The impact of COVID-19 on Influencer Marketing

HypeAuditor delves into what effect COVID-19 has on the instagram influencer market and Influencer Marketing more broadly

Instagram influencer market reached $5.24 billion in 2019

To estimate the market size in 2019 HypeAuditor has analysed over 3M posts that were marked as sponsored. A “sponsored post” is an influencer’s post with brand mentions that was posted on a paid or a barter basis when an influencer receives a product or services from a brand in return for publication.

The number of Instagram Stories’ daily active users (DAU) currently sits at 500 million. This number has been continuously rising since 2016, when Instagram first launched the “Stories” format. Advertisers also included stories in their influencer marketing strategy and the number of integrations in Stories is growing month after month.

HypeAuditor estimates that 47.18% of sponsored integrations occur for Stories. And their share is growing every month.

The impact of COVID-19 on influencer marketing

HypeAuditor compared the money spent globally on sponsored posts and stories in the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 and we can see that Influencer Marketing didn’t suffer as much as other industries. Rather, one can even say that it didn’t take a fall, but there was a reduction in growth.

The market size in the first quarter of 2019 was approximately $1185M and in 2020 this figure rose by 3.9% to $1232M. 

The largest budget cuts occurred in March. If we compare March 2019 to March 2020, we will see that market size was reduced by $16M (-3.8%)

Based on the comparison between money spent on sponsored posts and stories in the first quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 HypeAuditor estimates that the Instagram Influencer Marketing market size will be from $5 billion to $6.5 billion in 2020.

Read the full research here