The State of the
Creator Economy
What 7.7M creators across 15 platforms tell us about where audiences are, which niches are biggest, and what sponsorships actually pay — from SocialDB's open dataset.
Where the creators are
Live public listings per platform. Live-streaming and the open social web (Bluesky, Mastodon) now rival the incumbents by sheer creator count.
Where creators are based
Top countries among the 605.1K creators with a known location. The US and UK lead, but the bench runs deep and global — India, Brazil and mainland Europe are all major creator hubs.
What a sponsorship pays
Estimated market rate for one sponsored post / integration, by platform and audience size (2025–26). A planning benchmark — real deals vary with niche, deliverables and exclusivity.
| Platform | 10K | 100K | 1M followers |
|---|---|---|---|
| $70–145 | $700–1,450 | $7,000–14,500 | |
| TikTok | $84–174 | $840–1,740 | $8,400–17,400 |
| X / Twitter | $42–87 | $420–870 | $4,200–8,700 |
| Twitch | $126–261 | $1,260–2,610 | $12,600–26,100 |
| Podcast | $175–363 | $1,750–3,625 | $17,500–36,250 |
Try the interactive rate calculator for any specific creator.
The biggest niches
Most common creator categories across the dataset. Broad buckets like Society & Culture, Business and Education sit on top because podcasts (which use Apple's high-level taxonomy) are one of the fastest-growing slices of our corpus — so this doubles as a read on how much of the creator economy is now audio.
The most active sponsor brands
Brands appearing across the most creator sponsorships in our data — a proxy for who's spending on influencer marketing right now.
Source: SocialDB — The State of the Creator Economy (October 2026), https://socialdb.xyz/report. Figures from SocialDB's public dataset of 7.7M+ creator listings; rate benchmarks are estimates. Free to quote with a link. See our methodology.