When Brazilian influencer Camila Coelho started on YouTube in 2011, the creator industry didn’t exist, she says. Originally a makeup artist, she began by posting videos for friends “to learn to do a cat eye or whatever”. It caught on, engagement soared, and, at viewers’ requests, she started posting every week. Then came the brands. “It started growing so fast and these brands were reaching out to me. I had no idea what to do. It was a time when we didn’t know how these things worked.”
Today, Coelho has 10.4 million followers on Instagram (1.2 million on TikTok), has worked with brands from Revolve to Patbo and Lancôme (for the latter’s first-ever influencer collaboration in 2018) and attends runway shows from Valentino to Chanel. But it’s a very different market than the one she came up in.
Once disregarded as an unserious industry, the global creator economy will be worth $500 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. These days, some of the largest celebrities double as influencers, from Hailey Bieber’s 54.6 million Instagram followers to Selena Gomez’s 420 million. Now, they’re rivalled by social media natives — Charli D’Amelio, for instance, boasts 42.4 million Instagram followers. Having followings in the millions is par for the course for fashion creators, from Aimee Song’s 7.2 million to Caroline Daur’s 4.6 million. And these make up just a fraction of the now over 50 million influencers globally.
Brand interest is still on the up. Seventy-three per cent of marketers plan to invest more in ambassador programmes over the next year, per influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. Some brands are even starting to offer equity in exchange for ambassadorships.
It’s no wonder brands can’t get enough; the influencer’s ability to push product has only gotten more powerful. In a March 2024 survey from consumer insights firm GWI, 33 per cent of social media users had purchased a product or service because of a social media influencer in the month prior. Among those who had, clothing was the top purchase (14 per cent), followed by skincare (12 per cent) and a new smartphone (11 per cent). In the same survey, GWI found when buying products from influencers, the biggest purchase drivers were price and value for money (50 per cent), followed by brand reputation (33 per cent) and trustworthiness of the influencer (30 per cent).
But navigating the creator economy today isn’t just about landing the biggest influencers or garnering the highest likes or views. Creators are beholden to the platforms they post on. And over the course of the last year, social media has undergone a transformation. TikTok was almost banned (twice, and its future remains up in the air) and invested heavily in TikTok Shop; while Instagram shifted its algorithm, deprioritising creator content and making reach unreliable. New paid member platforms like Substack and Patreon gained prominence and affiliate platforms from LTK to ShopMy have surged, as brands prioritise conversion over awareness, and shift focus to nano and micro-influencers. Creators and brands have been forced to adapt quickly, diversifying when it comes to platforms, and rethinking the types of creators they invest in, depending on desired results.
“For a young industry, the creator economy is maturing and evolving rapidly, and we’re adapting and innovating as we go,” says Becky Owen, global CMO of Billion Dollar Boy. Owen led creator marketing at Meta from 2019 to 2023, during which there was a major shift: creators went from being a “fun, supplementary element” to a major marketing pillar. This is a recent shift, she says, and one brands are still coming around to. “Teams still face the ongoing pressure to validate the effectiveness and legitimacy of this channel — a pressure creators themselves know all too well.”
Raina Penchansky co-founded her creator marketing agency Digital Brand Architects (DBA) in 2010. It was acquired by United Talent Agency (UTA) in 2019. (Penchansky is now co-head of UTA’s creators division, as well as DBA CEO.) UTA’s embrace of creators signals this shift, she says. “In some sense, this feels like a peak moment for the creator economy, but at the same time, we’re just getting started. There are so many platforms and industries making space for new voices, brands willing to come to the table financially and creators wanting to play ball.” But to capture a portion of the industry’s growing worth, brands must tap in fast.
Creator saturation and struggling to cut through
In the earlier days of social media, creator performance could largely be determined by follower count. But now, it’s hard to keep up, as algorithms have shifted and platforms continue to make changes, creators can no longer guarantee their content will be seen by their followers, which is affecting their reach, engagement, revenue and relationships with brands. It means creator content as a brand awareness play has lost its shine for some brands. As conversion is so hard to track from influencer content anyway, reach and engagement is crucial to be sure brand posts have resonated.
