Why has no influencer marketplace won, and which ones do brands actually use?

Only 5.3% of brands sponsoring YouTube in our table ever ran a link through a creator platform or affiliate network. The rest booked creators with their own link.

That one number explains most of this post. These companies are not one market, so there is nothing single to win. They do different jobs for different buyers, and most brands use none of them.

The platforms brands do use are spread thin. The leader has been losing share for three years, and the companies that grow tend to get bought by holding companies rather than buying up their rivals.

We can measure which platforms brands use and whether the same creator gets booked again. We cannot measure sales, so "moves the needle" here means adoption and re-booking.

Why are there so many influencer platforms?

The sheet we started from lists 90 companies, and only 14 are influencer marketing companies in the narrow sense. The rest are editing tools, storefronts, media companies, AI influencers, live shopping and data tools.

Even those 14 do different work. Here are the six kinds that matter to a brand.

Storefronts are not even selling media. ShopMy's co-founder Tiffany Lopinsky puts them in retail: "The influencer is a retailer, a mini-Saks, a mini-Bloomingdale's." (Fortune, May 2026)

Copying is easy too. LTK's co-founder Amber Venz Box, on Fashion Blog to Billions, described a rival that matched each launch:

"So there was a company who had tried to to replicate LTK. The company actually folded this year. But we you know we launched like to know it. They launched shop style it. We launched the link ninja. They launched the link star."

Which platforms do brands actually use?

In our table, 602,461 sponsored YouTube videos carried a tracking link, from 78,054 brands. Only 4,121 of those brands ever used a platform or network link.

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Among the brands that did, affiliate networks lead, then GRIN.

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ShopMy's row badly understates it. Another 1,994 videos carried a ShopMy link where the link was ShopMy's own page and we could not name the brand behind it.

LTK has 668 of those and MagicLinks 239. So storefronts carry far more videos than their brand counts show.

Most brands dip a toe. The median brand on Impact.com, GRIN, CreatorIQ and LeadDyno ran 2 videos through it, and on most others 1.

Only 33 brands ran 50 or more videos through Impact.com, and 15 through GRIN.

Why has nobody won?

There are six reasons, and each one shows up in the data or in the companies' own words.

Most brands use none. With 5.3% of brands on any platform, the default way to sponsor a creator on YouTube is a direct deal with the brand's own link. There is no crowd to consolidate.

Brands pick one, not all of them. Of 1,537 brands on a creator platform, only 103 used two or more, and 26 used three or more.

The leader is shrinking. GRIN led every year in our table, but its share of brands on a creator platform fell from 65% in 2022 to 30% in 2025.

GRIN's own brand count barely moved, 174 in 2022 and 204 in 2025. The pool around it grew from 267 brands to 678.

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The apps own the data and compete with the tools. IZEA, a public company in this business, wrote in its annual filing:

"We rely on third-party social media platforms such as Facebook/Instagram (collectively known as Meta), TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube for core aspects of influencer data."

The same filing says "Many of the social platforms offer their own competing marketplaces or services." (IZEA 10-K, FY2024)

The apps keep changing their own tools. TikTok stopped new Creator Marketplace campaigns after March 1, 2025 and folded it into TikTok One (TechCrunch, Feb 2025).

YouTube's BrandConnect is "the creator marketing hub that emerged out of YouTube's 2016 acquisition of FameBit" (Tubefilter, Mar 2026). In 2026 it became Creator Partnerships (YouTube, Mar 2026).

Meta took its Instagram Creator Marketplace to 8 more countries in 2024 (Meta, Feb 2024).

At the same time, the apps feed the outside tools. TikTok opened its Creator Marketplace API to 4 partners, Captiv8, Influential, Whalar and INCA (TechCrunch, Aug 2021).

CreatorIQ plugged into YouTube's new Creator Partnerships API (CreatorIQ, Mar 2026). So the apps keep every outside tool alive and none of them in charge.

Anyone can start one. IZEA's filing says "The market for influencer and content marketing is highly competitive, with no significant barriers to entry for those operating in a Managed Services or agency-type model." (IZEA 10-K, FY2024)

The winners sell instead of buying. The companies that got big were bought by holding companies and software groups, so the category never rolled up under one owner.

• Publicis bought Influential (Publicis, Jul 2024) and then Captiv8 (Publicis, May 2025), neither price disclosed.
• Accenture agreed to buy Whalar, terms not disclosed (Accenture, Jun 2026).
• Sprout Social bought Tagger for $140 million (Sprout Social, Aug 2023).
• Cision bought Brandwatch for $450 million (TechCrunch, Feb 2021).
• Meltwater bought Klear for $17.8 million, 1.4 times its 2020 revenue (GlobeNewswire, Apr 2021).
• Later bought Mavely for $250 million (PR Newswire, Jan 2025).

