Influencer Marketing Statistics 2026: 36 Numbers, All Sourced

Most influencer marketing statistics online are copies of copies: a number appears in one roundup, gets repeated in fifty more, and nobody can say who measured it, when or how. Many of the most widely shared figures don’t lead back to any study we could open, so we left them out.

This page is for marketers, journalists, students and anyone else who needs a number they can stand behind. Every statistic below names its publisher, its date and what was actually counted, and we opened every source ourselves. The sources are the platforms, regulators, researchers, research firms, trade bodies and data vendors that did the counting. Where a figure is a forecast, or a company describing itself, we say so.

Three terms come up throughout. Influencer marketing is brands paying creators, in money or products, to feature them in their content. The creator economy is the wider business of earning from content, including platform payouts, brand deals, subscriptions and merchandise. An engagement rate is interactions, usually likes and comments, divided by followers or by views, and which one you divide by changes the answer.

What are the headline influencer marketing statistics for 2026?

How big is the influencer marketing industry in 2026?

There’s no single answer, because publishers count different things. The gap between the first and third numbers below is mostly definition, not disagreement.

1. US creator ad spend, 2025

US brands were projected to spend $37 billion on creator advertising in 2025, up 26% on 2024. The IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report, published in November 2025 with Advertiser Perceptions, pairs spending estimates with a survey of 453 US ad decision-makers. It counts only money brands spend on purpose: sponsorships, paid boosts of creators’ posts, and ads deliberately placed next to creators.

2. US creator ad spend, 2026

The same report forecasts $43.9 billion for 2026. It follows the IAB’s estimates of $13.9 billion in 2021 and $29.5 billion in 2024. The IAB says 2025’s growth was about four times the 5.7% it expected for the media industry overall.

3. US influencer marketing spend, eMarketer’s measure

eMarketer forecast US influencer marketing spending of $10.52 billion in 2025. Its March 2025 forecast counts only what brands pay US-based creators to promote products on social and video platforms, and excludes paid media and non-social channels. That narrower definition is why it’s under a third of the IAB’s figure.

4. eMarketer’s outlook to 2027

eMarketer expects that spending to grow 15.7% in 2026 and reach $13.7 billion by 2027. Its full forecast tables are for paying clients, so we report only what it published openly, in March 2025 and January 2026.

5. The global creator economy forecast

Goldman Sachs Research estimated in April 2023 that the creator economy could grow from $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027. It’s a total-market estimate covering brand deals, platform payouts and fan payments, and it’s now three years old. Quote it as a 2023 forecast, not a current measurement.

Are brands increasing influencer marketing budgets?

6. Budget plans for 2026

87.49% of marketers surveyed by Influencer Marketing Hub expected their influencer budget to rise in 2026, and 5.55% expected a cut. Its 2026 benchmark report, published May 4, 2026, surveyed more than 600 marketing professionals, and 72.22% expected increases of 50% or more. The report itself warns that these are intentions, not results.

7. The biggest challenge: creator costs

Rising creator costs were the most-cited challenge in the same survey, at 35.4% of selections. Fake engagement and authenticity problems came second at 12.73%, and measuring ROI was 8.70%.

8. Creators as a “must buy”

48% of US ad buyers consider creators a “must buy”, behind only social media and paid search. This comes from the IAB survey in item 1. Building brand awareness was the most common goal, at 43%, and 40% named overall ROI as their top measure of success.

Which platforms matter most for influencer marketing?

9. YouTube’s reach in the US

84% of US adults say they ever use YouTube, more than any other platform Pew asked about. Pew Research Center surveyed 5,022 US adults by web, mail and phone from February 5 to June 18, 2025, and published the results that November. Facebook came second at 71%.

10. Instagram and TikTok in the US

50% of US adults use Instagram and 37% use TikTok, up from 40% and 21% in 2021. That’s from the same Pew survey; eight in ten adults aged 18 to 29 use Instagram.

11. Instagram’s global audience

Instagram has 3 billion monthly active users, Meta said in September 2025. It’s a company-reported count from Meta’s newsroom, not an independent measurement.

12. Where brands plan to invest

TikTok was the platform most often included in brands’ 2026 influencer plans, chosen by 31% of Influencer Marketing Hub’s respondents. Every other platform landed between roughly 8% and 15%. These are shares of respondents planning to invest, not shares of spending.

How big are YouTube and YouTube Shorts?

13. Shorts views

YouTube Shorts averages 200 billion daily views, according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2026 letter, published January 21, 2026. It’s a company-reported average, and daily views aren’t the same as daily viewers.

