Is influencer marketing dead? Search that phrase and you will find a steady stream of obituaries: audiences are tired of #ad, trust is falling and every other post looks the same. We went through the most credible data published between 2024 and 2026 to find out what is actually happening. The short answer is no. Influencer marketing is not dead, and the money is still growing fast. What is dying is the lazy version of it: the one off paid post, bought on follower count, forgotten in two days.
This report sets out what the numbers say about spend, trust, compliance and effectiveness, where budgets are moving, and a practical plan for brands that want creator work to build something that lasts.
The short version
- It is not dead. US creator ad spend is growing about four times faster than the total media market, and the UK is on course to pass £1bn in 2026.
- The easy growth is over. Fewer brands keep a separate influencer budget, and analysts now describe the boom years of sponsored post growth as largely finished.
- Trust is the pressure point. Influencers sit joint bottom of Edelman’s brand trust ranking, and a third of UK influencer ads carried no disclosure at all.
- Most creator content underperforms. Kantar found only 6% of branded creator assets were strong on both engagement and brand building.
- The winners are building, not renting. Long term partnerships, creator led series and brand owned channels are replacing the one off paid post.
Is influencer marketing dead? What the money says
If influencer marketing were dying, spend would be the first place to show it. It shows the opposite. The IAB estimates US creator economy ad spend at $29.5bn in 2024 and $37.1bn in 2025, a 26% rise, roughly four times faster than the 5.7% growth of the total media industry. It forecasts $43.9bn for 2026. Nearly half of ad buyers (48%) now call creators a “must buy”, behind only social media and paid search.
US creator economy ad spend, US$ billions
The UK tells the same story. Figures from IAB UK and IRM, reported by Marketing Week this month, put UK creator partnership ad revenue at £966m in 2025, up 20.1% from £804m in 2024. That growth was more than double the rest of the digital market, and the forecast for 2026 is about £1.2bn, the first time the category passes £1bn.
UK creator partnership ad revenue, £ millions
Is influencer marketing growing globally?
Global estimates vary because publishers define the market differently, so treat them as direction rather than precision. Influencer Marketing Hub, a vendor, puts the global market at $32.55bn in 2025, a figure Statista also reports, up from $1.7bn in 2016. Whichever definition you prefer, the curve has not bent downwards.
Global influencer marketing market size, US$ billions
Zoom out further and the creator economy is larger still. Goldman Sachs estimated the total addressable market could approach $480bn by 2027, with around 50 million creators worldwide. YouTube said it paid more than $70bn to creators, artists and media companies in the three years to mid 2025. And marketers intend to keep investing: 61% of senior marketers globally expect to increase creator content budgets, according to Kantar Media Reactions 2025. This is not a market in decline.
Is influencer marketing dying, or just the old model?
Growth at market level hides real strain underneath. Three signals suggest the easy phase is over.
First, budgets are consolidating. In Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2025 benchmark the share of brands with a dedicated influencer budget fell from 85.8% to 75.6%, which the vendor links to cost pressure and “smaller, more targeted collaborations”. Creator work is being folded into wider media and brand budgets and asked to compete for them.
Second, growth is slowing from a high base. eMarketer expects US influencer spend to grow 15.7% in 2026 and reach $13.7bn by 2027, according to its 2026 FAQ on influencer marketing. Still strong, but no longer the near 25% jumps of recent years.
“The boom days of spending growth on social media sponsored content are largely over.” Jasmine Enberg, eMarketer, 2025
Third, the money is shifting from the post to the media behind it. eMarketer forecasts that US spend on paid amplification of creator content will reach $14.15bn in 2027, matching what creators earn from sponsored content that year and overtaking it in 2028. Brands are no longer just paying creators to post. They are buying the content and running it as advertising.
| Signal | What the data says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Spend | US creator ad spend $37.1bn in 2025, growing about 4x faster than total media (IAB) | Growing |
| UK market | Creator partnerships worth £966m in 2025, forecast to pass £1bn in 2026 (IAB UK) | Growing |
| Dedicated budgets | Brands with a dedicated influencer budget fell from 85.8% to 75.6% (Influencer Marketing Hub, vendor) | Consolidating |
| Trust | Influencers score 58 on Edelman trust index, joint lowest of seven sources | Under pressure |
| Compliance | Only 57% of UK influencer ads properly disclosed (ASA) | Under pressure |
| Quality | Only 6% of branded creator assets strong on engagement and brand building (Kantar) | Most work is weak |
Sources linked in the Sources and methodology section. Vendor research flagged.
