Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric, “marginal minutes of viewing content gained per marginal dollar given to personality.” If you meant real ROI (“dollars of revenue minus ad expense per attributed channel”) there’s no way this is true. This is how people observe that only the top 10 or so web destinations make any sense to advertise on but Google sends you traffic from 99,990 more trash websites that never convert, because in aggregate you might barely break even but the extra non converting traffic enabled Google to spend all your budget faster. D-Listers are definitely not ROI positive and anyone who measures that to be so is almost certainly making an attribution error or has a product that is already good enough to sell without targeted ads.
I'm not saying D-Listers are worthless. They aren't! They are ROI negative today. D-Listers are exclusively valuable for the potential of becoming A-Listers.
Anyway this parasocial relationship stuff is a huge red herring because people who aren't sick in the head and need followers for weird reasons are only doing this to become Hollywood stars.