Creator Partnership Report: Q3 2026 (Who Brands Actually Booked)

Between July 1 and September 30, 2026, we tracked 5,848 disclosed paid creator partnerships from 2,439 brands and 4,174 creators across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Five affiliate-led brands (the SHEIN and Temu family) produced 32 percent of all of those posts on their own. The other 2,434 brands booked a median creator of about 92K followers, ran 63 percent of their placements on Instagram, and gave roughly one paid post in six to a creator under 10K. Quarter over quarter, the creator sizes brands book did not move: on Instagram Reels the median went from 92K to 93K, and the under-10K share from 5.0 to 5.4 percent.

This is the first edition of the Creator Partnership Report, the quarterly cut of the CollabFeed database for people who run creator programs: brand marketers, agencies and anyone deciding where a budget should go. Everything below comes from disclosed paid content (#ad, paid-partnership labels, YouTube's paid-promotion flag), not from surveys or self-reported rates. If you are a creator asking what follower count gets paid, How Many Followers Do You Need to Get Brand Deals answers that question with the same data from the creator's side, and the rate benchmarks by niche cover what a post at those sizes is worth.

Key findings

• Instagram carries the market, YouTube is the second platform, TikTok is the smallest and the biggest. Excluding the affiliate family, 63 percent of tracked paid placements ran on Instagram, 27 percent on YouTube and 10 percent on TikTok. The median TikTok creator booked has 321K followers, almost four times Instagram's 88K.
• Five brands are a third of the market. The SHEIN, SHEGLAM and Temu affiliate programs generated 1,849 posts from 1,175 creators in one quarter. Every other number in this report excludes them, because their code-driven placements would drown out what the other 2,434 brands do.
• Beauty and Food & Beverage are the two biggest niches, and Food has the most hiring brands by far. Beauty is 20 percent of placements from 363 brands; Food & Beverage is 18 percent from 488 brands, more distinct hiring brands than any other niche.
• Niche decides the creator size more than anything else. Technology (median 124K), Finance (143K), Pets (127K) and Food & Beverage (118K) book big. Beauty (56K), Sports (63K), Fashion (65K) and Education (66K) book small. Gaming is its own market: 45 percent of placements went to creators under 10K.
• Reels are 95 percent of paid Instagram placements. Static images and carousels together are about 5 percent, and they go to much smaller creators (median 8K versus 93K for Reels).
• One brand in four hired more than once in the quarter. 24.5 percent of brands ran two or more tracked placements, 21 percent booked two or more different creators, and 89 brands booked five or more creators in 90 days.
• The size mix is stable. Like for like (Instagram Reels, affiliate family excluded), the median creator, the under-10K share and the 250K+ share all moved by about a point or less between Q2 and Q3. The brands and creators we track grew; who gets booked did not change.

How many paid creator partnerships ran in Q3 2026, and on which platforms?

5,848 tracked placements, 4,140 of them on Instagram. The affiliate family skews this split, so the table shows both views.

Medians and engagement in the table exclude the affiliate family. Two notes on reading it. YouTube's share partly reflects our coverage: YouTube tracking began on July 22, so Q3 is the first quarter it appears in, and its numbers will settle in the Q4 edition. TikTok is small in count and large in creator size: the typical paid TikTok placement goes to an account with a third of a million followers, and a third of them go to accounts over 1M. If your budget is for TikTok, you are shopping in a different size market than on Instagram. We keep a running list of brands hiring TikTok creators.

Which niches booked the most creators?

Beauty and Food & Beverage, in that order by placements, with Food & Beverage far ahead by number of hiring brands. Affiliate family excluded; Health and Fitness are separate categories in our data and sit next to each other here.

With the affiliate family included, Fashion is 36 percent of everything we tracked, and 79 percent of those fashion posts come from the five affiliate brands. That is the single biggest distortion in any "who hires creators" dataset, and it is why we report Fashion at 11 percent here. We broke the biggest program down in how SHEIN runs its creator program.

