There are at least 25.4 million active accounts with 1,000+ followers on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. That is how many accounts in Virev's index have 1,000 or more followers, at least 5 posts and a post in the 90 days from July 27 to October 24, 2026. Instagram holds 24.3 million of them. Among the active Instagram accounts whose country Virev has set, the United States has the most, followed by Brazil and India.
These are counts of accounts Virev indexes, so they are a lower bound and not a census. Virev's index covers 180M+ creators, and it holds far more Instagram accounts than TikTok or YouTube accounts, so the TikTok and YouTube counts below are much further from the real totals. Each platform is counted on its own, so a creator with an Instagram and a TikTok account counts twice.
25.4M
Active accounts, three platforms
24.3M
Active Instagram accounts
59%
Accounts seen posting in 90 days
How many influencers are there in the world
We count with two definitions, so you can compare our numbers with HypeAuditor's.
- The HypeAuditor definition is the one in HypeAuditor's May 2026 country breakdown, an account with 1,000+ followers, at least 5 posts and at least one post in the last 90 days.
- The Virev definition is a public account with 1,000+ followers and a post in the last 90 days that Instagram's category or Virev's creator profile does not mark as a brand, business, media outlet, organization or government.
| Platform | HypeAuditor definition | Virev definition |
|---|---|---|
| 24,305,882 | 23,167,817 | |
| TikTok | 979,782 | 967,878 |
| YouTube | 145,296 | 146,696 |
| All three | 25,430,960 | 24,282,391 |
The base is 42,236,531 Instagram accounts, 2,019,536 TikTok accounts and 225,131 YouTube channels with 1,000+ followers.
Of the 44.5 million accounts with 1,000+ followers, Virev saw a post in the last 90 days from 26.4 million. Among the 42.2 million Instagram accounts, 20% had posts read and none in the window, and Virev had read no posts at all from another 20%. So about 2 in 10 are known to have gone quiet. HypeAuditor says counting every account above a follower line can overstate a market by 20% to 40%.
The Virev definition removes 1.8 million public, active Instagram accounts as brands, businesses or media. Instagram's own account category removes 1.7 million of them, such as Restaurant, Clothing (Brand) or Media/news company, and Virev's profile labels remove 116,231. A category counts as a business when most of the accounts Virev has profiled in it are not individual creators. In a hand check of 30 accounts the rule removed, 27 were businesses, and of 30 it kept under a creator category, 26 were people. The rule does not reach every brand. 16.4 million of the active Instagram accounts show no category and have no Virev profile, and among the 173,118 accounts without a category that Virev has profiled, 44% are individual creators. 6.4 million active Instagram accounts carry a creator category, such as Digital creator, Artist or Athlete, or a Virev label as an individual creator, which is the floor for people rather than pages.
HypeAuditor's 2025 report counts 3.8 million Instagram influencers in Brazil and says that is 15.8% of its global total, which works out to about 24 million. Our 24.3 million active Instagram accounts is close to that, but the report does not say which filter it used, and its numbers are for 2024.
How many influencers by follower count
Most active creators are small. 77% of the active Instagram accounts under the Virev definition have 1,000 to 10,000 followers, and 57,351 have 1 million or more.
Instagram accounts by follower count
| Followers | HypeAuditor definition | Virev definition |
|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 18,567,424 | 17,865,814 |
| 10K to 100K | 4,848,868 | 4,475,324 |
| 100K to 1M | 829,426 | 769,328 |
| 1M+ | 60,164 | 57,351 |
TikTok accounts by follower count
| Followers | HypeAuditor definition | Virev definition |
|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 448,177 | 453,947 |
| 10K to 100K | 324,471 | 314,842 |
| 100K to 1M | 170,872 | 164,284 |
| 1M+ | 36,262 | 34,805 |
YouTube accounts by follower count
| Followers | HypeAuditor definition | Virev definition |
|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 43,405 | 44,792 |
| 10K to 100K | 51,667 | 51,824 |
| 100K to 1M | 38,961 | 38,887 |
| 1M+ | 11,263 | 11,193 |
The Virev definition can be higher than the HypeAuditor one, because it does not ask for 5 posts. On YouTube few channels are marked as brands, so that is the only difference there. For what each tier earns and how it performs, see the micro and nano influencers study and the average Instagram follower count.
How many Instagram influencers are there in each country
Instagram does not show an account's country. Virev's creator profile sets one, which a language model reads from the bio, captions and other public profile text, the same inference our engagement rate by country study used. A hand check of 25 Instagram profiles found 20 where the bio or language supports the country, 4 where the bio does not say, and 1 that looks wrong. Virev's profiles set a country for 221,851 of the 24.3 million active Instagram accounts, so the table gives the share of each country among those, not a full count per country. Share and Accounts use the HypeAuditor definition.
| Country | Share | Accounts |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 25.8% | 57,308 |
| Brazil | 12.6% | 28,007 |
| India | 10.9% | 24,191 |
| United Kingdom | 5.2% | 11,589 |
| Australia | 3.1% | 6,917 |
| Indonesia | 3.1% | 6,843 |
| Canada | 2.8% | 6,232 |
| Mexico | 2.1% | 4,709 |
| France | 2.0% | 4,443 |
| Germany | 2.0% | 4,379 |
| Argentina | 1.9% | 4,147 |
| Italy | 1.8% | 3,915 |
| Spain | 1.7% | 3,780 |
| Turkey | 1.4% | 3,008 |
| Chile | 1.2% | 2,653 |
| Iran | 1.0% | 2,165 |
| Colombia | 1.0% | 2,144 |
| Poland | 0.9% | 2,000 |
| South Korea | 0.9% | 1,923 |
| Philippines | 0.7% | 1,541 |
Under the Virev definition the same profiled set holds 120,738 accounts, 54% of the HypeAuditor count, because Virev profiles many brand pages. The CSV has both columns for all 94 countries with 100 or more profiled accounts.