“If you were a creator who had 100,000 impressions per post last year, you ended the year with about 30,000 per post,” says Amber Venz Box, co-founder and CEO of creator affiliate platform LTK. Elsewhere, of 1,000 creators surveyed by membership content platform Patreon in August 2024, 53 per cent said it’s harder to reach their followers today on mainstream social media than it was five years ago.
But why? Unlike Facebook or Instagram, which traditionally only showed you content from people you follow, TikTok’s feed (or For You Page) shows you content from any creator that the algorithm predicts you will enjoy. While a large following on TikTok can improve content discovery, a high follower count doesn’t guarantee success if your content doesn’t resonate with the audience. Instagram has followed suit: since the summer of 2020, Meta made algorithm changes to Instagram’s formerly reverse-chronological feed, emulating TikTok’s approach by thrusting unfollowed content in front of audiences. This shift to recommendation-based algorithms has created increased competition for audience eyeballs and has reduced the reach for creators and brands who could always rely on the fact their posts would be seen by followers. While traditional branded influencer posts were always hard to track when it came to sales conversions, it’s increasingly harder to predict which posts will even be seen.
And there’s more change to come. “[Meta founder and CEO] Mark Zuckerberg said soon the majority of content you see is going to be generated by artificial intelligence,” Venz Box says. While in January, Instagram founder and CEO Adam Mosseri announced from now on, Instagram Stories — which have been a key tool for creators to link out to products and services — will be for those who follow one another to connect and not as a distribution tool, meaning the platform will deprioritise stories from creators unless they follow their fans back. “There are entire creator businesses and brands who have built their whole creator strategies around what I call ‘link slinging’, which is creators throwing [affiliate] links or codes within their stories,” says Venz Box. “If what Adam says is true, that will really change brand strategy around how and where they reach creators.”
“Instagram and TikTok have each evolved so much, and the algorithm shifts have definitely impacted the way my content is seen,” says Tejumade Adejimi-Adu, a fashion micro-influencer with 22,500 followers on Instagram and 13,700 on TikTok. “On Instagram, one Reel might go viral, while another with the same energy and storytelling barely gets pushed. TikTok, on the other hand, has been more generous with discoverability, but it still favours trends over personal storytelling at times, which makes it tricky when you’re focused on authenticity. These changes have affected revenue in the sense that I can’t rely on virality or platform performance alone.”
Dutch influencer Vivian Hoorn, who got her start blogging before shifting to Instagram, feels this crunch. “In the beginning years of Instagram, there weren’t that many creators, so I felt that my account was more seen and I received much more engagement,” she says. “Sometimes I have the same amount of likes as I had when I had 50,000 followers.” She now has 597,000 (and 73,000 on TikTok).
Concerns for creators from marginalised groups are even higher. Discovery algorithms like the TikTok FYP and increasingly Instagram’s feed have been criticised for inadvertently amplifying unconscious biases, as the algorithm prioritises content that’s been watched for longer periods of time, rather than content users mindfully engage with. This can affect performance of content from certain creators from marginalised groups, for example, affecting their appeal to brands. Plus-size influencer Denise Mercedes says she has seen a decline in sponsorships over the years. “I think brands still need to cast their campaigns with diversity top of mind, and sometimes, using [algorithms] doesn’t work well for that.”
The recent online discourse surrounding ‘NYC influencers’ illustrates how important it is for brands to broaden the scope of creators they collaborate with. Creator @MartiniFeeny shared her thoughts on the current, boring state of the influencer landscape: “They all wear the same bracelets, they look like they shop at Revolve, they’re all basic — but they’re skinny and pretty, so stuff looks good on them.” This specific crop of ‘boring NYC influencers’ reflects what appears to be an increasing homogenisation of the creator economy. But in reality, it’s a reflection of a subset of algorithms. These creators’ brand-safe content shows up on the feeds of those who have engaged with this type of material in the past; engagement is high; they get more brand deals — and thus the cycle continues.
