Where the money goes in influencer marketing

A brand approves a campaign budget. Some months later a creator receives a payment. Between those two events the money passes through several sets of hands, and almost nobody in the industry has seen the whole route. Brands see the top. Creators see the bottom. The middle is where every argument about this business actually takes place.

This is a map of that route, written for the brand side and for creators who want to understand what happens above them. Most of the layers are doing real work and deserve what they take. A few of them are where money evaporates. And there is one part of the chain that genuinely cannot be seen from either end, which is the last thing this piece deals with, because pretending otherwise would make the rest of it worthless.

Nobody agrees how big this business is

Start with the size of the pot, and immediately run into the first honest problem. The published figures for the same year, on the same subject, are billions of dollars apart.

Those first two are the interesting pair. Both are global, both are for 2025, and they are about twelve billion dollars apart. They disagree because they are counting different things. Statista's outlook measures advertising spend on influencer placements, built from an ad-market model; the Influencer Marketing Hub figure is an industry estimate that grows out of its own survey work and platform data. Neither is lying and neither is the number. If a deck you are reading cites one of them without saying which definition it used, the deck is guessing.

The Goldman Sachs figure is a third thing again. Its 2023 research put the whole creator economy, including platform ad-share, subscriptions and direct payments from fans, at roughly $250 billion at the time, projected to approach $480 billion by 2027. Brand deals were about seventy percent of what creators earned. That last number is the one worth carrying into the rest of this article: for most working creators, this chain is not one revenue line among many. It is the revenue.

The chain from budget line to bank account

Here is the route in order. Not every campaign has every link, and a small brand paying a creator directly has almost none of them, which is one of the reasons small brands can sometimes outbid large ones on the same creator.

1. 01The brand budget. A line in a marketing plan, usually annual, usually fought for against paid search and paid social. It is gross, it is committed before anybody has spoken to a creator, and it is frequently the wrong shape for the campaign that eventually gets run.
2. 02The agency, on a retainer or a commission. Either a monthly fee for running the programme, or a percentage of what flows through it. Which of the two it is changes the incentives underneath everything that follows, and it is the single most important thing for a brand to know about its own arrangement.
3. 03The platform or marketplace fee. Discovery software, campaign management, payment rails, reporting. Charged as a subscription, a percentage of spend, or both.
4. 04Production. Anything shot properly. Studio, editor, product samples, shipping, and on larger campaigns a producer. On creator-led work this is often folded into the creator's fee, which makes the creator's fee look larger than it is.
5. 05The creator's fee. The line everybody argues about. It is one component of a larger number, and by the time it is agreed, three other parties have already taken theirs.
6. 06Tax, and then payment terms. Withholding, GST or sales tax depending on the market, then net 30, net 60 or worse. The fee was agreed months before the money lands, and in the gap between those two dates the creator has financed the brand.

Move the sliders below to see how the same budget lands under different arrangements. The shares are illustrative and yours to change: the point of the instrument is the shape, which is that the creator line is a remainder rather than a starting point.

There is one measured figure for the agency layer worth putting beside that. The Association of National Advertisers, in its Influencer Marketing Agency Compensation report published in 2026, found that on average thirty percent of influencer marketing spending goes to agencies and seventy percent to influencers. It is a survey of 84 client-side marketers, which is a small sample and should be quoted with that attached, and it is still the most solid public figure on the question that exists.

What each layer is genuinely for

It is easy to read a chain like that as a queue of people taking a cut. Mostly it is not. Each layer exists because somebody tried to remove it and found out what it was doing.

The one layer worth interrogating hardest is your own. The Influencer Marketing Hub's Benchmark Report 2026, surveying more than 600 marketers, found 66.33 percent running influencer marketing entirely in-house. If that is you, the agency line in the chain above did not disappear. It moved onto somebody's job description, usually somebody who also has four other responsibilities, and it is now invisible in the budget rather than absent from it.

Where the money actually leaks

Three leaks are large, boring and almost never on the agenda of the meeting where the budget is set.

Content that is paid for and never used

This is the biggest one and there is a real number attached. CreativeX research presented at Cannes Lions in June 2024, drawing on data from clients including Diageo, Bayer and Unilever, found that only 45 percent of the core assets in global campaign toolkits were used in any capacity, and that 90 percent of global campaign toolkits were never used by local markets at all. The waste was put at roughly $25 million a year for the average Fortune 500 company. That study is about campaign assets broadly rather than creator content specifically, and the mechanism is identical: content commissioned centrally, delivered, filed, and never run.

For a creator this leak is invisible and expensive in a different way. You are asked for twelve months of usage rights on a video that will run for three weeks, and you priced the twelve months, so the brand paid for something it did not use and you were paid less per week of actual use than either side thinks.

Campaigns measured on the wrong number

The same Influencer Marketing Hub 2026 survey found brand awareness the most selected campaign KPI, at 55.1 percent. Awareness is a legitimate objective and it is also the objective that is hardest to falsify, which means a campaign optimised against it can be declared a success on numbers that would not survive contact with a sales report. Money does not leak out of the budget here. It leaks out of the next budget, when the campaign that was declared a success gets repeated and the one that quietly sold things does not.

Late payment, cascading downhill

Payment delay is the leak that costs the least in accounting terms and the most in practice, because the party at the bottom of the chain is the one least able to absorb it. Visa's 2025 Creator Report, a Morning Consult survey of 1,067 creators across five countries, found 42 percent receive payments within a week and 26 percent said payment delays had a negative impact on their content production. That second figure is the whole problem stated as a business cost: the delay does not merely inconvenience the creator, it reduces the thing the brand was buying.

What a brand cannot see, and no tool changes it

Here is the part of the chain that is genuinely opaque, and it is worth being blunt because most writing on this subject is not. A brand that hires an agency generally cannot see what that agency paid the creator. The brand sees a total. The creator sees a fee. Whether those two numbers are related in the way everybody assumes is, for most brands, not knowable from the inside.

This is measured. The Association of National Advertisers' Influencer Marketing Agency Compensation report, published in 2026 from 84 client-side marketers surveyed in late 2025, found that around half reported full visibility into what their agencies pay creators. Thirty-one percent said their agency uses compensation methods that are not transparent, and another thirty percent did not know whether it does, which the ANA totals to as many as 61 percent of marketers who cannot see how their influencer budget is allocated. The opacity mechanisms it describes are unglamorous: talent and agency fees bundled into a single line, lump sums quoted across all creators with no per-creator breakdown, and agencies declining to disclose the structure at all.

Nothing about that is fixed by software, and it is important to say that on a page belonging to a software company. Our product cannot show a brand what an agency paid a creator, because that figure exists in a contract between two other parties and never touches any system a third party can read. Any tool claiming otherwise is either inferring it or has been handed it voluntarily, and inference is not visibility.

What does work is contractual and it works before anybody starts. The ANA's own guidance to marketers is to require the transparency as a condition of the relationship rather than requesting it afterwards, and its 2023 Influencer Pay Equity Guide, produced with the 4A's and the PR Council, makes the same argument for itemised fee disclosure at contracting time. The respondents who could see everything were the ones who asked at the start. That is the whole finding, and it is cheap to act on.

For creators, the same limit runs the other way. You usually cannot see what the brand paid the agency, so you cannot tell whether a low offer is a small budget or a large one with a wide margin on it. What you can do is price your own work from your own numbers, treat every offer as information about that agency rather than about your worth, and keep the terms, the deadlines and the invoice for each deal in one place instead of three, which is one of the things our own product does beside the calendar.

Questions people ask about the money chain