The creator line item grew up faster than the process around it
$37 billion in 2025, $44 billion forecast for 2026. Most of it is still being bought on instinct, briefed over direct messages and measured on screenshots.
iStudios, Creative practice
The IAB puts US creator advertising at $37bn in 2025, climbing to a projected $44bn in 2026. For comparison, that is a channel roughly half the size of all digital video, and it is being run, in a great many organisations, without a rate card.
The reason is historical rather than stupid. Creator budgets grew out of PR and social teams, where relationships matter more than procurement, and the informality was a feature when the numbers were small. At $44bn it is a liability.
Four things that are usually missing
- Usage rights written down before the asset exists. The single most common expensive mistake is discovering a piece of content is performing, and that you cannot run it as paid media.
- A brief that specifies the job, not the post. Creators are good at their own audience and bad at guessing your objective.
- Whitelisting and paid amplification planned from the start, because organic reach on creator content is the least predictable part of it.
- Measurement that is not engagement. Engagement tells you the content worked as content. It does not tell you it worked as advertising.
Treat creators as a media channel with a creative production attached, not as a creative project with some reach attached.
Where AI changes the economics
Not by replacing creators; the reason the channel works is that a specific person vouched for something. It changes the economics on the other side: versioning, localisation, cutdowns, and the long tail of formats each platform demands. The creator makes one thing well; the production system turns it into the forty assets a real flight needs, inside the rights you negotiated and the brand rules you set.
That is the boring half of the work and it is where the margin is.