How creators are incentivised by platforms helps to spur the creator economy forward, but efforts have been mixed or short lived. In the past, monetisation based on content performance — designed to attract talent to platforms — was a key revenue driver for creators. These revenue streams have been stop-start in recent years, and have faced criticism from creators who couldn’t make a living, even when their content performed well. In 2020, shortly after its launch, TikTok launched its $200 million creator fund to attract new creators to the platform. The fund was increased to $2 billion between 2020 and 2023. But TikTok shuttered the fund thereafter, instead implementing a revamped creator rewards programme, providing remuneration for longer form, high-performing content (over a minute long).
In 2021, YouTube launched a $100 million fund for then-new short-form video platform YouTube Shorts, which it’s since ended. YouTubers can still make money from ad views on their long-form videos via the YouTube Partnership Programme if they have over 1,000 subscribers and over 4,000 public watch hours on their channel in the last 12 months. And TikTok says its has expanded its monetisation programmes, noting that creators can now earn 15 times higher rewards and achieve 40 times higher follower growth, whether it’s through directly monetising their content in the Creator Rewards Programme or promoting and selling products through TikTok Shop, says Kim Farrell, global head of creators at TikTok.
But creators remain sceptical of the results. On YouTube, the addition of YouTube Shorts in September 2020 has increased competition for audience share. “Ad revenue from YouTube, while I’m grateful for it, feels more random. You could be doing everything ‘right’ according to YouTube best practices, but still have underviewed videos that result in a bad month,” says fashion creator Zoe Hong, who started out on YouTube in 2015 and now boasts 600,000 subscribers. “It feels like a nebulous, fickle algorithm you have no control over.”
TikTok’s Creator Fund can make you a lot of money — but only if you’re making long videos, says Victoria Paris, who has 1.9 million followers on the platform. “At my peak on it [YouTube], I was making $20,000 a month. Now, I don’t put out as many long videos,” she says. “It’s totally input/output.”
For many creators, the monetary incentive doesn’t match up to the effort required, especially when a creator with a large following can make the $20,000 from a post or two. “Ultimately, [today] the biggest monetisation opportunities tend to come from brand deals, rather than platform-specific monetisation,” DBA’s Penchansky says.
Creators are confident that, even as the space crowds and algorithms shift, increased brand investment will mean growth is still feasible. New York influencer Halley Kate says she’s almost doubled her income every year since starting on TikTok, where she now has 1.5 million followers (versus 127,000 on Instagram), in 2020. “I don’t see that momentum slowing,” she says. “While the space has become more saturated, brands continue to invest in influencer marketing.” Though her engagement ebbs and flows with shifts in the algorithm, views and interactions have steadily increased over the years, she adds.
Affiliate marketing: An avenue for growth
Five to 10 years ago, influencer marketing was top of the funnel, focused on reach and brand awareness, and often difficult for brands to track when it came to actual sales. Originally adopted by mass market and direct-to-consumer labels, the affiliate model provides a more measurable way for brands to engage with creators, helping them to prove their influence to brands with sales data instead of (unreliable) likes or views. Now, alongside affiliates, with the rise of social commerce platforms like TikTok Shop and newer platforms like live-stream shopping app Whatnot over the last 18 months, creators have become salespeople for their brand partners. Affiliate platforms like LTK and ShopMy are evolving to help creators cultivate their fan communities outside of traditional social media, and to help brands find more consistent and reliable affiliate revenue that’s easier to track.
