The Creator Economy Shift: What Marketers Need to Know For 2026
The Creator Economy Isn’t Slowing, It’s Maturing
In 2025, the creator economy was no longer a niche playground for influencers; it is a powerhouse of brand trust and growth. Reaching a $250 billion global force according to Forbes, the creator economy reshapes how your favourite brands build brand loyalty and engagement, as the powerhouse behind brand strategy.
Content creation has become one of the main means for brand trust, with consumers increasingly trusting the creators that they follow online. This spans generations from Gen Z to even Gen Alpha, as online creators bring authenticity that traditional brand campaigns lack.
However, by the end of 2025, there was a significant shift closer to caution than curiosity in influencer marketing. The types of channels that brands invested in and creators they trusted to deliver their brand message have become increasingly controlled as marketers develop a protective mindset surrounding influencer marketing. So what does this mean for the creator economy in 2026?
We’ve partnered with Modash, the influencer marketing platform for Shopify brands who released a report based on what influencer marketers have actually been doing in 2025 and what they will place their bets on for 2026. These are our insights.
The Creator Economy Isn’t Slowing, It’s Maturing
Despite this cautious and protective mindset that defined much of 2025, the creator economy itself continues to grow; however, what is changing is how brands participate in it.
Creators are no longer treated as an experimental platform and are now a core part of the brand’s marketing strategy as they are expected to deliver measurable results for brands. The creator economy is now under greater scrutiny, and in 2026, a brand’s success won’t be measured by how many creators it works with or how viral a campaign becomes, but by how scalable, repeatable and defensible those results are.
So why did 2025 become the year of playing it safe? Uncertainty. Economic pressure, changeable e-commerce forecasts, and geopolitical factors all pushed brands to take more control.
This showed up in various forms:
Fewer platforms
Shorter content
Smaller creator partnerships
Faster turnaround campaigns
Speed Over Staying Power
One of the clearest signals of risk aversion in 2025 is the brand’s choice of short-form content and channels. Instagram remained the top choice of sales driver, closely followed by TikTok in 2025.
As attention spans get shorter, this seems like the obvious and most effective choice in increasing audience engagement.
Short-form platforms offer immediate and fast results whereas longer form platforms, such as YouTube, despite driving conversions even months or years after a campaign ends, were chosen less by brands seeking fast and justifiable results.
However, brands that did lean into long-form platforms invested heavily, which suggests that long-form channels and content have been repositioned as higher-stakes and higher-commitment channels. Similarly, long-form content, despite matching or even outperforming short-form content, is perceived as higher risk due to its higher upfront investment and longer timelines.
Despite this, in 2026, this short-form dominance could be set to change. Despite consumers’ need for quick, engaging bite-sized content, this form of content is quick to become oversaturated as short-form fatigue sets in. This appetite for depth is shown through Gen Z’s social media movements, with 53% using social media long-form videos to watch news, tutorials and even movies. For creators and influencers, this is already evolving with TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program that incentivises videos over one minute long. This may result in brands discovering long-form channels and content as a stabilising counterweight to short-form fatigue in 2026.
Smaller Creators, Bigger Engagement
2025 saw the rise of small, niche creator partnerships with brands over large general interest personalities.
Brands haven’t just tested the use of smaller creators; they’ve doubled down on them, which led to stronger performance for many brands, with nearly 60% of marketers seeing much better performance from these niche creators in 2025.
Unlike celebrities or macro influencers with huge followings, micro, niche influencers are perceived as everyday relatable people who are trusted by their communities, meaning their brand endorsement feels more authentic and reliable, unlike a scripted campaign ad.
These types of creators also receive high engagement rates due to their small, tight-knit communities; their audiences are more actively and organically receptive to their content. Whether it be a foodie TikTok creator creating a strawberry delight inspired by their latest bodycare brand collaboration, or a lifestyle influencer showcasing their latest wellness obsession, niche influencers gain huge traction for brands.
Alice Arruda, a Senior Social Media Analyst, expands on this, reinforcing:
“Historically, niche influencers have consistently outperformed celebrities or large influencers. What we did differently this year was double down on them — scaling our efforts with bigger deals, more activations, and a wider variety of content formats and campaigns.”
A platform that has since seen the resurgence of smaller creators is LinkedIn, with the number of active content creators increasing; brands are leaning into smaller creators on this platform to further gain brand trust and relevance.
Once described as “Facebook in a suit,” LinkedIn has seen a resurgence, while other platforms struggle with algorithm confusion and chaos, LinkedIn benefits from upheavals elsewhere in the social media landscape.
A significant creator within this space, despite only having a relatively small following of just under 52K, is Brandon Smithwrick. Smithwrick is an award-winning marketer who shares insights on content marketing and social media while partnering with an array of brands from LinkedIn and VEED to Notion.
Smithwrick is evidently recognised within the marketing industry; therefore, his collaborations with brands, such as his latest partnership with Stanley, build brand trust and authenticity while reaching his specific community of followers.