14. Uploads

More than 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube on an average day. YouTube publishes this on its press page, which we checked in October 2026; it doesn’t say when the figure was measured.

15. YouTube on TV

YouTube took a record 14.2% of all US TV viewing in July 2026. Nielsen’s The Gauge, released September 10, 2026, measures viewing on TV sets in its panel households and covers June 29 to July 26, 2026. It excludes YouTube TV’s live channels and doesn’t count phones or computers.

16. YouTube’s revenue

YouTube’s ad and subscription revenue exceeded $60 billion in 2025. Alphabet reported this with its results on February 4, 2026. Ads alone brought in $11.06 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 13% on a year earlier, according to Alphabet’s July 22, 2026 results.

How much do creators earn, and how big is the creator economy?

17. YouTube’s payouts

YouTube says it paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies in the four years from 2022 to 2025. The figure comes from YouTube’s own data, repeated in its January 2026 letter and its 2025 US Impact Report. It includes artists and media companies, not just independent creators, and it isn’t independently audited.

18. The revenue share

YouTube pays Partner Program members 55% of net revenue from ads on their videos’ watch pages and 45% of the Shorts feed revenue allocated to them. YouTube’s Help Center sets out these rates, which we checked in October 2026. What that works out to per view varies widely; see how much YouTube pays per 1,000 views.

19. YouTube’s US economic impact

YouTube’s creative ecosystem added more than $60 billion to US GDP and supported more than 540,000 full-time equivalent jobs in 2025, according to research YouTube commissioned from Oxford Economics. The methodology combines YouTube’s payout data with online surveys of 6,100 US creators, 600 businesses and 5,700 users fielded from January to March 2026, plus a model that adds supply-chain and spending effects. A full-time equivalent job is one full-time workload, such as 35 hours a week, whether one person or several do it. YouTube’s January 2026 letter put 2024 at $55 billion and more than 490,000 jobs.

20. How many creators make a living

About 4% of the world’s estimated 50 million creators earn more than $100,000 a year, Goldman Sachs Research estimated in 2023. It also said brand deals make up about 70% of creators’ revenue, citing survey data. We couldn’t find a more recent estimate with a published method.

21. How rare a million subscribers is

Only about 76,700 YouTube channels have ever passed 1 million subscribers, 2,991 have passed 10 million and 17 have passed 100 million. CreatorDB, a creator-data company, counted these in its June 2026 census of the 2.15 million channels with at least 1,000 subscribers in its index. It says counts at the largest tiers are close to complete, while smaller tiers are a sample.

How many influencers disclose sponsorships and affiliate links?

Disclosure is where measured data is strongest, and it points one way: most paid content isn’t clearly labeled. Our guide to disclosing affiliate links and sponsorships covers what the rules require.

22. Affiliate links on YouTube

Of about 140,000 English-language YouTube videos with affiliate links, 54.19% disclosed nothing and only 12.20% clearly met the FTC’s guidelines. The study, “Turning Trust to Transactions” by Chen Sun and three co-authors, was first posted to arXiv in March 2026. It ran machine-learning classifiers over 2 million videos uploaded from 2015 to 2024, and checked only written disclosures in descriptions and the shopping shelf, not spoken or on-screen ones.

23. Disclosure in 2018

About 10% of affiliate marketing content on YouTube and Pinterest disclosed the relationship, Princeton researchers found in 2018. Their study, “Endorsements on Social Media”, measured more than 500,000 YouTube videos and 2.1 million Pinterest pins. Its methods differ from the 2026 study, so compare the two only loosely.

24. The EU’s 2024 sweep

97% of 576 influencers checked by EU consumer authorities posted commercial content, but only 20% systematically disclosed it as advertising. The European Commission and authorities from 22 member states, Norway and Iceland published the results in February 2024. 38% didn’t use platform labels such as Instagram’s “paid partnership” toggle.

25. The UK’s 2025 check

About 57% of influencer ads analysed by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority were properly disclosed, and 34% had no disclosure at all. The ASA’s AI-based system reviewed more than 50,000 Instagram and TikTok posts, Stories and Reels from 509 UK accounts, with experts checking a sample; results came out May 9, 2025. The sample mixed previously flagged influencers with random ones.

26. The FTC’s maximum penalty

FTC civil penalties can reach $53,088 per violation. The FTC set that figure in January 2025, and the Code of Federal Regulations (16 CFR 1.98) still listed it in October 2026. It applies to knowing violations of FTC rules, such as the Consumer Review and Testimonial Rule, which covers buying or selling fake followers and views.