“For so long, brands have been flying blind. They re paying a creator $6,000 simply because they reached out and asked someone what their rates were, and they said, $6,000. But they don t know if that s going to drive $6,000 or $1 million [in conversions],” says Tiffany Lopinsky, co-founder and president of affiliate platform ShopMy, which secured $77.5 million series B investment last June. “Affiliate linking used to be seen as a low status form of marketing. Now, we’re getting really elevated talent to use affiliate links, and designer brands and multi brand retailers to really invest in this channel. It’s really changed the image over the last couple of years.”
ShopMy can generate affiliate links for creators to use across their socials, from Instagram to Substack, centralising their affiliate links and revenue. Its 150,000 creators can link products from over 50,000 brand partners, including luxury players like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent. On the brand side, marketers can use the platform to find creators to gift and seed to, based on their performance. At the time of investment, the platform had driven $352 million in brand sales at a fivefold return on investment (ROI). “Now, [many] brands will only pick creators for paid marketing when they come from their affiliate programme, so they can guarantee that creator drives conversion,” she says.
Venz Box’s platform LTK — which allows creators to create a centralised storefront from products posted across their social accounts — has raised $315 million funding over two rounds since 2021. In the US, about 38 per cent of Gen Z and millennial women already use LTK, which now has 40 million monthly users. In response to feedback from creators that it was increasingly difficult to reach audiences on traditional social media, LTK launched its new app last year, which emulates what Instagram used to be: solely content from creators you follow, in reverse-chronological order, with the option to filter by location or content. “For a creator, social media is no longer reliable for them to be able to house their communities,” says Vens Box. “We have built LTK to be a creator’s home base, so they can have a single place to collect their audience who wants to connect with them and shop from their content.”
Creator Coelho only started using affiliate links recently, after being advised to for years. “I always thought in my head, ‘Oh, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be confusing.’” Now, she uses ShopMy, and says it’s easy — and it adds a new revenue stream. What takes time is uploading the products, which is often made easier with a team. When she knows what outfit she’s going to wear, Coelho shares the items with her team, who upload them to her ShopMy. When the time comes for her to link, they’re ready to go.
Kate uses both ShopMy and has an Amazon storefront. To her, affiliates are a key source of secondary income and a way to earn passively. ShopMy is the most user-friendly and has the best conversion rates for sales, she says. “I update my ShopMy with everything I do, making sure my audience always knows where to find the products I’m wearing or using through my links.”
The time-intensive nature of setting up affiliate profiles can be prohibitive for influencers whose teams are less built-out. Establishing an affiliate presence is on Hoorn’s list of to-dos, she says. “It’s something new I want to integrate but it’s a lot of work, so I need to take a moment for that,” she says.
Creators are also wary of pushing too much product. “I don’t want to feel like an Avon lady, pushing product all the time,” says Jodie Taylor, a New York influencer with 174,300 TikTok followers and 72,000 on Instagram, who uses affiliate links on and off, but not daily. “I want to be diligent in not over-pushing a link.” But audiences want to know, she concedes. “Every time you use a product you are going to get at least 10 DMs, being like, ‘Where’s that from?’” She notes a natural curiosity people have with content creators, and puts it down to the parasocial relationship people develop with those they follow online. “They want to know everything you’re doing and everywhere you’re going and shopping.”
There are also new platforms coming to the fore. London-based creator Federica Labanca has 44,000 Instagram followers, and started out posting content while working as an art director at Prada. While her conversion was high when it came to affiliate linking, she found existing platforms “frustrating” because of the many different landing pages and steps users had to take to purchase. So this month, she launched app Fflow, an affiliate offering where users can click on a link on social media and directly check out from the creator’s storefront, without being redirected to a brand’s page. “We wanted a seamless shopping experience. If I want to shop a creator’s closet, I’ll click on her link and it’s an independent boutique, a sub-domain where I can check out directly. This means you can shop a creator’s full look within the platform, rather than having to check out first at Gucci, then at Everlane.”
