Somewhere in your agency, right now, there’s a planning template with a line item called “influencer” sitting at 5% of budget. Filed under “test and learn.” Approved last, cut first.
That line item is a fossil.
Creator marketing crossed a threshold last year that most media plans haven’t acknowledged: it stopped being a channel you add and became the substrate the other channels run on. The industry noticed the milestone, nodded politely, and went back to arguing about CTV supply paths.
Here’s the fact worth pinning above your desk: in 2025, for the first time, content made by individual creators on platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram attracted more advertising revenue than television, cinema and news combined, according to WPP Media’s This Year Next Year research.
More than TV, cinema and news. Combined. First time in the history of the medium.
Read that again, then look at your planning template.
The money already voted
The numbers aren’t subtle anymore, and none of them are projections from a creator-economy hype deck. They’re from the people who count the money.
- Creator-driven advertising is forecast to more than double to US$376.6 billion by 2030 (WPP Media, 2025)
- Creator ad spend hit US$37 billion in 2025, heading for roughly US$44 billion in 2026 (eMarketer)
- Creator content now powers 44% of paid media creative (CreatorIQ, 2026 Creator-Powered Funnel report)
- Nano and micro creators now take 49.9% of US creator spend, up from under a fifth a few years ago (eMarketer)
And locally: Statista Market Insights put Australian influencer advertising at US$589 million in 2025, growing over 10% a year, a figure the Australian Influencer Marketing Council was quoting with something like told-you-so satisfaction (via B&T, June 2025).
Sit on that CreatorIQ number for a second. Forty-four per cent of paid media creative. Nearly half the ads being trafficked through the auctions we manage all day are creator-made. The “influencer budget” isn’t buying influence anymore. It’s buying the creative supply chain for paid social.
Why the plan hasn’t caught up
Because agency org charts still have “influencer” sitting in the PR or social team, three desks and one political rivalry away from the people who control media dollars.
Because procurement categories were written when a creator post was a brand-awareness garnish, so usage rights get costed as production, negotiated as an afterthought, and expire mid-flight, usually the week the ad finally exits learning.
Because attribution flatters what’s easy to track, and a creator’s contribution gets laundered through “paid social” the moment you whitelist the post. The channel that supplies 44% of the creative gets 0% of the credit line.
Structural problems. Not talent problems. The fossil survives because nobody’s job description includes killing it.
eMarketer’s own analysis says the quiet part: two-thirds of increases in influencer spend are being reallocated from other paid media channels. This isn’t new money. It’s your media budget, migrating, whether your template acknowledges it or not.
The audience moved on and the money followed.
Worth being precise about why this happened, because it wasn’t a marketing fad. It was a viewing shift.
WPP Media’s report makes the structural point: individual media diets are now personalised around creators and topics, not channels and timeslots, and audiences increasingly treat purchase decisions as extensions of those personal feeds and belief systems. The Australian Influencer Marketing Council’s Patrick Whitnall put the punchline on it: YouTube is now the most-watched streaming service in the world (via B&T, June 2025).
The most-watched streaming service on earth is a UGC platform. The ad money didn’t disrupt anything by following it there. It simply went where the eyeballs already were, five years late and slightly embarrassed about it.
Which means the creator shift isn’t a bet on a format. It’s the consequence of a settled audience behaviour. You can argue with a trend. You can’t argue with where people watch.
What the operators who get it are doing
They’ve stopped treating creators as a campaign and started treating them as inventory with a supply chain.
Practically, that looks like four changes.
Brief for the ad slot, not the feed post. The deliverable isn’t “one TikTok.” It’s hook variants, native-format cutdowns, and raw footage rights, briefed against the angles your creative strategist actually needs to test. The organic post is the audition. The paid usage is the job.
Price usage as media, not production. If creator content is powering the auction, its licensing cost belongs in the media line, judged on in-platform performance like any other unit of creative. When you cost it that way, a $2k licence on an ad that holds CPA for six weeks is the cheapest media you’ll buy all quarter. In my experience running creator content for AU DTC food brands, the licensing conversation is where most of the margin hides, in both directions.
Buy a portfolio, not a hero. The 49.9% nano/micro share isn’t sentimentality about authenticity. It’s diversification maths: ten small creators at $500 each generate ten distinct creative bets; one mid-tier at $5k generates one. Andromeda-era Meta rewards exactly this kind of creative diversity, which is a happy coincidence the planning template also hasn’t noticed.
Measure creators where the money lands. In-platform, post-whitelisting, against the same thresholds as studio creative. Creator content that can’t survive a fair fight in the ads manager doesn’t deserve budget protection either. This cuts both ways, and should.
The uncomfortable close
The last time the industry was this slow to reorganise around where attention went, an entire generation of agencies spent a decade explaining why their TV-shaped teams couldn’t do digital. Some of them are still explaining.
Creator content out-earning TV, cinema and news combined wasn’t a trend confirmation. It was the handover of the medium.
The plans will catch up. The question is whether yours does before your competitors’ do, or after your clients ask why it hasn’t.
If you’re a founder or operator who wants creator content wired into paid properly: briefing, licensing, testing, the whole supply chain — that’s day-job territory for us. Book a growth call with Thrive.
FAQ
How big is creator marketing in 2026?
Creator advertising spend reached about US$37 billion in 2025 and is projected at roughly US$44 billion in 2026 (eMarketer). WPP Media forecasts the broader creator-driven ad market to more than double to US$376.6 billion by 2030.
Did creator content really out-earn traditional media?
Yes. WPP Media’s This Year Next Year research found that in 2025, for the first time, more than half of content-driven advertising revenue came from user-generated platforms and content, with creator content attracting more ad revenue than television, cinema and news outlets combined.
How much of paid media creative comes from creators?
CreatorIQ’s 2026 Creator-Powered Funnel report found creator content now powers 44% of paid media creative, meaning nearly half of ads running through platforms like Meta and TikTok are creator-made rather than studio-made.
Should brands use nano and micro creators or big influencers?
The spend data leans small: nano and micro creators now account for 49.9% of US creator spend (eMarketer). Smaller creators cost less per asset, produce more diverse creative for testing, and their content typically transitions into paid placements at a fraction of celebrity licensing costs.