27. The FTC’s warning letters

FTC staff sent warning letters to 10 companies on December 22, 2025, about possible violations of the Consumer Review Rule. The FTC listed misuse of “indicators of social media influence like the number of followers or views” among the practices the rule covers. The letters aren’t findings that anyone broke the law.

How common are fake followers and influencer fraud?

Measured fraud data is scarce, because outsiders can’t see who follows an account. What exists is enforcement records and surveys of what marketers run into. Our checklist for vetting a YouTube creator covers how to check one yourself.

28. The Devumi case

Devumi, a seller of fake engagement, had more than 4,000 sales of fake YouTube subscribers and over 32,000 sales of fake YouTube views, according to the FTC. The FTC announced its settlement with the company and its owner on October 21, 2019. The order included a $2.5 million judgment against the owner, suspended once he paid $250,000.

29. What marketers run into

Fake or bot followers made up 56.5% of all fraud and quality problems reported in Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 survey. Inauthentic comments (10.6%) and fake or purchased engagement (10.2%) came next, and only 10.9% chose “none of the above”. These are shares of reported problems, not the share of creators who cheat.

What is a good engagement rate by influencer tier?

Every dataset agrees that smaller accounts engage more per follower, but the numbers depend on the formula. Our guide to calculating engagement rate shows each one.

30. Medians by follower count

Median engagement falls from 0.74% for YouTube channels with 1K–5K subscribers to 0.08% for channels above 5 million. Iqfluence, an influencer-data company, measured 141.6 million active creators in September 2026, dividing average likes and comments on recent posts by followers (subscribers on YouTube). Instagram and TikTok start higher and fall less steeply, with small rises in some larger bands:

31. Against active followers

Measured against active followers instead, CreatorDB finds median YouTube engagement of 3.2% for channels with 10,000 to 100,000 subscribers and 2.5% at 1 million and above. Its June 2026 census covers 2.15 million channels. Neither method is wrong, but a rate from one can’t be compared with a benchmark from the other.

32. Per view, before the August 2026 change

The median long-form YouTube engagement rate was 3.67% of views across 1.46 million active channels, measured just before YouTube changed how it counts views. CreatorDB took this baseline on August 18, 2026, dividing likes and comments by views on each channel’s 20 latest long-form videos. Public views have counted from the first frame since August 24, so per-view rates measured afterwards will tend to read lower.

Do consumers trust influencers and buy what they recommend?

33. Purchases

58% of consumers surveyed for BBB National Programs had bought something because of an influencer’s endorsement. Its National Advertising Division commissioned The Benchmarking Company to survey more than 3,720 US consumers aged 18 to 65 over three days in February 2025. 3,484 of them were women, so read it mainly as women’s experience.

34. Trust

74% of the same respondents trust influencer advertising, compared with 87% for advertising in general. Only 5% trust influencers completely, 69% trust them somewhat, and 26% don’t trust them.

35. Undisclosed deals

70% said they’d feel negative toward an influencer who was paid or got free product and didn’t disclose it. 37% would feel deceived and 33% negative. The same survey found that a brand partnership by itself had little or no effect on how trustworthy an influencer seemed.

36. News from influencers

21% of US adults regularly get news from news influencers, rising to 38% of adults under 30. Pew Research Center surveyed US adults from August 18 to 24, 2025, and published the results that November. The overall share was unchanged from 2024.

How we chose these numbers

We started from the statistics that turn up most often in roundups and traced each one back. We kept a number only if we could open the original and see the figure ourselves, the publisher ran the study or owns the data, it carried a date, and we could say what was counted. If a figure sat behind a paywall, we left it out. Forecasts are labeled as forecasts, and figures companies publish about themselves as company-reported.

Several popular figures didn’t survive. The claim that influencer marketing returns $5.78 for every dollar spent is everywhere, but we couldn’t find the study, sample or method behind it. The estimate that fake followers cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019 comes from a report by the cybersecurity company CHEQ that we could find only in press coverage. The 2026 market-size figures attributed to Influencer Marketing Hub don’t appear in its 2026 report. Paywalled market-research estimates are out because we couldn’t see their methods.

What to do next

If you’re choosing what size of creator to work with, our guide to influencer tiers explains where nano, micro, mid-tier, macro and mega start and end, and how to find micro-influencers covers building a shortlist. If you’re setting a budget, how much creators charge for a sponsored video puts the cost side in context. And if disclosure is your concern, how to tell if a YouTube AI tool review is honest shows what a well-disclosed review looks like from the viewer’s side.