contrast, hold that relationship directly, and she sees that ownership, not reach or category, as the asset that will determine which creator businesses actually last.

That has a cost for creators who get the sequencing backwards. “A lot of creators have launched vanity projects, things that they want, but that don’t necessarily solve a need for their audience,” she says. She expects something closer to “social Darwinism” over the next five to ten years, with only the businesses built around a real audience need surviving the shakeout.

Photo: Ronit Cohn interviewing Sean Sotaridona (SeanDoesMagic)

Where the Value Actually Sits Now

Across measurement, pricing, and categorization, Ronit’s argument is that the industry keeps sorting creators by what’s easy to count and missing the thing that actually predicts whether a partnership or a creator’s business holds up. 

She traces that idea back further. “It’s the vision that I had back in 2011,” she says, “which is that creators are not the future, but they are the present.”

For Ronit, the fix is not a platform or a metric. It is the relationship itself. “If you create a deep enough connection, the algorithm doesn’t matter,” she says. “They’re going to find you. They’re looking for you. They want you.”

All photos are Courtesy of Cohn Talent Group.

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