A creator marketplace is a platform that connects projects seeking promotion with creators seeking campaigns, typically handling discovery, matching, and payment in one place. Marketplaces differ on curation (open versus invite or score-gated) and on what they pay for (content produced versus results driven).
Those two axes produce very different products. An open marketplace paying for content maximizes participation and needs strong filtering to stay useful. A score-gated marketplace paying for results narrows the pool and shifts the risk onto creators, who only earn if their audience acts.
For a project the practical question is what the marketplace verifies on its behalf. Payment handling and discovery are table stakes. Whether the platform can prove a conversion came from a specific creator campaign is what determines whether the spend can be evaluated afterward.