One brand that has leaned into this trend of niche content creators is heritage brand J.Crew, with its 2025 holiday campaign, “The Wishlisters.”
Rather than anchoring the campaign around a single celebrity, J.Crew built a collective. The brand partnered with an array of niche yet culturally influential creators, each known for very different styles of content. The line-up included Delaney Rowe, Aki and Koichi Kim, Taylen Biggs, Terrence O’Connor, Kereem Rahma, Abby and Baskin, each labelled as a different type of personality to buy for over the festive period, whether that be The Holiday Drama Queen or The Holiday Sportsman.
Each creator’s holiday personality fits their style of content and ties into their personal brand, making the campaign culturally relevant and inserting J.Crew as a brand that is native to social media rather than interruptive.
Long-Term Partnership Loss
It would be assumed that long-term creator partnerships remain one of the most effective strategies in influencer marketing; however, many brands hesitated to commit in 2025. Due to this economic uncertainty, brands diversified their influencer reach and budget across more creators and more campaigns, resulting in shorter commitments.
Back in 2024, influencer marketing platform Modash asked marketers if they planned to run more long-term partnerships, with 84.4% stating they’d double down on this strategy. However, when marketers were asked the same question for 2026, 27.9% fewer agreed that they would be keen to do so.
Joshua Weidling, Influencer Marketing & Creator Economy Consultant, explains why long-term partnerships just aren’t as simple as they were:
“Across the board, influencers seem to be becoming less effective. As TikTok shop has taken off from an affiliate perspective, leading to a slew of new people trying content creation, the amount of news is larger than it’s ever been, and consumers may be tuning out - especially when you factor in tariffs in the U.S and the economy in general.”
Compensation Standoff
One of the most defining tensions within the creator economy in 2025, leading into 2026, sits at the intersection of trust and money. Due to marketers’ need for results and creators’ need for financial security, more brands leaned into affiliate and performance-based models while influencers became less willing to accept compensation that wasn’t guaranteed pay. Therefore, to bridge this gap, brands have experimented with hybrid compensation models:
Flat fees combined with performance bonuses
Non-monetary incentives like early VIP access and custom products
Longer-term collaboration promises without rigid contracts
A standout example of this compensation standoff is party girl lifestyle influencer Alix Earle. Who, over the past few years, has become an investor in multiple beverage brands.
Her latest venture with the clean energy drink brand Gorgie is the influencer’s latest investment, as she joined the brand in December 2025 as a strategic investor after being seen with the beverage throughout her time on Dancing with the Stars.
This is her latest investment following her stake in the $1.95B prebiotic soda brand Poppi and ready-to-drink cocktail brand SipMargs. Earle’s investment in these brands redefines what influencer-brand partnerships look like, as rather than leaning into traditional influencer deals, she takes equity stakes in the brands that she promotes. Rather than limiting her involvement to paid posts, Earle has invested directly into these brands, not as passive endorsements but as long-term bets.
By investing in these brands, she ties her upside to their success. If the product resonates, she benefits from more than a campaign performance but from the brand’s long-term growth.
What to Expect in 2026?
As we look ahead to 2026, the defensive 2025 year matters as the choices that brands make while under pressure shape what the creator economy is becoming.
Here are the key takeaways and predictions for how brands will prosper within the creative economy in the coming year and how to navigate these changes:
In 2026, the brands that will succeed will be those that rebalance speed with durability, using short-form content to drive momentum and engagement, while rebuilding and reshaping long-form as a long-term asset rather than a discretionary expense. As content saturation increases and short-form fatigue sets in, brands that lean into long form may stabilise this short-form fatigue and create deeper engagement.
Competitive advantage in terms of niche influencer collaborations won’t come from choosing smaller creators, but it will come from the ability to scale those relationships efficiently without sacrificing quality or authenticity.
Long-term brand partnerships won’t disappear; they will be redefined with brands moving more towards multi-campaign creator relationships, flexible contracts with opt-out clauses and deeper integration during key product or seasonal moments. Therefore, in 2026, long-term partnerships won’t necessarily be longer but more embedded.
Finally, compensation structures will become more customised, transparent, and negotiable, reflecting the reality that creators are not just media placements but independent businesses that manage their own risk and financial security.
The best way to navigate these changes as a marketer is to diversify your overall influencer marketing program and consolidate your efforts into what you know works. This may seem risky due to the nature of algorithms, but having access to the right data can help take the risk out of influencer campaigns.
Modash offers valuable data when selecting the right influencers. This means you’ll have access to engagement rates across content formats and channels. From how an influencer’s content performs compared to organic, who they’ve worked with in the past, and deep audience demographics to help you match your own customer cohort.
You’ve explained this really well
Coming from the brand side, how the compensation model will shift and how brands + creators can craft mutually beneficial partnerships is an interesting WIP. I think the most innovative partnerships will figure it out and also create meaningful content (meaningful = impactful by some measurement). I think those who rinse and repeat how things used to work... will struggle.