How Many Influencers are There in 2025?

The world of influencer marketing has grown pretty quickly, and there are a lot of the younger generation that now aspire to be influencers or YouTube content creators when they grow up.

With the growth and popularity of personality driven social media, as well as the emergence of new ways to express yourself like TikTok and Instagram reels, there are a lot of people out there that are wondering how many influencers there are in the world.

We were wondering the exact same thing. As a result, we set out to work out the exact number so that you can know as well.

How Many Influencers Are There?

Our data revealed that there are between 3.2 million and 37.8 million influencers in the world, who are on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

How we Determined How Many Influencers There Are

In order to work out how many influencers there are in the world, we needed to work out the right methodology to account for influencers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and then also establish parameters and account for the fact that there are going to be a number of influencers that appear on multiple platforms. In order to get around this, we established influencer tiers.

We worked out how many influencers exist on a specific platform for each tier.

What is an Influencer and Fake Influencers?

It is really important to take note that while influencer marketing channels try to measure and vet influencers in their database for fraudulent activity and being inauthentic, there are still going to be fake influencers out there.

The authenticity of influencers can often be overlooked, especially when it comes to bigger influencer marketing platforms.

This is why when you see the stats below, you’ve got to take them at a general sense, because the other thing to think about is the definition of ‘influencer’.

The word ‘influencer’ can mean a lot of things, so for the purposes of this article, we have decided to incorporate the following criteria.

We consider an influencer to be someone who has more than 1000 followers or subscribers and engages with their audience through their content.

We have looked at influencers of all ages, nationalities, and language preferences and we have focused our article on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

We also used a sample size of more than 1000 profiles on each platform, which enabled us to get a rough estimate of how many influencers are on each platform.

We looked at data from more than four different influencer marketing platforms, which varied based on things like platform offerings, size, and methods for working out influencers within their system.

Because influencer marketing platforms can vary when it comes to size, this can be seen in the wider range of our estimates when it comes to the number of influencers that exist for each platform or tier.

As an example, one influencer marketing platform might offer 2000 experienced Instagram influencers that have been heavily vetted, while another platform might offer 2,000,000 influencers.

However they will have limited information when it comes to the credibility of these profiles. As a result, our results are conservative.

How Many Influencers are on Instagram?

Statistics show that 52% of people on Instagram have less than 1000 followers, which means that 48% of people on Instagram have more than 1000 followers. Instagram has been pretty vague in the past when it comes to its data around influencers, but most people out there agree that Instagram has more than 500 million active users every day.

Based on this statistic, and the percentage statistics that show how many people have more than 1000 followers, it is safe to say that there is the potential for 83 million Instagram users being influencers.

As a result, the biggest influencer marketing platforms can have anywhere between 20 and 80 million Instagram influencers.

When you use an authenticity filter, this can lower the complete number of influencer search results to be anywhere between 30% and 97%.

This means that the top range when it comes to how many Instagram influencers we estimate there to be is 83 million, while the lower range is less than 37 million.

Tier information is based on multiple influencer marketing platforms information. As a result, we had to average the data.

How Many Influencers on YouTube?

Statistics estimate that there are more than 37 million YouTube accounts that are active right now, and 32 million of these have less than 1000 subscribers.

This means that there are 5 million remaining YouTube accounts that have more than 1000 subscribers, but the statistics don’t distinguish active accounts from influencer accounts.

So, in order to work out how many of the five million accounts are influencer accounts, we looked at the top 1000 YouTube accounts.

As a result, we found that You Tube influencers were roughly 30% of the top 1000 channels while companies took 47%, and celebrities and musicians were 22%.

This means that based on our findings, we can determine that the complete number of influencers on YouTube is lower than 5 million and a lot closer to 1.5 million.

How Many Influencers on TikTok?

There are some platforms that claim to have more than 22 million TikTok influencers that each have more than 1000 followers.

Through further examination of two of the biggest influencer databases, we have found that this lacks credibility for the most part.

Doing our own research, we were able to determine that 50,000 is the average range of influencers on TikTok that have more than 1000 followers.

Credibility is really important when working out how many influencers there are on social media sharing apps like TikTok, which is why the number of 50,000 influencers on TikTok is conservative.

TikTok is pretty quiet about statistics like this, so we have to go to third parties to work it out.

There are 3.2 million to 37.8 million Influencers in the World

If we combine the statistics for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, without counting influencers that use all three channels to reach their audience, YouTube is the biggest channel when it comes to influencers, with a complete range estimation of between 3.5 million and 42 million.

Again, if we count influencer overlap between platforms, we can safely remove 10% of influencers. However, there is a chance that the overlap is a lot higher than this.

Our data reveals that there are between 3.2 million and 37.8 million influencers in the world, who are on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

How we Calculated This

Working Out High Range

We estimate the high range per channel by using the highest number of influencers within the largest influencer database that is available.

We then worked out the largest possible potential for influencers using platform data and we did our own research on the top 1000 accounts on each platform.

Working Out Low Range

In order to work out the minimum number of influencers on each platform, we looked at the number of influencers that exist on each social channel on a number of different influencer marketing databases.

We worked out the median and the average of the information, and as a result, our calculations are conservative.

Working out Influencer Tier Distribution

We started to estimate tier distributions by averaging the distribution data from more than four influencer marketing platforms. We adjusted the averages and established influencer tier distributions for the three social channels.

Final Thoughts

Are there more influencers in the world than you expected, or are there less? At the end of the day, it is impossible to know the exact number of influencers in the world, but we can get pretty close.

As you can see, there are a lot of factors to consider when considering the exact number, and it is always worth erring on the side of caution, because there are probably less than we have estimated.

The other thing to think about is that the overlap is probably bigger than we have estimated as well, since so many influencers these days capitalize on having a YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok account.

Nevertheless, there is still an impressive number of influencers in the world, and as we go forward and more people use social media, this is only set to get bigger.