Make better decisions on the influencer marketing platform market

Influencer marketing platforms are hot again, because brands want creator campaigns to work like ads they can measure.

We've found a lot of interesting signals. For example, in October 2025, ShopMy, which connects premium brands with creators who earn a cut of the sales they drive, raised $70M at a $1.5B valuation. A month later, Agentio raised a $40M Series B to automate creator ad campaigns, after brands like Uber and DoorDash moved paid media budgets onto its platform. Investors are backing the platforms that tie creators to sales, not just to likes.

In this section, we look at why brands now treat creators as a media channel, which platforms benefit most, and what this means for tools that only help brands find influencers.

Working with ten creators is a spreadsheet. Working with five hundred is a full-time job nobody wants.

We compare six kinds of influencer platforms, from discovery tools and campaign software to affiliate networks, gifting tools and creator payments. Then we rank what their buyers need most, like finding creators with real audiences, getting posts approved on time, and proving which ones drove sales.

This shows which problems brands will pay a platform to solve, and which ones they still handle with an agency or a spreadsheet.

Yearly software subscriptions, a cut of each creator payment, affiliate commissions, fees per campaign and managed services: influencer platforms make money in several ways.

We compare who pays each platform and what it costs to keep them. Subscription tools need brands to log in every week, or they get cut at renewal. Marketplaces take a share of what brands pay creators, so they grow with ad budgets but face pressure on their fee. Affiliate platforms earn when shoppers buy, which ties revenue to results but also to retail cycles. And managed services bring bigger contracts with thinner margins.

You'll see which models keep their customers when budgets get tight, and which ones lose out when social networks offer brands something similar for free.

Influencer spending keeps rising, and we go through the forces behind it one by one.

Some drivers are easy to see: people spending more time with creators than with traditional media, brands wanting more content at lower cost, and shopping links built into social apps. Others feed each other. The more sales a platform tracks, the better it gets at picking creators who sell. Better results move budgets from brand awareness to performance. And once a brand pays creators through one platform, it tends to run more of its program there.

Before building or investing, you should know what makes a brand move creators from a side test into its regular marketing budget.

CreatorIQ and GRIN are the names most marketers know, but they're only part of the influencer marketing platform market.

Many interesting players work in the background. Some only handle gifting and product seeding. Others pay creators across dozens of countries, check posts for brand safety, or track which posts led to a sale. Some serve one type of brand, like beauty or B2B software.

They're hard to compare because they often sell the same promise, finding the right creators, while doing very different jobs. Many also call themselves agencies, marketplaces or software depending on the client, so it's not always clear what a brand is buying.

Below, you'll find the market grids and ecosystem maps we've built to show who does what in a creator campaign, and where new platforms are getting in.

LTK, Later, Modash… a few influencer platforms have found a clear job that brands keep paying for.

LTK built an affiliate network where creators earn when their followers buy. Later started as a tool to schedule posts and grew into creator campaigns and commerce, buying the affiliate platform Mavely. Modash focused on helping brands search and vet creators quickly, without the heavy setup of enterprise software. Each started with one job, and none of them has proven that one platform can do everything.

We'll look at how these teams picked the first job to do well, earned the trust of brands and creators, and grew from there.