Put together, the picture is clear. Influencer marketing is not dying. It is maturing, and maturity means the weakest formats get squeezed out.
Is influencer marketing losing credibility?
This is where the obituaries have a point. Trust in influencers as a source of brand information is weak compared with almost everything else people rely on.
How much people trust each source for accurate information about a brand (index, 15 markets)
The Edelman Trust Barometer special report on brands (June 2025) asked 15,000 people across 15 countries how much they trust different sources to give accurate information about a brand. Influencers scored 58, level with brand CEOs and below journalists, employees and customer reviews. Friends and family (84) and “customers like me” (80) were far ahead. People trust people they recognise as peers, not people they recognise as ads.
The US data points the same way. The BBB National Programs Influencer Trust Index (June 2025, 3,700+ respondents) found 74% of consumers trust influencer content at least somewhat, but only 5% trust it completely. 70% feel deceived when they discover an undisclosed partnership, and 80% named a lack of authenticity or transparency as the biggest trust killer. Yet 58% had bought something because of an endorsement. The channel works; hidden selling breaks it.
Disclosure is still a UK problem
The UK regulator’s own monitoring shows how often brands and creators still get the basics wrong. The Advertising Standards Authority reviewed more than 50,000 pieces of content from 509 UK accounts on Instagram and TikTok. Only 57% of influencer ads were compliant; 34% had no disclosure at all.
UK influencer ads on Instagram and TikTok: how they were disclosed
The stakes have risen. Since April 2025 the Competition and Markets Authority can fine businesses directly under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover, and hidden advertising falls within scope, as Stephens Scown sets out. Poor disclosure is no longer just a reputational risk. It is a legal one.
Does influencer marketing work?
Done well, yes. Done averagely, much less than most brands assume. The most useful recent evidence comes from Kantar, which analysed more than 15,000 branded creator assets on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram in 2026. Only 6% delivered both strong platform engagement and strong brand building potential.
Branded creator content that delivers both engagement and brand building
The detail matters more than the headline. According to reporting on the study by NetInfluencer, engagement lined up with brand impact in only about one case in three, so likes are a poor proxy for results. Creator content beat digital ad norms on involvement, relevance and enjoyment, but trailed on branding. Simply saying the brand name out loud added 22 percentile points to brand power, yet only 49% of content did it. And creator content’s impact on brand measures has risen 77% since 2022.
Platform data, which should be read as vendor research, points in the same direction. TikTok reports that creator ads earn a 70% higher click through rate than non creator ads at the same cost. Think with Google reports that 79% of surveyed US Gen Z YouTube viewers trust recommendations from creators, and that around 40% of views on sponsored videos arrive more than 30 days after publication. That long tail is the difference between a post and an asset.
A creator post you rent for 48 hours is an expense. A creator series you own and keep publishing is an asset. The data now rewards the second.
Where the money is moving
Three shifts stand out in the 2025 and 2026 data.
1. Toward YouTube and long form
eMarketer’s 2025 US forecast, reported by Tubefilter, put YouTube ahead of Instagram as the largest platform for influencer spend for the first time, with more than half of US marketers paying for influencer content there. Long form video builds the depth of attention that short posts rarely reach, and it keeps earning views for months. We have written about why YouTube is replacing TV for the same reason.
US influencer marketing spend by platform, 2025 forecast, US$ billions
2. Toward long term partnerships
Later, a vendor, reports that 70% of leading brands now prioritise ongoing creator partnerships over one off activations, and 82% work with fewer than 20 creators per campaign. The biggest advertisers are going further. Unilever’s chief executive Fernando Fernandez said in 2025 that the company would work with “20x more influencers” and raise social media’s share of its media spend from about 30% to 50%, as reported by The Drum and PRWeek.
