There are at least 25.1 million active influencer accounts on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. That is how many accounts in Virev's index have 1,000 or more followers, at least 5 posts and a post in the 90 days from July 26 to October 24, 2026. Instagram holds 24.0 million of them. The United States has the most active Instagram creators, followed by Brazil and India.
These are counts of accounts Virev indexes, so they are a lower bound and not a census. Virev's index covers 180M+ creators, and it holds far more Instagram accounts than TikTok or YouTube accounts, so the TikTok and YouTube counts below are much further from the real totals. Each platform is counted on its own, so a creator with an Instagram and a TikTok account counts twice.
25.1M
Active accounts, three platforms
24.0M
Active Instagram accounts
59%
Accounts that posted in 90 days
How many influencers are there in the world
We count with two definitions, so you can compare our numbers with HypeAuditor's.
- The HypeAuditor definition is the one in HypeAuditor's May 2026 country breakdown, an account with 1,000+ followers, at least 5 posts and at least one post in the last 90 days.
- The Virev definition is a public account with 1,000+ followers and a post in the last 90 days that Instagram's category or Virev's creator profile does not mark as a brand, business, media outlet, organization or government.
| Platform | 1,000+ followers | Virev definition | HypeAuditor definition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 41,786,114 | 22,557,317 | 24,001,944 | |
| TikTok | 1,941,296 | 902,376 | 915,935 |
| YouTube | 218,907 | 145,063 | 143,683 |
| All three | 43,946,317 | 23,604,756 | 25,061,562 |
Of the 43.9 million accounts with 1,000+ followers, 26.1 million posted in the last 90 days, so about 4 in 10 have gone quiet. HypeAuditor makes the same point, that counting every account above a follower line makes a market look 20% to 40% bigger than it is.
The Virev definition removes 2.1 million Instagram accounts as brands, businesses or media. Instagram's own account category removes 2.0 million of them, such as Restaurant, Clothing (Brand) or Media/news company, and Virev's profile labels remove 116,276. It does not reach every brand. 16.2 million of the active Instagram accounts show no category and have no Virev profile, and among the 173,205 accounts without a category that Virev has profiled, 44% are individual creators. 6.4 million active Instagram accounts carry a creator category, such as Digital creator, Artist or Athlete, or a Virev label as an individual creator, which is the floor for people rather than pages.
HypeAuditor's 2025 report counts 3.8 million Instagram influencers in Brazil and says that is 15.8% of its global total, which works out to about 24 million. Our 24.0 million active Instagram accounts under the same kind of filter is close to that.
How many influencers by follower count
Most active creators are small. 77% of the active Instagram accounts under the Virev definition have 1,000 to 10,000 followers, and 57,004 have 1 million or more.
| Platform | Followers | Virev definition | HypeAuditor definition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 17,384,657 | 18,313,373 | |
| 10K to 100K | 4,358,931 | 4,803,893 | |
| 100K to 1M | 756,725 | 824,639 | |
| 1M+ | 57,004 | 60,039 | |
| TikTok | 1K to 10K | 409,672 | 405,191 |
| TikTok | 10K to 100K | 298,351 | 308,224 |
| TikTok | 100K to 1M | 159,882 | 166,578 |
| TikTok | 1M+ | 34,471 | 35,942 |
| YouTube | 1K to 10K | 44,186 | 42,817 |
| YouTube | 10K to 100K | 51,169 | 51,013 |
| YouTube | 100K to 1M | 38,556 | 38,631 |
| YouTube | 1M+ | 11,152 | 11,222 |
The Virev definition can be higher than the HypeAuditor one, because it does not ask for 5 posts. On YouTube few channels are marked as brands, so that is the only difference there. For what each tier earns and how it performs, see the micro and nano influencers study and the average Instagram follower count.
How many Instagram influencers are there in each country
Instagram does not show an account's country. Virev's creator profile sets one, which a language model reads from the bio, captions and other public profile text, the same inference our engagement rate by country study used. A hand check of 25 Instagram profiles found 20 where the bio or language supports the country, 4 where the bio does not say, and 1 that looks wrong. Virev has profiled 221,950 of the 24.0 million active Instagram accounts, so the table gives the share of each country among those, not a full count per country. Share and Accounts use the HypeAuditor definition, and the last column counts the same profiled accounts under the Virev definition.
| Country | Share | Accounts | Virev definition |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 25.8% | 57,333 | 28,170 |
| Brazil | 12.6% | 28,014 | 16,736 |
| India | 10.9% | 24,199 | 17,816 |
| United Kingdom | 5.2% | 11,593 | 5,745 |
| Australia | 3.1% | 6,919 | 3,413 |
| Indonesia | 3.1% | 6,850 | 3,648 |
| Canada | 2.8% | 6,235 | 3,251 |
| Mexico | 2.1% | 4,710 | 2,526 |
| France | 2.0% | 4,447 | 2,117 |
| Germany | 2.0% | 4,382 | 2,196 |
| Argentina | 1.9% | 4,148 | 2,000 |
| Italy | 1.8% | 3,915 | 1,831 |
| Spain | 1.7% | 3,783 | 1,792 |
| Turkey | 1.4% | 3,009 | 1,627 |
| Chile | 1.2% | 2,653 | 1,089 |
| Iran | 1.0% | 2,167 | 1,222 |
| Colombia | 1.0% | 2,145 | 1,150 |
| Poland | 0.9% | 2,000 | 1,224 |
| South Korea | 0.9% | 1,925 | 1,111 |
| Philippines | 0.7% | 1,542 | 1,056 |
The counts are profiled accounts only, 221,950 under the HypeAuditor definition and 120,762 under the Virev definition. The profiled set holds more brand pages than the index as a whole, because 46% of its active Instagram accounts are marked as brands, businesses or media, against 9% of all active Instagram accounts. That is why the Virev column is about half the HypeAuditor column. The CSV has all 94 countries with 100 or more profiled accounts.
