Influencer marketing has moved from an experimental tactic to a substantial advertising channel. U.S. creator advertising spend reached $29.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $37 billion in 2025, while survey data shows consumers increasingly discover, evaluate, and buy from brands on social platforms.
Contents
- Market size and investment growth
- Platform usage and creator mix
- Budgets and spending forecasts
- Content formats and partnership strategies
- Audience trust, shopping, and outcomes
- Measurement, selection, and operating challenges
- AI adoption and the future
Market size and investment growth
The U.S. creator advertising market has expanded quickly. The 2025 Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report from IAB puts U.S. creator advertising spend at $13.9 billion in 2021 and $29.5 billion in 2024. IAB projects $37 billion for 2025, a 26% year-over-year increase, and expects the figure to reach $44 billion in 2026. The 2025 and 2026 figures are forecasts, not completed spending totals.
IAB also reports that 48% of creator-ad buyers considered creators a must-buy channel in 2025. That framing matters: creator partnerships are increasingly treated as a planned media destination rather than an occasional add-on to a social campaign.
The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025 estimates the global influencer marketing market at $24 billion for 2024 and projects $32.55 billion for 2025. These global market figures and the IAB U.S. creator-ad-spend estimates measure related but different scopes, so they should not be added together.
| Market measure | Period | Reported value | Status or scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. creator advertising spend | 2021 | $13.9 billion | IAB estimate |
| U.S. creator advertising spend | 2024 | $29.5 billion | IAB estimate |
| U.S. creator advertising spend | 2025 | $37 billion | Forecast |
| Global influencer marketing market | 2024 | $24 billion | Estimate |
| Global influencer marketing market | 2025 | $32.55 billion | Forecast |
Platform usage and creator mix
CreatorIQ’s CreatorIQ Wrapped 2024 shows Instagram’s continued central role in brand campaigns. Instagram appeared in 91% of CreatorIQ customer campaigns in 2024, which produced 1.7 million Instagram creator posts.
TikTok activity was smaller in absolute post volume but grew rapidly. CreatorIQ customer campaigns produced 415,000 TikTok posts in 2024, up 72% year over year. TikTok had 59,800 creators posting in those campaigns, up 63% year over year.
Short-form video was active across several platforms. Instagram Reels led the short-form creator-post categories in the CreatorIQ data with 520,000 posts in 2024, up 52% year over year. TikTok generated 398,000 short-form creator posts, up 61%, while YouTube Shorts generated 94,000, up 59%. Snapchat recorded the highest year-over-year post-volume growth in the CreatorIQ data at 221%.
These figures describe CreatorIQ customer campaign activity, not the total number of posts or creators on each platform. The useful signal is the combination of scale and change: Instagram remained broadly used, while TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Snapchat showed strong activity growth in the measured campaign population.
Budgets and spending forecasts
CreatorIQ’s 2025 research, summarized in Creator Marketing Enters the Era of Efficacy, found that average reported annual influencer-marketing budgets rose 171% year over year. Seventy-one percent of organizations reported increasing their influencer-marketing budgets, and about 66% of organizations increasing creator spend said the new money came directly from paid-media budgets.
The reported investment range was especially large among enterprise organizations, which reported average annual creator investments of $5.6 million to $8.1 million. CreatorIQ’s industry-leading organizations averaged $7.8 million in annual creator spend and devoted an average of 54% of their total marketing budget to creators. These are survey aggregates, so they describe reported organizations rather than a universal budget benchmark.
European expectations also point upward. The State of Influencer Marketing in Europe 2025 reports that 72% of European brands anticipated influencer-marketing budget growth in 2026. In the same research, 57% of European marketers expected influencer-marketing spend to rise by more than 10% in 2025. Kolsquare’s figures come from a Europe survey of 613 decision-makers fielded in September and October 2025.
Content formats and partnership strategies
Influencer programs are often distributed across more than one platform. CreatorIQ reported that 60% of campaigns used more than one social platform in 2024. The same data found that 40% of creators were added to multiple campaigns, indicating that repeat collaboration was a meaningful part of the measured campaign mix.