Food & Beverage is the widest door for creators and the most fragmented market for marketers: 488 brands shared 700 placements, so the typical food brand ran one or two. Beauty is the opposite, with a smaller set of brands running repeat waves, and Gaming is a market of launch campaigns that seed dozens of small channels at once.

What creator size does each niche actually book?

The follower bands below are the share of each niche's placements by the booked creator's size, affiliate family excluded. The median is the midpoint of all placements we matched to a profile (98.4 percent of the dataset).

Three patterns are worth planning around.

The small-creator niches are small for different reasons. Gaming's 45 percent under 10K is launch-campaign casting: a game release books dozens of small channels in one week. Fashion's 21 percent is ambassador programs that recruit under-5K accounts on commission, the shape we documented in the Fashion Nova deep-dive. Beauty's 24 percent is mostly YouTube: on Instagram alone the median beauty creator booked is 71K, while beauty brands ran YouTube campaigns across more than a hundred channels under 10K subscribers.

Technology, Finance and Food & Beverage barely book under 10K. Five to six percent of placements. If your brief is "find micro-creators" in those niches, the supply of creators with a tracked paid deal is thin, and the ones who exist are easy to find because so few brands have used them.

Travel and Parenting are mid-size markets. Close to half of their placements land between 50K and 250K, and both have the smallest 250K+ share of any niche. A travel or parenting campaign built around a handful of 500K accounts is working against where the category spends.

Does the platform change who gets booked?

Yes, more than the niche does. Same dataset, affiliate family excluded, split by platform.

Instagram is the middle market: more than half of paid placements go to creators under 100K, and a third go to the 100K to 500K band. Engagement rates fall as size rises, from a median of 9 percent at 10K to 25K to 3.7 percent at 100K to 500K and 2.5 percent above 1M, which is the trade every brief makes between reach and response.

TikTok is top-heavy. A third of paid TikTok placements go to accounts over 1M, and only a third go to accounts under 100K. The under-10K share (16 percent) is real but it is a different product: short-form affiliate and reaction content, not the mid-size campaigns Instagram runs.

YouTube is two markets stacked on top of each other. A third of placements go to channels under 10K subscribers, mostly campaign-seeded small channels, and a third go to channels over 250K, where sponsorships are negotiated integrations. The middle is thin. Treat YouTube medians with caution until the Q4 edition, when the platform has two full quarters of data.

Reels, carousels or static posts?

Reels. Of paid Instagram placements from non-affiliate brands, 94.7 percent were Reels, 3.9 percent were carousels and 1.4 percent were single images. The static formats go to a very different creator: the median carousel placement went to an 8K creator and the median image to a 4K creator, against 93K for Reels. In practice, static paid posts are an ambassador and gifting format; a brand buying reach on Instagram is buying a Reel.

We began tracking static and carousel paid posts on July 17, so this is the first quarter with a format split and the shares should be read as a first measurement rather than a trend.

How many brands hire creators more than once?

About one in four, affiliate family excluded.

• 597 of 2,434 brands (24.5 percent) ran two or more tracked placements in the quarter, and 108 ran five or more.
• 515 brands (21 percent) booked two or more different creators, and 89 brands booked five or more.
• 465 of 3,051 creators (15 percent) landed two or more paid placements in 90 days.

For a marketer, the repeat-hiring brands are the competitive set that has already decided creators work: they have the budget line, the brief and a roster. For a creator, they are the pitch list. CollabFeed's brand pages show each brand's recent placements and the creator sizes it books, and the creator programs directory lists the brands with an open application route.

Which brands started or scaled creator programs in Q3?

Two lists, both built from Instagram only, because YouTube tracking began mid-quarter and would make every brand with a YouTube presence look new. Names are alphabetical within each group; this is not a ranking by volume.