3. Toward paid amplification and owned channels
Brands are licensing creator content and running it as ads, which is why eMarketer expects amplification spend to overtake creator fees. The logical next step is owning the channel itself: a brand run YouTube series or social channel, hosted or shaped by creator talent, that compounds audience instead of renting it one post at a time.
What replaced the paid post
The brands getting value from creators in 2026 treat them less like billboards and more like talent, writers and hosts. The table below summarises the shift we see across the market.
| The old model (dying) | The new model (growing) |
|---|---|
| One off paid posts bought on follower count | Long term partnerships and ambassador programmes |
| Many small deals, little creative input | Fewer, deeper relationships; creators shape the idea |
| Success measured in likes and reach | Measured on brand lift, search, sales and watch time |
| Content lives on the creator feed for 48 hours | Content is boosted as paid media and lives on brand owned channels |
| Brand borrows an audience | Brand builds its own audience with creator talent and formats |
This is the model we build at Advertain. Our work across brand channels and series for names including L’Oreal, Red Bull and Gymshark, creator led Formula E content across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok that passed 7 million views, and US Playing Card Company content that passed 132 million views all rests on the same idea: make something people choose to watch, then keep publishing it. For one creator, Paul Ribot, that meant growing from zero to 30,000 YouTube subscribers in 75 days. You can see more on our work page.
It also reflects how younger audiences actually discover brands. Our research on how Gen Z discovers brands found search, creators and video feeds doing the work that ads used to do.
Is influencer marketing worth it in 2026? A practical plan
For most brands the answer is yes, if the programme is built for how the channel now works. This is the plan we would give a marketing director this quarter.
- Set a brand outcome before choosing creators. Decide whether the job is awareness, consideration or sales, and pick measures that match: brand lift, share of search, site visits or sales. Our guide to measuring brand awareness covers the options.
- Choose fewer creators and keep them longer. Replace scattered one off posts with three to six month partnerships, so audiences see a relationship rather than a transaction.
- Brief the idea, not the script. Kantar’s data shows creator content wins on relevance and enjoyment. Protect that, but insist the brand is named clearly and early, which too few creators do.
- Disclose every time. Use clear “Ad” labels on every paid post. With CMA fining powers now live, this is non negotiable.
- Budget for amplification. Reserve part of the creator budget to run the best content as paid media, where it can reach far beyond the creator’s own followers.
- Build something you own. Turn the best creator format into a recurring series on your own channel, so every episode adds to an audience you keep. Start with our organic social media playbook.
- Judge on a longer window. With a large share of sponsored YouTube views arriving after the first month, a 48 hour report will undercount the return.
If you want help turning creator spend into a channel your brand owns, talk to us.
Frequently asked questions
Is influencer marketing dead in 2026?
No. US creator economy ad spend reached an estimated $37.1bn in 2025 and is forecast at $43.9bn in 2026 (IAB), and UK creator partnership revenue is expected to pass £1bn this year. What is fading is the one off paid post bought on follower count.
Is influencer marketing dying?
It is slowing from a very high growth rate and consolidating. Fewer brands keep a separate influencer budget and analysts say the boom in sponsored post growth is largely over, but total spend is still rising faster than the wider media market.
Is influencer marketing losing credibility?
Trust is under pressure. Influencers score joint lowest of seven sources in Edelman’s 2025 brand trust ranking, and 70% of US consumers feel deceived by undisclosed partnerships. Clear disclosure and long term, authentic partnerships are the fix.
Is influencer marketing worth it for brands?
It can be, when it is tied to a clear brand outcome, built on fewer and longer partnerships, amplified with paid media and measured over months rather than days. Kantar found only 6% of creator content excels on both engagement and brand building, so quality of execution decides the return.
What is the future of influencer marketing?
Creator led marketing: brands working with creators as talent and partners, running the best content as advertising, and building their own channels and series. Budgets are moving toward YouTube, long term partnerships and paid amplification.