The way brands search for creators also suggests a move beyond simple audience size. Creator attributes accounted for 17.73% of brand creator-search filters in 2024, followed by audience demographics at 10.70% and engagement rate at 7.9%. Only 2.4% of CreatorIQ creator searches applied a follower-count filter. Follower count still exists as a selection input, but it was much less common than broader creator and audience criteria in this dataset.
Later’s 2025 State of Influencer Marketing found that 70% of surveyed influencer-marketing leaders had converted creator relationships into ongoing partnerships. The report also found that 22% of brands named user-generated content and affiliate programs their top-performing tactics. Together, these findings point toward programs that reuse trusted relationships and connect content with measurable or commerce-oriented activity.
Audience trust, shopping, and outcomes
The consumer case for creator content is visible in survey findings from Trust in Influencer Marketing 2025. Among the surveyed American consumers, 77% preferred influencer-created content to professionally scripted ads. Eighty-six percent searched for brands on social media before purchasing, and 77% reported making purchases directly on social platforms. IZEA’s findings are based on more than 1,000 American consumers.
Sprout Social’s The State of Influencer Marketing Report adds a purchase-frequency perspective. Almost half, about 50%, of consumers in its research purchased at least monthly because of influencer posts. However, only 35% of Gen Z consumers in the same research ranked authenticity as a top influencer trait. Authenticity may matter in practice without being the only trait audiences use when evaluating creators.
The Sprout Social report includes an 80% forecast for 2027: that share of consumers said they would be more willing to buy from brands partnering with influencers beyond social content. This is a forecasted expectation, not a measured 2027 purchase rate. The same 2025 report found that 93% of influencers said a brand’s existing social-content quality affects whether they collaborate.
Influencer content also compares favorably with brand-created social content in some marketing surveys. The Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025 reports that 36% of marketers said influencer content outperformed brand-created social content. That percentage reflects marketer responses and does not establish a universal performance advantage across campaigns.
Measurement, selection, and operating challenges
As investment rises, measurement becomes a central operating problem. In CreatorIQ’s 2025 research, measurement was the leading creator-marketing challenge for 26% of brand respondents. Content velocity was a leading challenge for 21%, while navigating AI and brand fit were each leading challenges for 20%.
Brand suitability ranked ahead of follower count in creator selection. Twenty-two percent of brands identified brand suitability as a top creator-selection factor, compared with 8% selecting follower count. Among enterprise brands, 72% said brand safety had become more important year over year.
European marketers reported using a mix of outcome indicators. In Kolsquare’s 2025 survey, engagement rate was used as a KPI by 70% of European influencer marketers, while reach was used by 57%. These measures are not interchangeable: engagement rate describes interaction relative to an audience or exposure base, while reach describes the size of the audience exposed. The source reports the adoption rates, not a single universal KPI hierarchy.
The selection and measurement figures together suggest that influencer marketing is being managed through several lenses: suitability and fit before activation, engagement and reach during evaluation, and broader measurement questions as budgets move from experimental to substantial.
AI adoption and the future
AI is already part of many creator-marketing workflows. IAB’s 2025 research reports that 75% of brands were using or planning to use AI for creator-marketing tasks. CreatorIQ’s 2025 survey found an even higher 95% of brand respondents reporting AI use, while Later’s survey found 92% adoption among its surveyed influencer-marketing leaders. These percentages come from different surveys and populations, so they should be read as separate indicators rather than combined.
CreatorIQ identified several specific AI use cases. Caption generation was reported by 45% of brand respondents, research by 44%, and video or graphic editing by 41%. Sixty-nine percent of respondents wanted to fully automate influencer-marketing workflows. At the same time, 41% of creators said their voice or likeness should never be replaced by AI.
The contrast between workflow automation and creator identity is important for planning. The available figures support strong interest in using AI for research, captions, editing, and process management, while a substantial share of creators draw a boundary around replacing the human voice or likeness that audiences associate with the partnership.