Product seeding upload rate: creators who had posted twice before posted 1.4x more often than the campaign average

PLAYLAB's gifting-only (unpaid) product seeding campaigns run at an upload rate of 60–70% — the share of shipped creators who post. Compared within the same campaign, creators who had posted for us twice or more before posted 1.43x as often as the campaign average, and creators who had posted once, 1.21x. Creators who had previously received a product and not posted came in lowest, at 0.89x (16 gifting-only campaigns, 5,819 shipments).

When brands pick creators to ship to, they usually look at follower count and recent views first. But the first question at the end of a campaign is "how many of them posted?" Before views come into it at all, whether the people who received the product actually publish decides the result.

So we went back through the 5,819 shipments from 16 gifting-only campaigns PLAYLAB has run and split them on a single question: had this creator posted for one of our earlier campaigns?

Uploads relative to the campaign average

Campaigns differ in product and timeline, so their upload rates differ too. That is why we compared creators within the same campaign. Setting each campaign's average to 1:

Prior campaign history	Shipments	Uploads vs campaign average
First collaboration	4,503	0.96x
Received before, did not post	482	0.89x
Posted once before	551	1.21x
Posted twice or more before	283	1.43x

The pattern holds campaign by campaign

In PLAYLAB's data, creators who had posted twice or more posted 1.43x as often as their campaign's average, and creators who had posted once, 1.21x. Taken one campaign at a time, creators with a prior post posted more than first-time creators in all 16 of 16 campaigns. The gap is not an artefact of pooling different campaigns together.

Look at the second row

Creators who had received a product once and not posted posted less than creators we had never worked with (0.89x vs 0.96x). Prior history tells you not only who is worth inviting back, but also who to be careful about inviting back.

That distinction only exists if campaign records are kept at the creator level. If shipment lists and post checks live in a different file for every campaign, the next campaign starts by digging up whether this person posted last time. What records you should keep after a seeding campaign covers what to keep per creator.

You still cannot fill a campaign with people you know

In this dataset, only about 23% of creators had any prior history with us. Most are still people we are meeting for the first time, and scaling a campaign up keeps requiring new creators.

So the number is less an argument for swapping out your creator list and more an argument for keeping records. Whether you run seeding in-house or hand it to a partner, these are the questions worth asking:

• Is there a per-creator record of who received a product and who posted in past campaigns?
• Is that record actually used when choosing candidates for the next campaign?
• How are creators who received a product and did not post flagged, and how are they handled if invited again?

What these numbers do not say

Some of the creators who had posted before were re-invited precisely because our team looked at their record. So the gap should not be read causally, as in "working with a creator again raises the upload rate." What it shows is narrower: past history predicted the next outcome fairly well.

This analysis also looks only at whether a video was posted. Whether those videos earned more views is a separate question.

Data basis

• Scope: 16 gifting-only seeding campaigns run by PLAYLAB (upload windows April–September 2026; creators mostly outside Korea). One campaign run under substantially different conditions and campaigns still in progress were excluded.
• Denominator: shipments with a registered tracking number (shipment basis). Whether each creator actually received the product was not separately verified.
• Counted as posted: at least one video confirmed for that campaign (videos marked as excluded are not counted).
• Prior history: the number of other campaigns in which the creator had a confirmed video before being assigned to the current campaign. Records created after assignment were not used.
• Uploads vs campaign average: the actual number of uploads divided by the number expected from each campaign's own upload rate (above 1 means the group posted more than its campaign's average).