Striking the balance of nano, micro, macro and mega
As the focus shifts from marketing to sales and acquisition, each level of creator is finding their function in the fashion landscape. Typically, the rule of thumb is that brands tap nano and/or micro-influencers when they want high engagement or a conversation-focused campaign; and tap macro and/or mega-influencers for high-reach campaigns to drive general awareness, Penchansky explains. She encourages brands to think of creator investment as a media buy. “You work with different creators to evoke different things, whether that’s brand awareness, sales or developing a new audience,” she adds. This chimes with the changes we’re seeing in the purchase funnel for Gen Z audiences, who perhaps discover a product worn or used by celebrities and mega-influencers, but then go on to research product reviews from micro and nano-influencers, who they feel they can relate to, before they actually buy.
With the rise of so many new platforms, creators tend to have vastly different followings from one to the next. If you built your multi-million Instagram following over 10 years, chances are your TikTok following is lower. If you had a TikTok go viral and gained a mass of followers on the platform, your Instagram may lag behind. So the lines between nano, micro, mid, macro and mega are blurred. Plus, different platforms hold different weights when it comes to follower counts. Paris, who started out on TikTok in 2021, has 1.9 million TikTok followers and 416,000 on Instagram. To her, these followings are of similar value. “I think the weight of a follow on each platform is different,” she says. “Like 100,000 on Instagram is easily 500,000 on TikTok.” Taylor, who creates content alongside her full-time job, adopts this approach: Instagram for more day-in-the-life content; TikTok for “yapping”, meaning advisory, big sister-type content.
Micro-influencers are some of the most powerful creators on ShopMy, co-founder Lopinsky says, as they have tight-knit, loyal fanbases. “If you look at the top 100 order volume driving [creators] on the platform, there are a good amount in the 5,000 to 100,000 follower range, moving more than the people with millions of followers, because they have dedicated audiences. ShopMy is about helping the brands find [those creators], because it’s really hard to understand that by just looking at someone’s Instagram.” Chiming with Labanca’s point of building an audience because of being a professional who users find relatable yet aspirational, many of ShopMy’s most successful creators have ‘regular’ jobs, Lopinsky adds.
New platforms, new opportunities
Increasingly, amid platform changes, many creators are exploring paid membership content on platforms like Substack or Patreon to secure a regular income, alongside more unpredictable revenue from Instagram or TikTok.
In a study from LTK and Northwestern University, 74 per cent of consumers said that social media “is no longer social”, and offers “entertainment over connection”. While 50 per cent of Gen Zs and millennials said they are now looking elsewhere [to connect with] creators and communities that they follow, beyond the main platforms. “That’s why we’re now seeing the rise of, once-niche, focused platforms, because social media is quite broad,” says Vens Box. “Whether its community platforms like Strava for those interested in running, LinkedIn for professional interests, or LTK in fashion and lifestyle.”
For audiences, paid-for membership sites are thriving, because they allow users to curate their home feeds and only see content from creators they like. Ten per cent of consumers say they’ve used a paid-for membership site to follow creators or influencers in the last week, according to GWI.
On Patreon, fans can pay for memberships to gain access to perks like bonus media, early access to new work, extended cuts and behind-the-scenes content, alongside exclusive engagement opportunities like community chats or IRL ticketed events, explains Stephanie Hind, Patreon’s head of top creator partnerships. “Already, more than half of the $290 billion potential creator economy value comes from direct-to-fan value like ticket sales, courses, live streams and paid memberships,” she says. “On Patreon, we offer ways for creators to tap into all of these.”
YouTube creator Hong has diversified and added paid membership platforms to her repertoire in recent years, due to the unpredictability of traffic. “I’m pretty much everywhere now. I have a thriving Patreon, where I teach university-level fashion design courses paced slowly for adults with day jobs, and host a monthly fashion movie club. And I use Pinterest to create reference boards for my Patreon classes.” Hong also writes a weekly newsletter on Substack, with her Fashion Word of the Week series and updates; has groups on Facebook and Discord to connect with her followers; and uses Instagram, Threads and LinkedIn for announcements as well as casual conversations.
