More money is flowing into creator marketing — just not directly to creators

With the winter holidays on the horizon, both creators and influencer marketers believe the majority of brands’ new investment in creator marketing is coming in the form of paid media inventory that allows advertisers to show up alongside creators, including Meta’s partnership ads and TikTok’s Spark Ads, as well as scalable options like affiliate marketing.

“They’re moving spend out of paid media that they would have previously done on linear TV, like big ad spots, and chopping that up and using it to bolster and support the creator economy,” said Cindy Okeneke, a senior director at the marketing agency Worthi. 

Creators’ strategy regarding holiday marketing spending has shifted significantly, according to creator monetization platform Collective Voice’s Holiday 2025 Creator Commerce Report, which between June and July 2025 asked 1,200 U.S. creators and consumers about their plans for the upcoming holiday period. Sponsored content, once the lifeblood of creators’ brand revenue, is no longer the centerpiece, with 70 percent of creators saying traditional sponsored posts will make up less than a quarter of their holiday content, per the report, with creators increasing their focus on performance-driven strategies like affiliate instead. 

“Affiliate marketing is no longer an add-on or an emerging opportunity; it’s a foundational revenue stream for creators, and the same for brands,” said Collective Voice vp of marketing Clair Sidman. “Affiliate has often, in the past, sat in a lower-ranking tier for media dollars, whereas now, with creator affiliate, they’re able to get the branding as well as the performance, and to drive ROI.”

Between January and August of this year, affiliate marketing spend has grown at an average rate of six percent on YouTube, compared to a two percent average growth rate for sponsorship videos on the platform, according to data shared by the influencer marketing data company CreatorDB.

Lisa Singelyn, vp of celebrity and influencer at Platinum Rye Entertainment, the talent procurement shop within the Omnicom agency TMA, said that it is “well documented that an increasing proportion of brands’ creator marketing spend is shifting toward third-party managed inventory versus direct deals with creators,” citing numbers from Insider Intelligence’s 2025 Influencer Marketing Measurement report showing that Spark Ads account for 60% to 70% of all creator-driven ad spend on TikTok. 

“The trend is especially visible among global brands such as McDonald’s or Nike because they have larger budgets and a greater need for scale and control,” she said. “But we see small and midsize businesses, challenger brands and especially DTC companies increasing spend in this category, too.”

Some brands may have unwittingly stepped up their spending on paid media involving creators in the past year, according to Charlotte Stavrou, a creator and the CEO of the creator talent management agency SevenSix Agency, who said that increased spending on third-party creator inventory could be downstream from creator agencies, rather than the brands themselves. 

“The agency is putting paid spend behind the content. They’re asking for the Spark codes; they’re asking for the Meta access,” Stavrou said. “The problem is, there’s a language issue. I don’t think brands fully understand that what they’re actually asking for is paid social with creators.”

Brands’ increased spending on paid creator media is also a result of algorithmic changes that have made it difficult to determine a creator’s true reach using their follower count, as well as the tacit knowledge that platforms’ algorithms suppress branded content, according to Harley Block, CEO of the creator media company IF7. Paid media is a way to guarantee a certain number of impressions on brands’ influencer content. 

“Everybody knows that organic branded posts get suppressed, and brands are investing significant dollars into these creators,” Block said. “So, obviously, you want to see returns on that, in terms of reach and awareness.”

Brands’ growing spend on third-party creator inventory is forcing creators to become more business-minded with their approach to brand partnerships, according to Singelyn, who said that the trend was one reason why creators are raising their rates to account for brands using their content in ads across multiple platforms. In 2025, creators have increased their participation in third-party creator marketing opportunities like affiliate marketing and scalable creator ads, recognizing the flow of marketing dollars into these areas. 

As brands increasingly scrutinize the ROI of their creator marketing spend, it makes sense that they are leaning into strategies like paid media and affiliate — but this trend is not inherently bad news for creators. Since the added spend is often coming from brands’ paid media budgets, rather than their pre-existing creator budgets, the growing trend of brands spending on paid media that involves creators still means more money is being pumped into the creator economy overall. 

“As an industry, what that means is that, if you think of paid influencer spend as somewhere in a $5-to-$10 billion range today, it clearly is going to 10x if not more, because of that paid media spend being put behind it,” said Stephen Titus, the co-founder and CEO of the creator marketing platform Faved. “And that’s something very exciting for us.”