Influencer Middle Class Gets Squeezed As Marketers Turn Toward Celebs [Video]

A few years ago, influencer marketers were ditching their plans to hire celebrity content creators for brand deals in exchange for influencers with smaller audiences. Goodbye, Kim Kardashian. Hello, small-town beauty influencer.

Smaller creators, often categorized as “micro” influencers, typically have fewer than 100,000 fans. Marketers believed that cohort could reach a more intimate audience than celebrities and appear more authentic in their messaging, driving up engagement rates. They were also cheaper to hire, costing a few hundred dollars for a sponsored post instead of the thousands that an influencer with millions of followers might charge. Nano influencers, or creators with as few as 5,000 fans, could charge as little as $5 for a promotional post.

But the race among marketers to work with less famous (and cheaper) creators may be on its way out.

In a recent surveyof 200 US enterprise marketers by the influencer firm Linqia, the agency found that between 2023 and 2024, …