I don’t get many chances to say something positive about Creator Connections these days, so I’m going to take this one. Over the last four days, the number of available campaigns went from roughly 80,000 to 93,000. That’s one of the first stretches of actual growth we’ve seen in a long time. Before anyone gets too excited, there’s an asterisk on it, and I’m going to walk you through exactly why it happened, what the numbers say about the campaigns that came in, and why I don’t expect it to last.
In This Article
- The Numbers Finally Moved the Right Direction
- How Fast Campaigns Are Coming In Right Now
- Reason One: Chinese Sellers Came Back From Holiday
- Reason Two: Black Friday Is 30 Days Out
- What the New Campaigns Actually Look Like
- The Math Behind the Bleeding
- Why This Probably Reverts
- What You Should Do With This Information
The Numbers Finally Moved the Right Direction
I want to be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not saying. This does not mean Creator Connections is fixed. It doesn’t mean it’s fine. It doesn’t mean it’s not still crashing in the ways I’ve been talking about for months. What it means is that something good happened in the data, and I report the data whether I like it or not.
Campaigns had been disappearing fast. We dropped to around 80,000 available campaigns and actually teetered under that line for a moment before bouncing back up to about 83,000. Then, over the last four days, the total climbed to roughly 93,000. The page still says “a million” at the top, and that number has always been meaningless. The real figure is the one that tells you what you can actually claim, and that one went up for the first time in a while.
How Fast Campaigns Are Coming In Right Now
Most of that jump came in literally the last two days. Here’s the daily intake I tracked:
- Four days ago: around 7,400 new campaigns
- Three days ago: about 8,000
- Two days ago: roughly 10,000
- Yesterday: somewhere around 14,000
So intake basically doubled in four days. For context, a normal day is 6,000 to 7,000 new campaigns, and that’s nowhere near enough to sustain the program. My numbers say Creator Connections needs 12,000 to 15,000 new campaigns a day minimum to actually grow. That’s not what it normally does, which is why the available count has been shrinking all year. When it does happen, it’s worth noticing.
Reason One: Chinese Sellers Came Back From Holiday
There are two main reasons for the spike, and neither of them is “Amazon fixed something.” The first is that a huge share of Creator Connections campaigns are set up by sellers based in China, and they just came off a week-long national holiday. When they’re on holiday, they don’t post campaigns. When they come back, they post faster than usual to play catch-up. Some of what we’re seeing is simply that backlog clearing.
This matters because it means part of the surge is borrowed from the slow week before it. It balances out. It’s not new demand showing up; it’s delayed demand arriving late.
Reason Two: Black Friday Is 30 Days Out
The second reason is the calendar. We’re sitting right around the 30-day mark before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is when brands start loading up campaigns for the holiday push. This is the week and weekend where a lot of those campaigns get built, and early next week you’ll see a bunch of them pop up for the first time.
Is this typical volume? No. But I’ll take atypical volume over the steady bleed we’ve been living with. If you’ve been holding off on claiming campaigns because the pickings were thin, the next couple of weeks are the window to pay attention.
What the New Campaigns Actually Look Like
Here’s the part that caught my attention when I dug into the file. Of the 49,121 campaigns that were new to my data over those four days, only about 1,300 were at 30% commission or higher. If you’re wondering about the 50% campaigns, there were 28 of them. Twenty-eight out of 49,000.
So the volume went up, but the quality distribution didn’t change. The overwhelming majority of what came in is under 30%. That’s consistent with what I’ve been seeing all year, and it’s exactly why I keep telling people that raw campaign count is the wrong thing to chase. More campaigns at the same low rates just means more noise to filter through. This is where tools that sort by rate, category, and the products you already have content for earn their keep, because scrolling through 49,000 new listings by hand is not a strategy.
The Math Behind the Bleeding
It’s important to understand that the available count grew because the number of campaigns coming in per day increased exponentially. It is not because creators are claiming fewer campaigns. Claim rates haven’t dropped.
On an average day, about 7,000 new campaigns arrive. At the current rate of acceptance, that leaves the system in a hole of roughly 29,500 campaigns per day. That’s why the available pool was draining so fast. According to my numbers, Creator Connections needs about 11,500 new campaigns per day just to stop the bleeding and hold flat. Not grow. Just maintain.
That’s a big ask when the average intake for most of the last several months has hovered around 7,100 per day. Going from 7,100 to 11,500 is a 60% jump in daily brand participation, and brands have not shown any willingness to sustain that kind of pace this year.
Why This Probably Reverts
The reason we’re seeing the available count climb right now is that we’re temporarily pushing past that 11,500 maintenance line, thanks to the Black Friday build-up and the post-holiday catch-up. Both of those are temporary. The holiday backlog clears in a few days. The Black Friday loading has a natural end date.
Unless brands keep adding campaigns at this unusually high pace, which they have not done at any point this year, the available count will revert and start bleeding out again. I’m not predicting doom. I’m telling you what the math says, and the math says this is a bump, not a trend.
What You Should Do With This Information
A few practical takeaways. First, the next two weeks are a better-than-usual window to find Creator Connections campaigns worth claiming, especially in categories where you already have products in your storefront. Run a Storefront Cross Check against the new campaigns and prioritize the ones where you don’t need to buy or make anything new.
Second, don’t let volume fool you into claiming garbage. 1,300 campaigns at 30% or above out of 49,000 means the filter still matters more than the feed. Sort by rate first and treat the rest as background noise.
Third, keep your expectations calibrated. I’ll gladly report good news when the numbers give me some, and for a couple of days they did. But Creator Connections isn’t healthy until intake can sustain 11,500 a day without a holiday on the calendar, and we’re not there. Congrats on the bump. Now let’s see if it holds.
If you want to track Creator Connections campaign counts, commission rate distribution, and which campaigns match products already in your storefront without doing it by hand, that’s exactly what I built Oink for Influencers to do. Try it and stop guessing at the numbers.
