Many small instead of one big

The market outgrew the celebrity

Influencer marketing was a curiosity ten years ago. Influencer Marketing Hub's benchmark reports, the series most people cite, put the global market at $1.7 billion in 2016, $16.4 billion in 2022, $21.1 billion in 2023, $24 billion in 2024 and a projected $32.55 billion for 2025. The figures are vendor estimates with undisclosed methodology, and other analysts land lower, but the direction is not in doubt: the budgets have moved here.

The interesting part is who the money goes to. When Influencer Marketing Hub's report asks businesses and agencies which type of creator they prefer to work with, a clear majority say the small ones. In 2023, 39 percent picked nano creators (1,000 to 10,000 followers) and 30 percent micro creators (10,000 to 100,000). By 2024 the nano share had grown to 44 percent. Celebrities and mega accounts with over a million followers stayed at 12 to 13 percent. It is a question of preference, not of money, but it says something about where the industry is looking.

32,55

billion dollars. The global market in 2025, per Influencer Marketing Hub's projection.

70 %

of surveyed businesses and agencies prefer nano or micro creators over larger accounts, per Influencer Marketing Hub.

44 %

chose nano creators as their first-choice partner in 2024, up from 39 percent the year before, per Influencer Marketing Hub.

Almost every creator is small

The supply side is even clearer. HypeAuditor, which indexes 76 million Instagram accounts and 104 million TikTok accounts with at least a thousand followers, counts 76 percent of Instagram's influencers and 88 percent of TikTok's as nano creators in its 2025 report. Mega accounts are a rounding error by count. The ecosystem is built of small nodes.

And the small ones get more response per follower. On TikTok, nano creators' engagement sits at 10 to 12 percent in HypeAuditor's 2025 report, against 7.1 percent for mega accounts. On Instagram the levels are lower across the board, around 1.7 to 2.2 percent for nano, but nano is still the top tier. Engagement figures vary a lot between vendors depending on whether they count against followers or views, so never compare percentages from two different sources. The direction, though, is the same everywhere: the smaller the account, the larger the share of the audience that reacts.

Revenue per follower: the best study we have found

Engagement is an intermediate step. What counts is sales, and there one study stands out. Beichert, Bayerl, Goldenberg and Lanz published, in the Journal of Marketing in 2024, an analysis of 1.88 million purchases, tracked through unique discount codes, from 2,808 sponsored posts by 1,698 creators, complemented by three field experiments.

The study compares nano, micro and macro accounts across several economic measures, including revenue per follower and revenue per person reached. The results come from a limited dataset and should not be read as a general promise of campaign outcomes.

The study uses data from a European DTC fashion company on Instagram and measures purchases attributable to discount codes. It is useful as background, but its results should not be treated as a general estimate for Collabify campaigns.

Sweden: TikTok overtook Instagram

Sweden has unusually good figures. According to IRM's measurements for IAB Sverige, the market went from SEK 458 million in 2016 to 1,048 million in 2021 and 1,064 million in 2022, an increase of 1.5 percent that year. For 2023 and 2024, IRM's report from November 2023 has only forecasts, not outcomes: SEK 954 million for 2023 and 1,052 million for 2024. We have not found the outcomes for those two years in any public source. According to IRM, the market then grew, “after an earlier slowdown”, by just over 19 percent in 2025 to a record of just over SEK 1.1 billion and became the fastest-growing media category in the country. For 2026, IRM expects another 9 percent.

Two things happened along the way. TikTok became the largest platform in Sweden, with 44 percent of revenue in 2025 against Instagram's 41.9, according to IAB Sverige. And the smallest creators grew: accounts under 10,000 followers took 8.2 percent of sponsorship revenue in 2022 and 13 percent in the latest measurement, at the expense of accounts over 100,000. Already in 2022, creators with up to 100,000 followers took the majority of the money, 56 percent. Sweden is behind the global surveys in how much goes to nano, but it is moving the same way.

1,1 mdkr

Sweden's influencer market in 2025, up 19 percent and a record, per IRM for IAB Sverige.

44 %

of revenue went through TikTok in 2025, now larger than Instagram in Sweden, per IAB Sverige.

8 → 13 %

the share of revenue to creators under 10,000 followers, 2022 to 2025, per IRM for IAB Sverige.

What counts as small depends on who is counting

Nano and micro sound like fixed sizes, but the sources use different names and boundaries. In Influencer Marketing Hub's survey, where the figures above come from, nano is 1,000 to 10,000 followers and micro 10,000 to 100,000. HypeAuditor draws the same line for nano. IRM calls the same range, 10,000 to 100,000 followers, the middle segment and writes that smaller influencers “in this study” are those with fewer than 10,000. Mediemyndigheten, the Swedish media authority, notes that there are no clear boundaries for who is an influencer, and in its own estimate counted only accounts with at least 5,000 followers. The bands are conventions that each source picks for itself. Check the boundaries and names before you compare two figures about micro creators.

The rise from 8 to 13 percent is IAB Sverige's own comparison, but the bases differ. The 2022 shares are of sponsorship revenue, while the 13 percent for 2025 is of total turnover. IAB Sverige publishes no figures for the other bands in 2025. IRM's full report is downloaded through a form, and we have not read it. Read the rise as a direction, not as an exact change.

On TikTok, follower count also says less about reach. TikTok wrote in 2020 that a video is likely to get more views if the account has more followers, but that neither follower count nor previous high-performing videos are direct factors when the feed recommends videos. Mediemyndigheten describes TikTok as “not primarily follower-based”: users gather around topics, and that gives smaller, more niche creators a chance to reach the right audience. The same report cites a large influencer network saying that advertisers still use bigger creators to reach more people with their campaigns. A small account on TikTok does not mean a small audience, but it does not promise a big one either.

How to build with many small ones

This is where the numbers run out. We found no independent source that measures what it costs to run dozens or hundreds of small creators in parallel, or which ways of working hold up. What follows is our own conclusion, built on what is above and on what we see ourselves.

For Collabify, the practical question is how businesses can work with multiple creators without turning administration into a project of its own. More creators mean more agreements, more content deliveries to manage, more publications to follow up and more payouts to administer. That makes the workflow around the collaborations as important as the matching itself.

That is why Collabify is built the way it is. A business writes a brief, sets a pool and chooses how many creators get a place. Creators apply, make their video their way and give their consent to publication per post. After 30 days the views are counted and the pool is split in proportion to them. Everyone pulls in the same direction, nobody negotiates, and anyone who wants to can put a single large collaboration on top for the launch moment. That is how we think many small ones become a system instead of a project.

When many small ones fit, and when they don't

This section is our judgement, not a measured result. It builds on the sources above and on what we see ourselves, and no independent study has tested it. Start from what the campaign is meant to achieve, not from follower count.

The choice does not have to be either or. One larger collaboration can carry the launch itself while many smaller ones spread it further into different niches.

What we could not verify

Many more figures circulate than the ones above: price bands per post for every tier, cost per engagement down to the cent, conversion rates per tier, a claim of 18 dollars back per dollar spent on nano against 6 on macro, and forecasts for 2026 of up to 40 billion dollars. We tried to trace each one to a primary source and could not. Several are repeated blog to blog without an origin. We left them out. If you find the source, we would like to see it.