Brands with no tracked paid Instagram placement in Q2 that ran three or more with at least two creators in Q3:

• Fashion: Fashion Nova, Old Navy, Primark, Vinted, Windsor
• Beauty: Atom Fresh, Lush, MAC Cosmetics, Vaseline
• Food & Beverage: Doritos, Mother Root, My/Mochi, Oreo, The Sicilian Butcher
• Home & DIY: Thermomix, Tossware, Two Pages
• Technology: Higgsfield, Lovart, Printify, Telstra
• Health & Fitness: Glowmode, Metamucil, ONERACTIVE, WOLFPak
• Travel: Holafly, Norwegian Cruise Line
• Other: CrunchLabs (education), Ingenuity (parenting), Mercedes-Benz (automotive), Moose Toys (toys)

Brands whose tracked paid Instagram placements at least 2.5x'd from Q2 to Q3:

• ALDI, Aerie, H&M, Logitech, Samsung, Starbucks, Walmart, Yves Saint Laurent

The two fashion ambassador programs in these lists (Aerie, Windsor) booked a median creator under 5K; Walmart, Starbucks and ALDI booked mid-size accounts between 17K and 90K; Samsung, H&M and Yves Saint Laurent booked over 100K. Same quarter, three different ways of running a creator program.

What changed since Q2?

Very little in who gets booked, and a lot in how many brands are doing the booking.

The like-for-like comparison is Instagram Reels from non-affiliate brands, the one slice our tracking covered the same way in both quarters:

Niche shares on Instagram moved a few points: Home & DIY fell 3.6 points (its summer lull), Food & Beverage fell 1.6 and Beauty 1.1, while Technology gained 2.1, Fitness 1.4, Pets 1.1 and Education 0.9. The number of brands with a tracked Instagram placement rose from 1,409 to 1,735 and creators booked from 1,377 to 1,830, which is partly seasonal (back-to-school and the first holiday briefs) and partly our coverage growing.

What this means if you run creator partnerships

1. Benchmark your creator sizes against your niche, not against "influencer marketing". A 40K creator is above the median hire in Beauty and Fashion and well below it in Technology, Finance and Food & Beverage.
2. Pick the platform for the size you want. Instagram for the 25K to 250K middle, TikTok if the brief needs reach from accounts over 250K, YouTube for either end but not the middle.
3. If you want micro-creators, look at how the categories that use them do it. Gaming launches, fashion ambassador programs and beauty YouTube campaigns book small accounts in waves with a commission or a code, not one at a time with a flat fee.
4. Buy Reels unless the deliverable is the product shot. Static paid posts exist, but they are a small, small-creator format.
5. Watch the repeat hirers in your category. The brands that booked five or more creators this quarter are the ones a creator pitches first and the ones a competitor benchmarks against.

Methodology

This report covers disclosed paid partnerships tracked by CollabFeed between July 1 and September 30, 2026: 5,848 posts from 2,439 distinct brands and 4,174 creators across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. We count only disclosed paid content (#ad, #sponsored, platform paid-partnership labels, or YouTube's paid-promotion flag). A paid-partnership label covers gifted and affiliate deals as well as cash fees, so nothing here says what any brand paid; every rate figure we publish is a market benchmark for creators of the size a brand books, from the same model as our rate calculator.

Follower counts come from matched creator profiles (98.4 percent match rate). Engagement rate is likes plus comments plus shares over views, reported as medians. "Affiliate family excluded" removes five brands (SHEIN, SHEGLAM, Temu and their regional accounts) whose code-driven placements total 1,849 posts in the quarter. Brand counts use normalized brand names, so regional handles of one brand count once.

Coverage changed during the quarter: YouTube tracking began July 22, Instagram static and carousel posts July 17, and the TikTok discovery was redesigned September 13. Counts are therefore not comparable across quarters; the "What changed" section uses Instagram Reels only, where tracking was the same in both windows. Brand lists in this report are alphabetical and never ranked by placement count.

Citing this report: reference any number here with a link to this page. The next edition, covering Q4 2026, lands in late January 2027 under the same URL.

Related posts:

• How Much Do Brands Pay Creators Per Post? Rate Benchmarks by Niche
• How Many Followers Do You Need to Get Brand Deals?
• Brands Hiring Creators Under 10K Followers
• Brands Hiring TikTok Creators in 2026

Data powered by CollabFeed. Track real-time brand partnerships at collabfeed.io.