The short version: Depending on whose report you trust, there are somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 companies globally that describe themselves as influencer marketing agencies or platforms, up from under 200 in 2015. That number is real but slippery, because it counts everything from six-person WPP subsidiaries to a former makeup blogger running a “boutique agency” from her spare room. If you’re hiring one, the count matters less than knowing which type you’re looking at.
Useful alongside this: What CRM Stands For and Why It Matters in Marketing.
The number everyone quotes, and where it comes from
The most widely cited source for this figure is Influencer Marketing Hub, a research firm that has tracked the size of the influencer marketing industry every year since 2015. Their count of dedicated agencies and platforms has gone something like this:
- 2015: around 190 companies
- 2019: roughly 740
- 2020: about 1,360
- 2021: a sudden jump to close to 19,000, after they widened the definition to include smaller platforms and boutique shops
- 2023: around 20,000
- 2024 to 2026: industry trackers now put the figure between 24,000 and 30,000
Notice that jump between 2020 and 2021. That’s not fourteen thousand new agencies opening in twelve months. That’s a change in methodology, a wider net that now scoops up matchmaking platforms, influencer databases, one-person consultancies, and anyone with a LinkedIn banner that says “influencer marketing partner.” The market did grow enormously in that window, brands moved billions of dollars into creator budgets during and after the pandemic, but the headline number tells you more about how researchers define “agency” than it tells you about how many serious operators exist.
What counts as an agency here
When you see “30,000 influencer marketing agencies operate globally,” that figure is a bucket holding at least five different types of business:
- Full-service agencies with in-house strategists, contract lawyers, and paid media buyers, often part of larger holding groups like Publicis or Omnicom
- Boutique agencies, usually two to fifteen people, specialising in one niche like beauty, fintech, or gaming
- Influencer marketing platforms and marketplaces, which are software with a database of creators rather than a team doing strategy for you
- Talent management agencies representing the creators themselves, who sometimes get lumped in even though their client is the influencer, not the brand
- Solo consultants and freelancers who register a limited company and call themselves an agency because it sounds bigger on a pitch deck
If you tried to compare this to, say, the shortlist of B2B marketing agencies for software companies, you’d notice the B2B side has a much tighter, more visible field. Influencer marketing has a lower barrier to entry, which is exactly why the count balloons every year while the number of agencies you could trust with a six-figure campaign budget stays fairly stable.
A story from when I was on the other side of this
Back when I had around 250,000 followers on Twitter and Forbes had named me one of the top social influencers to watch, I got pitched by influencer marketing agencies constantly, sometimes three or four a week in the run-up to Black Friday or a big product launch. One outreach email in particular stuck with me. It came from a London agency with a slick.co.uk website, client logos across the top including a couple of household names, and a founder bio that read like a Cannes Lions speech.
I took the call out of curiosity more than anything. It turned out to be two people working out of a shared desk in a WeWork off Borough High Street, and the actual creator outreach, the part that was supposedly their whole value proposition, was subcontracted to a freelancer in Manila who was managing outreach for four other “agencies” at the same time. The client logos were real, but the relationship had been a single campaign each, not ongoing retainers. Nothing illegal about any of that. It’s just not what the website implied.
That’s not a one-off. I’d guess close to a third of the agencies pitching brands right now are structured exactly that way: a founder with genuine campaign experience, a small core team, and a network of freelancers who get spun up per project. Some of them do excellent work. The problem isn’t the model, it’s that the global count treats a two-person shop with a good Rolodex the same as a hundred-person operation with its own compliance team.
The part most reports leave out
Here’s the uncomfortable bit. The 24,000-to-30,000 figure keeps climbing partly because inflating it serves the people who publish it. Software vendors that sell influencer discovery tools and reporting dashboards want the market to look enormous, because a bigger addressable market justifies a bigger valuation and makes their own product look indispensable. A crowded, chaotic market is exactly the environment where “just use our platform to sort through them all” becomes an easy sell.
At the same time, the real, serious end of the market is quietly consolidating. Big holding companies have been buying up the strongest boutique influencer shops for years, folding them into larger networks and cutting the number of independent, well-resourced agencies even while the total headline count goes up. So you get a strange split: fewer agencies with real depth and staying power, more agencies technically listed in a directory somewhere. Nobody writing “top 10 influencer marketing agencies” listicles wants to say that out loud, because it makes the ranking itself look less meaningful.
