How Many Influencers Are There Globally in 2026? (And the Top 20 Countries by Creator Count)
“Instructor”, “content creator”, “influencer”… people use these words like they mean the same thing, but the numbers change a lot depending on the definition.
So in this article I’m going to be explicit about what we’re counting, and then I’ll give you a practical Top 20 countries list you can use in a strategy doc (or a pitch deck).
First: what “influencer count” usually means (and why it’s messy)
There’s no single global registry of influencers. Most “counts” come from platforms and analytics companies that:
define an influencer as an account above a follower threshold (often 1,000+ followers, i.e., “nano-influencers”)
exclude obvious spam/bots (imperfectly)
estimate location from profile signals and audience data
That’s why you’ll see “tens of millions” in one report and “hundreds of millions” in another—because they’re counting different tiers and platforms.
A practical global answer: “tens of millions” (and growing)
One useful benchmark comes from HypeAuditor’s State of Influencer Marketing 2025, which says their report analyzes 76M Instagram, 104M TikTok, and 13.1M YouTube accounts.
That does not mean every one of those accounts is a paid influencer—just that this is the size of the analyzed creator/account universe in their dataset.
Also important: most creators are small. HypeAuditor notes that 76% of Instagram influencers are nano-influencers (1k–10k followers).
A rough “global Instagram influencer count” (in one line)
HypeAuditor states Brazil has ~3.8M influencers, representing 15.8% of the global share. That implies a global Instagram influencer pool on the order of ~24M (because 3.8M / 0.158 ≈ 24M).
This is not “all creators on Earth.” It’s closer to: Instagram influencer accounts (often 1k+ followers) that a measurement vendor can classify.
Top 20 countries by creator amount (Instagram-focused)
Because country-level creator counts are most consistently published for Instagram, the list below is Instagram influencer accounts as the “creator amount” metric.
Reported rows = published influencer counts (from an Instagram influencer distribution table).
Estimated rows = inferred using each country’s Instagram user base and a median creator-rate calibrated from reported countries (clearly marked as estimates).
Sources used:
Influencer counts by country (reported)
Instagram users by country (for context + estimates)
Top 20 countries by creator count (Instagram influencers)
| Rank | Country | Instagram users | Creator amount (Instagram influencers) | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brazil | 141.4M | 3.832M | Reported |
| 2 | United States | 172.6M | 3.779M | Reported |
| 3 | India | 392.5M | 1.995M | Reported |
| 4 | Iran | N/A | 1.209M | Reported |
| 5 | Russia | 63.9M | 1.123M | Estimated |
| 6 | Japan | 55.5M | 976K | Estimated |
| 7 | Indonesia | 90.2M | 864K | Reported |
| 8 | Mexico | 48.9M | 860K | Estimated |
| 9 | Turkey | 58.3M | 756K | Reported |
| 10 | United Kingdom | 34.7M | 721K | Reported |
| 11 | Italy | 30.7M | 653K | Reported |
| 12 | Germany | 33.8M | 520K | Reported |
| 13 | France | 29.2M | 513K | Reported |
| 14 | Argentina | 28.4M | 499K | Estimated |
| 15 | Spain | 27.1M | 476K | Estimated |
| 16 | South Korea | 24.2M | 425K | Estimated |
| 17 | Philippines | 22.2M | 390K | Estimated |
| 18 | Colombia | 20.9M | 367K | Estimated |
| 19 | Canada | 19.7M | 346K | Estimated |
| 20 | Egypt | 19.4M | 341K | Estimated |
How to interpret this table (important):
The top of the ranking is dominated by large, highly active Instagram markets (Americas + big population countries).
“Estimated” does not mean “made up”—it means “not publicly published as a country influencer count in the sources above, so inferred from the user base using a calibrated creator-rate.”
What this means for brands and agencies
If you’re choosing where to focus influencer campaigns (or where creators are most plentiful), the big takeaway is:
Brazil + US are creator powerhouses in raw count.
India has massive user scale, but creator-rate varies a lot by niche and monetization maturity.
Countries with “only” ~20–30M Instagram users can still have huge creator density and strong campaign performance (UK, Italy, Germany, France).
And because nano-influencers are the majority, most scalable strategies aren’t about finding one celebrity—it’s about building a repeatable pipeline of smaller creators.