Which ones move the needle?

The one outcome we hold is re-booking: the share of a platform's videos where the same creator made 2 or more videos for the same brand.

Big brands re-book more than small ones. So each platform is compared with what brands of the same size get on average, in our table.

The brand-side tools and affiliate networks sit at or above what their brands would get anyway. GRIN is 5 points above.

The storefronts sit far below, and that is how they work, not a failure. On a storefront the creator links many brands once each, so few pairs repeat.

LTK sits 28 points under because the brand did not choose to book that creator again. It never booked them in the first place.

Growth shows who brands are moving to. By brands a year in our table, Impact.com went from 366 in 2024 to 623 in 2025, AvantLink from 62 to 132, Aspire from 49 to 120 and Shopify Collabs from 72 to 116.

ShopMy videos we could tie to a brand went from 17 to 131. GRIN went from 194 to 204.

The outside numbers point the same way.

• ShopMy reports "Over $1B in annual platform sales" and 1,200+ brand partners, raised at a $1.5 billion valuation (PR Newswire, Oct 2025).
• LTK says its creators bring in more than $3.6 billion in annual retail sales (LTK, Apr 2023).
• CreatorIQ reports more than 1,300 customers and campaigns up 70% in a year (CreatorIQ, Dec 2025).
• Agentio "has grown fivefold" since November 2024 (TechCrunch, Nov 2025).
• Passionfroot grew revenue 13 times in a year (TechCrunch, Jul 2026).
• IZEA's revenue fell 12.9%, from $35.9 million to $31.2 million (IZEA 10-K, FY2025).

What do operators say about them?

The one brands speak best of is ShopMy, and the reason given is measurement. A guest on The Brand Builder Behind Goop, Chrissy Teigen & Molly Sims said:

"We use ShopMy. We actually really push our clients to onboard ShopMy. And that's because it's an incredible measurement tool."

A guest on Our DTC 2026 Predictions said "I think it's I think it's a failure of Shopify that Shop My exists."

The database tools get the harshest words. A guest on $200M CEO: How To Build and Scale Your Online Business in 2026 said:

"You can bleep them out, but Grin sucks. Creator IQ sucks. Like, they all suck cuz all of the data is just so old and they those lists have just been destroyed and abandoned."

Price pushes smaller brands to build their own. A guest on Bootstrapped to 8 Figures put the cost at sixteen thousand dollars a year:

"we can't afford to pay grin sixteen thousand dollars a year like they they charge a good amount of money yeah if you ever like talk to them they're they cost a lot of money so i'm like why don't we just build like our own version of it and so we did"

The apps' own marketplaces are not a way out either. A guest on LA Chargers + Social Media Pay said "Meta's doing a decent job now with their new like creator marketplace, but even then it's like it's still very manual, very hard to use."

Booking marketplaces are becoming a budget line. A guest on E041: Influencer Marketing Strategy said:

"we're going to spend, let's say we're going to spend a 50K a month on uh this organic influencer program, we'll do that for a quarter, and then we're going to have a very similar budget for Agentio."

What should a brand do with this?

• You do not need a platform to sponsor creators well. Almost 95% of brands sponsoring YouTube in our table show no platform in their links. A direct deal with your own link is the normal way to do it, not a gap in your setup.
• Pick a platform by the job you need done. Software, affiliate networks, storefronts and booking marketplaces do different work, and only 103 of 1,537 brands on a creator platform used two or more. Decide whether you need to find and pay creators, track commissions, or buy ad slots, then pick one tool for that.
• Check re-booking before you trust a tool. GRIN brands re-book creators 5 points above brands of their size, and CreatorIQ brands 10 points below. Ask how many of the creators you book through a tool come back for a second video.
• Treat storefronts as affiliate, not media. LTK links re-book 28 points below brands of the same size, because the creator picked you, not the other way round. If you want the same creator talking about you again, pay for repeated placements with creators you choose on purpose.

What this data cannot see

• YouTube only, so TikTok and Instagram deals are not in these counts.
• Booking marketplaces and the apps' own deals leave no platform link, so Agentio, Passionfroot, Billo, TikTok One and YouTube Creator Partnerships are invisible here.
• A brand can run a platform behind its own domain, which reads as no platform in our table.
• 2026 runs only to September, so its yearly counts are partial.
• We hold no sales data, so nothing here says which platform sells the most product. Re-booking is the closest outcome we have.