Brandon Smithwrick gave creators discount codes for his wife's Shopify store, and customers kept using them for months after the collab ended. “We're still seeing promo codes convert months after the collab ended,” he wrote on LinkedIn in a paid partnership with Modash.
A paid ad stops working the moment a brand stops paying for impressions. A creator's video, post or episode, however, stays on the profile, and the code in its caption keeps working. The budget runs out, but conversions from content that has already been published carry on.
This is exactly where the problem lies, and it is the one brands struggle with most in creator partnerships. How do you measure a channel that never fully switches off?
What the tools can attribute
Modash, on which Smithwrick built his test, says it attributes sales to creators through links, discount codes or both, and brings posts, clicks and revenue together in one overview. It handles payouts through adjustable thresholds and holding periods, with support in more than 180 countries.
Among measurement tools used across influencer programmes, the Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2026 shows that the discount code leads globally with 45.9% adoption, while affiliate links have 26.0% and native shop features 25.0%. A brand that wants to see what creator content has earned most often reaches for the code.
What a code does not catch
A code is cheap and works without any additional technology, but reading it has blind spots. In a 2021 article for Sounds Profitable, podcast analyst Bryan Barletta described how a code captures conversion at its earliest point, the account sign-up, and misses the steps that follow. A switch from a trial to a paid plan comes days or weeks later.
“The only one who knows that the code was used is the advertiser,” Barletta summarised the one-sidedness of the data. Vanity URLs fare similarly. A listener often searches for the brand instead of typing the exact address, and the publisher loses the credit.
A discount code therefore measures a narrow segment: price-sensitive audiences with a good memory. That is the part of the long tail the tool can see. The rest of the conversions that creator content triggers later, and by other routes, remain outside the record.
Podcasts have the same time tail
An episode is not consumed on the day it is published. Hosting platforms count downloads under the IAB methodology, which uses a 24-hour window to remove duplicates.
Buzzsprout evaluates the first 7 days after release, and as of June 2026, 412 downloads of an episode within that window is enough to reach the top 10% of podcasts. Downloads keep coming in after that window, though, and a sponsor read inside an episode keeps the code live, just as a creator's post does.
US podcast advertising reached $2.862 billion in 2025, up 17.6% year on year, according to IAB and PwC, with digital audio at $8.4 billion. When Spotify acquired Podsights and Chartable in February 2022, it said in its announcement that “measurement and attribution remain the two biggest unsolved challenges for podcast advertisers”.
Podsights became part of Spotify Ad Analytics, while Chartable, which Spotify had owned, shut down in December 2024. According to the same overview, the preferred alternative for pod-to-pod attribution became Magellan AI. Even with pixel attribution and conversion APIs, however, a podcast relies on the same durable trail as creator commerce: the code and the vanity URL.
Europe is turning creator commerce into declared advertising
The measured channel has to be a declared one, and in Europe that is no longer optional. On 14 February 2024, the European Commission and consumer authorities from 22 Member States, Norway and Iceland published the results of a sweep of posts by 576 influencers. Of these, 97% published commercial content, but only 20% systematically declared it as advertising. 38% did not use platform labels such as “paid partnership” and reached for the softer “collaboration”. 44% had their own website, and most of them could sell directly through it. 358 profiles were selected for investigation.
“The influencer scene has become a full-fledged business,” said then Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders when presenting the results. From 17 February 2024 the Digital Services Act applies across the EU and requires creators to declare commercial communications, and the Commission says the findings of the sweep should feed into the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act.
Smithwrick's #ad is exactly the transparency that regulation requires. It is also a condition of measurement. Revenue can only be attributed to content where that content is recorded as a commercial channel.
On both sides, for creators and for podcasts alike, the main evidence remains the same small detail: a code in a caption or a read inside an episode. The content keeps converting, and the code is still the only receipt the brand has in hand.
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