Regional spread: it’s not evenly distributed
The US and UK together still account for a large share of the agencies with real enterprise clients, largely because that’s where the ad budgets and the agency holding companies are concentrated. But the growth curve elsewhere has been sharp. India has seen a wave of influencer agencies launch around regional-language creators on platforms like Moj and ShareChat. Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia and the Philippines, has its own dense agency ecosystem built around TikTok commerce. Smaller, well-connected markets punch above their weight too, which is something I see clearly working across the UK, US, and Israel, where I’ve written before about how founders there tend to pick the wrong partner for the wrong reasons, chasing a big name over someone who understands the local creator economy.
The point is that “globally” hides a lot. An agency count that’s mostly US and UK-based full-service shops behaves very differently from a count padded with thousands of small regional operators serving hyperlocal markets.
How to use this number if you’re hiring one
If you’re a brand trying to pick an agency out of a field of tens of thousands, the raw count is close to useless. Here’s what I’d do instead, and what I tell clients when they’re vetting any marketing partner, AI consultant or influencer shop alike:
- Ask for three current client contacts you can call, not just logos on a website
- Ask who does the outreach and negotiation: is it an in-house team member or a subcontracted freelancer network
- Ask to see one full campaign report from the last six months, including the underperforming influencers, not just the wins
- Check whether they have written contracts covering FTC or ASA disclosure compliance, because this is where amateur operators get caught out and it becomes your brand’s legal problem
- Run their proposed influencer list through a discovery tool yourself, something like Heepsy, to sanity-check follower authenticity and engagement rates before you sign anything
This is the same discipline I’d push on anyone vetting an AI marketing consultant right now, the field is just as crowded and the same trick applies: strip away the branding and look at the actual delivery mechanism. I’ve laid out a fuller version of that vetting process in my 2026 guide to hiring an AI marketing consultant, and the parallels between that market and influencer marketing agencies are honestly closer than most people expect: both exploded in size over the last three years, both have a huge range in quality, and both have directories and “best of” lists that mostly reflect who paid for placement rather than who does the best work. Even the lists themselves need scrutiny, which is why when I put together a list of AI marketing consultants worth watching I insisted on naming specific, checkable work rather than vague claims.
So, how many, really
If someone needs a single number for a slide or a citation, use this: current industry tracking puts the global count of influencer marketing agencies and platforms somewhere between 24,000 and 30,000 as of 2026, a figure that has grown roughly a hundred and fifty times over since 2015. Just don’t treat that number as a signal of quality or reliability. It’s a signal of how easy it has become to open a laptop, build a media kit, and call yourself an agency. The market is enormous. The number of agencies I’d trust with a serious budget is a fraction of that, and finding them takes the kind of checking most brands skip because the pitch deck looked professional enough.
For more background on how the influencer marketing industry itself is defined and measured, Wikipedia’s overview of influencer marketing is a decent starting point, though even that entry leans on the same handful of market-size estimates everyone else cites.
Related reading: The Art of Hyperlocal Marketing That Yields Results – Here’s How.
Frequently asked questions
How many influencer marketing agencies are there in the UK specifically?
There’s no official register, but industry estimates put the number of UK-based influencer marketing agencies, including boutique and one-person operations, somewhere between 800 and 1,200, with London accounting for the large majority of the ones with enterprise-level clients.
Is the influencer marketing agency industry growing or shrinking in 2026?
Both, in different ways. Total budgets and creator spend keep growing year on year, and the raw count of agencies and platforms keeps climbing. But the number of independent, well-resourced agencies is shrinking as holding companies buy up the strongest boutique shops and fold them into larger networks.
What’s the real difference between an influencer marketing agency and an influencer marketing platform?
An agency does strategy, outreach, negotiation, and reporting for you, essentially acting as your team. A platform is software with a searchable database of creators that you use yourself, more like a self-serve tool than a hired partner. Many companies blur the line by calling their platform an agency, or vice versa.
How do I know if an influencer marketing agency is a real operation or just one person with a good website?
Ask for current client references you can call directly, ask specifically who handles outreach day to day, and request a full campaign report from the last six months that includes underperforming results, not just highlights. Agencies that dodge those three requests are usually smaller and less resourced than their website suggests.