Which country has the most influencers
The United States has the most active Instagram accounts among those Virev has profiled, with 25.8%, then Brazil with 12.6% and India with 10.9%. Under the Virev definition, which drops brand pages, India (14.8%) passes Brazil (13.9%), and HypeAuditor's 2025 report puts Brazil first on Instagram with 3.8 million influencers. HypeAuditor's May 2026 count across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube has the US first with 6.4 million active creators, Brazil with 5.5 million and India with 5.3 million. HypeAuditor puts 64% of the US count on Instagram, about 4.1 million accounts.
On the other platforms the order changes. The tables give each country's share of the active accounts with a known country, under the HypeAuditor definition.
| TikTok country | Share |
|---|---|
| United States | 6.5% |
| Indonesia | 6.3% |
| Brazil | 5.8% |
| Russia | 4.6% |
| Vietnam | 4.2% |
| Philippines | 4.0% |
| Mexico | 3.9% |
| Pakistan | 3.3% |
| Turkey | 3.2% |
| Thailand | 2.9% |
| YouTube country | Share |
|---|---|
| United States | 31.6% |
| India | 13.8% |
| United Kingdom | 5.5% |
| Japan | 3.6% |
| Indonesia | 2.7% |
| Brazil | 2.6% |
| Canada | 2.4% |
| Germany | 2.1% |
| France | 2.0% |
| Spain | 1.9% |
TikTok countries come from Virev's creator profiles, 81,778 active TikTok accounts. YouTube countries come from the country a channel sets itself, which 119,274 of the 145,296 active channels have set. The US leads both, Indonesia is a close second on TikTok, and India is second on YouTube. India ranks 44th on TikTok with 0.6% of the accounts, because TikTok has been banned there since 2020.
Creator economy statistics 2026: other counts of creators
Published counts of creators run from 25 million to 303 million, because each one counts something else.
| Source | Count | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| Adobe, 2022 | 303 million | People who make content online, from a survey of about 9,000 creators in 9 countries |
| HypeAuditor, 2026 | 227M+ | Accounts in HypeAuditor's creator database |
| Virev, 2026 | 180M+ | Creators in Virev's index |
| Goldman Sachs, 2023 | 50 million | Creators worldwide, an estimate |
| Virev, 2026 | 25.4 million | Accounts with 1,000+ followers, 5+ posts and a post in the last 90 days |
Adobe's 303 million counts people who say they create content, and Adobe says only 14% of them are influencers with 5,000 or more followers. Our 25.4 million counts accounts that have 1,000 followers and still post. For the other numbers in our studies, see influencer marketing statistics.
How to use these numbers
- When you size a market, count active accounts and not every account above a follower line, because Virev saw no post in the last 90 days from 4 in 10 accounts with 1,000+ followers, and about half of those had gone quiet.
- When you plan a campaign in Indonesia, Pakistan or Thailand, include TikTok, because Pakistan ranks 8th and Thailand 10th on TikTok in our data against 38th and 40th on Instagram, and HypeAuditor finds about 88% of Pakistan's active creators on TikTok only.
- When you look for creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, expect about 4.5 million active Instagram accounts to pick from, against 17.9 million below 10,000.
- Brands can filter creators by country, follower count and activity in Virev creator search, which covers 180M+ creators.
How we counted, and what can be wrong
- The base is every Instagram, TikTok and YouTube account in Virev's index whose latest follower count, read by Virev's crawler, is 1,000 or more. That is 42,236,531 Instagram accounts, 2,019,536 TikTok accounts and 225,131 YouTube channels.
- An account counts as active if Virev's crawler saw one of its posts or videos dated July 27 to October 24, 2026. Virev had read no post at all from 9.4 million of the accounts, and they count as inactive, which is one reason the counts are a lower bound.
- For the 5-post rule we use the larger of the post count the platform shows and the number of posts Virev has seen, and 4.0 million Instagram accounts have only the second.
- Accounts that are private now are left out of both definitions.
- Instagram categories are sorted into creator and business groups by the share of individual creators among the accounts Virev has profiled in each category. A category with fewer than 10 profiled accounts is treated like no category and kept, which covers 326,609 active public accounts in 1,414 categories, and about half of a 20-account hand check of them were people.
- Virev's index holds about 36 Instagram accounts for every TikTok account it holds, so the TikTok and YouTube counts are much further below the real totals than the Instagram count.
- Each platform is counted on its own, as HypeAuditor does, so one person with accounts on two platforms counts twice.
Download the data
The tables are in one CSV: how-many-influencers-2026.csv. Each row has a table, a platform and a group, with the number of accounts with 1,000+ followers, the count under the Virev definition, the count under the HypeAuditor definition and, for country rows, each country's share. The tables are by_platform, by_tier, by_country_profiled (Instagram and TikTok) and by_country_channel_setting (YouTube). The tables are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; credit Virev and link this page.
Cite as Virev, "How many influencers are there? 25.4 million active accounts in Virev's 2026 index", October 2026, https://virev.ai/blog/how-many-influencers-are-there.