Which country has the most influencers
The United States has the most active Instagram creators in our data, with 25.8% of the profiled accounts, then Brazil with 12.6% and India with 10.9%. HypeAuditor's May 2026 count across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube has the same top three, the US with 6.4 million active creators, Brazil with 5.5 million and India with 5.3 million. HypeAuditor puts 64% of the US count on Instagram, about 4.1 million accounts.
On the other platforms the order changes. The table gives each country's share of the active accounts with a known country, under the HypeAuditor definition.
| TikTok | Share | YouTube | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 6.5% | United States | 31.7% |
| Indonesia | 6.3% | India | 13.8% |
| Brazil | 5.7% | United Kingdom | 5.5% |
| Russia | 4.6% | Japan | 3.6% |
| Vietnam | 4.2% | Indonesia | 2.7% |
| Philippines | 4.1% | Brazil | 2.6% |
| Mexico | 3.9% | Canada | 2.4% |
| Pakistan | 3.3% | Germany | 2.1% |
| Turkey | 3.2% | France | 1.9% |
| Thailand | 2.9% | Spain | 1.9% |
TikTok countries come from Virev's creator profiles, 82,429 active TikTok accounts. YouTube countries come from the country a channel sets itself, which 117,997 of the 143,683 active channels have set. The US leads both, Indonesia is a close second on TikTok, and India is second on YouTube. India is missing from the TikTok list, because TikTok has been banned there since 2020.
Creator economy statistics 2026: other counts of creators
Published counts of creators run from 25 million to 303 million, because each one counts something else.
| Source | Count | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe, 2022 | 303 million | People who make content online, from a survey of about 9,000 creators in 9 countries |
| HypeAuditor, 2026 | 227M+ | Accounts in HypeAuditor's creator database |
| Virev, 2026 | 180M+ | Creators in Virev's index |
| Goldman Sachs, 2023 | 50 million | Creators worldwide, an estimate |
| Virev, 2026 | 25.1 million | Accounts with 1,000+ followers, 5+ posts and a post in the last 90 days |
Adobe's 303 million counts people who say they create content, many of them without an audience. Our 25.1 million counts accounts that have 1,000 followers and still post. For the other numbers in our studies, see influencer marketing statistics.
How to use these numbers
- When you size a market, count active accounts and not every account above a follower line, because 4 in 10 accounts with 1,000+ followers did not post in the last 90 days.
- When you plan a campaign in Indonesia, Pakistan or Thailand, include TikTok, because Pakistan ranks 8th and Thailand 10th on TikTok in our data against 38th and 40th on Instagram, and HypeAuditor finds about 88% of Pakistan's active creators on TikTok only.
- When you look for creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, expect about 4.4 million active Instagram accounts to pick from, against 17.4 million below 10,000.
- Brands can filter creators by country, follower count and activity in Virev creator search, which covers 180M+ creators.
How we counted, and what can be wrong
- The base is every Instagram, TikTok and YouTube account in Virev's index whose latest follower count, read by Virev's crawler, is 1,000 or more. That is 41,786,114 Instagram accounts, 1,941,296 TikTok accounts and 218,907 YouTube channels.
- An account counts as active if Virev's crawler saw one of its posts or videos dated July 26 to October 24, 2026. An account whose recent posts we did not read counts as inactive, which is one reason the counts are a lower bound.
- For the 5-post rule we use the post count the platform shows, and for 3.8 million Instagram accounts where we do not have it, the number of posts Virev has seen.
- Accounts that are private now are left out of both definitions.
- Instagram categories are sorted into creator and business groups by the share of individual creators among the accounts Virev has profiled in each category, and a category with fewer than 10 profiled accounts counts as a business.
- Virev's index holds about 37 Instagram accounts for every TikTok account it holds, so the TikTok and YouTube counts are much further below the real totals than the Instagram count.
- Each platform is counted on its own, as HypeAuditor does, so one person with accounts on two platforms counts twice.
Download the data
The tables are in one CSV: how-many-influencers-2026.csv. Each row has a table, a platform and a group, with the number of accounts with 1,000+ followers, the count under the Virev definition, the count under the HypeAuditor definition and, for country rows, each country's share. The tables are by_platform, by_tier, by_country_profiled (Instagram and TikTok) and by_country_channel_setting (YouTube). The tables are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; credit Virev and link this page.
Cite as Virev, "How many influencers are there? 25.1 million active accounts in Virev's 2026 index", October 2026, https://virev.ai/blog/how-many-influencers-are-there.
