IAB UK has sized the UK creator partnerships market at £966m, growing twice as fast as digital advertising. What the number counts, and what it leaves out.
UK creator partnerships have been measured properly for the first time, and they're growing at more than twice the rate of everything else in digital advertising. The number is also, by design, an understatement.
Last month IAB UK published the first study to put a defensible size on the UK creator partnerships market, conducted with the Institute for Advertising and Media Statistics. It found £966m in 2025, up 20.1% on the year before, and forecasts £1.2bn for 2026.
Two things make that worth paying attention to. The first is the growth rate. The second is everything the study, quite correctly, doesn't count.
Growing at twice the rate of the market around it
Creator partnerships grew 20.1% last year. Digital advertising excluding creator partnerships grew 9.6%. This is the fastest-expanding line in UK digital advertising, and it's forecast to add another 26% this year to cross £1bn for the first time.
It's also still around 2.4% of UK digital adspend: roughly £1 in every £42.
That combination is the opportunity. A category growing at twice the market rate while holding a single-digit share is a category in its early innings. Most of the brands who will eventually be spending seriously here haven't started, and the ones who move while the share is still small are buying relationships at today's prices rather than 2029's.
And the measured number is the conservative one
The study's definition is tight and sensible: revenues from creator campaigns appearing on creators' own platforms, including production, distribution and digital rights. For an advertising trade body sizing advertising investment, that's exactly right.
It means several large, fast-moving parts of the same economy sit outside the total.
Amplification. Paid promotion of creator campaigns is excluded, because it's already counted inside social and video adspend. Industry experts interviewed for the study put amplification at two to three times creator partnership revenues, a figure the report sensibly says to treat with caution, but one that points at the scale of the surrounding spend. Brands are already committing multiples of the partnership fee to getting creator work in front of more people, which is its own evidence of confidence in the format.
Everything the creator owns. The study also excludes "wider creator revenues such as subscriptions, events or product sales." That's where some of the most commercially interesting activity in this industry now happens. Creator-led festivals selling out stadium venues. Product ranges built with, not just endorsed by, the person whose name is on them. Memberships, licensing, formats sold on to broadcasters and streamers.
None of that is advertising, so none of it belongs in an adspend figure. But it's all driven by exactly the same asset the £966m is paying for, and it's growing fast.
Put the measured market, the amplification around it and the creator-owned businesses beside each other and the honest conclusion is that £966m is the floor of this thing, not the ceiling.
The excluded parts are the compounding ones
There's a reason to be cheerful about that, rather than just technical.
A brand partnership pays once. A format that a brand and a creator build together, that the audience returns to, that sells tickets or products or subscriptions, pays repeatedly and gets more valuable as it goes. Those are the projects that turn a campaign line into an asset, and they're the ones currently invisible to the industry's own measurement.
We've seen what that looks like up close: an audience built over years on Instagram filling four days at Twickenham Stadium, with zero paid media behind it. On the official sizing of the UK creator market, that registers as nothing. In commercial reality, it's a business, a brand platform and the strongest possible proof that a creator audience will act rather than just watch.
The study isn't wrong to leave it out. It's just a reminder that the fastest-growing line in UK advertising is simultaneously the narrowest view of what creators now do.
What having the number changes
Getting measured is genuinely good news, and not only for the trade press.
A defensible figure makes creator investment legible to the people who sign off budgets. It gives marketers a benchmark to argue from, planners a comparison against other channels, and the whole category a track record it can be held to. As IAB UK's Connie Hawker put it, "having a consistent measure gives us an important benchmark for tracking where this fast-growing market goes next."
That's how categories mature. Search, programmatic and retail media each went through the same sequence: arguments about size, then a credible number, then serious money.
Creator partnerships are now at the credible-number stage, with a growth rate most channels would envy and a share of budget that leaves enormous room to run.
Where the next billion comes from
If the first billion came from brands learning to buy creator campaigns, the second will come from brands learning to build with creators.
That means longer relationships rather than quarterly activations. Formats the partnership owns together instead of posts the brand rents, the way Taste of the North was sold as a series rather than a set of posts. Products and events that give an audience something to turn up for. The work that currently falls outside the measurement is, on the evidence, where the compounding returns are, and there is nothing stopping a brand buying into it now, while the category is still at 2.4% and the best creators are still taking on partners.
The number is a milestone worth celebrating. The more useful way to read it is as a floor.
If you're thinking about creator work that's meant to build something rather than fill a calendar, that's what we do. .