In addition to posting on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, Taylor publishes a newsletter via Squarespace. But she’s interested in both Substack and Patreon. “A lot of my creator friends are saying that Substack works the best from a monetisation standpoint,” she shares.
The rise of Substack has also been a boon to affiliate programmes, says ShopMy’s Lopinsky. “There’s a lot of overlap there with people making a lot from affiliates. If someone is so interested in what you have to say that they’re willing to pay $5 or $8 a month for it, then they’re likely clicking through your affiliate links,” she explains. “Both of them have that element of trust. There’s that difference between influencers that are doing entertainment versus building an audience and community. And if you’re doing the building an audience and community thing, affiliate and subscriptions are really growing for you.”
Launching a product or service
These days, an influencer’s reach is rarely limited to the confines of whatever (many) platforms they’re active on. Increasingly aware of the downsides of being tethered to a platform — and therefore subject to its whims — in addition to diversifying, creators are setting up safety nets beyond content. Eighty-eight per cent of creators have already launched a product or service, according to Billion Dollar Boy. Many fashion influencers now have their own brands to plug, from Elsa Hosk’s Helsa to Coelho’s eponymous Camila Coelho Collection. Kate and fellow influencer Sarah Palmyra, who focuses on beauty, are part of the even higher 93 per cent considering a launch in the next 12 months (both have product launches planned for later this year).
It’s a recent evolution, experts agree. “This wasn’t happening at scale when I was at Meta,” says Billion Dollar Boy’s Owen, who left the company in 2023. “The scale is certainly here now.” Many creator-founded brands have higher selling power than creator-recommended brands, Billion Dollar Boy found. Consumers are more likely to buy creator-founded products and services than those of traditional brands (27 per cent vs 24 per cent). US consumers are especially likely (71 per cent) to have purchased a creator-founded product or service compared to UK consumers (58 per cent).
Coelho can attest. “I know my followers are going to love each drop that we do,” she says. The brand’s latest drop was timed to Coachella, filled with fringe leather and ruffles. “In literally two days, the full collection sold out and I went to Coachella and I saw so many girls wearing my brand.”
The main barrier to launching a successful influencer brand is a lack of expertise — and funding. Creators said some of the biggest challenges include a lack of budget (38 per cent); a lack of experience (31 per cent); and a lack of business knowledge (27 per cent). Billion Dollar Boy recently launched its FiveTwoNine platform to educate and support creators in their business endeavours via knowledge sharing and events. To mitigate, creators work with experienced teams to develop their brands. Hoorn’s business partner, Nicholas Hurenkamp, for instance, has worked in fashion production for 20 years.
Both Hoorn and Coelho say it took time to land a good balance between running a brand and influencing. Coelho still does external brand deals, but not as many as she was doing at her 2019 peak. Hoorn just recently amped up her content creation once again, three years into building her fashion brand Viveh. “Now we have a beautiful team, so I get more time to focus on my socials again, which makes me very happy because I missed the content creation,” says Hoorn.
The next wave of creator-led brand innovation will emerge in the interplay between creator-led and traditional brands, Owen expects. “Traditional brands can bring their established scale and resources to collaborate with a creator’s digital expertise and engaged community to market a product or service in a completely fresh way,” she says. “It’s a chance for both brands to shine and reach audiences they might not have otherwise.”
It’s also a chance for traditional brands to tap into the strong follower loyalty creators boast. Paris’s jewellery brand Tenfour, which she founded with jewellery designer Gille Peeters after a 2024 sell-out collaboration with Peeters’s brand Fragille, had lines around the block for its April pop-up. The ear cuffs are consistently selling out, Paris says.
Looking ahead, it’s interesting to consider who will hold more power, brands or influencers? As we move further into the next phase of creator marketing and increasingly lean towards tighter-knit communities, member content and measurable affiliate programmes, we can expect brands to pull back further on traditional paid influencer marketing. But experts agree, the market will continue to adapt to changes, and creators will continue to increase their share of digital marketing spend.
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