Despite COVID-19, new research suggests the Instagram influencer market hasn’t suffered as much as other industries when comparing marketing budgets for sponsored posts and Stories on Instagram during Q1 2019 and Q1 2020.
The market size in the first quarter of 2019 was approximately $1185 million and in 2020 this figure rose by 3.9% to $1232 million. Based on this comparison between money spent on sponsored posts and Stories on Instagram in Q1 2019 and Q1 2020, it is estimated that Instagram’s influencer marketing market size will reach between $5 billion to $6.5 billion in 2020.
The largest budget cuts occurred in March as the market size was reduced by $16 million (-3.8%) compared to the same period in 2019.
As brands look for new ways to reach their audience, more advertisers are seeing influencer marketing as a viable option to increase brand awareness. Social media usage is growing and advertising budgets are increasingly being directed from offline to online.
HypeAuditor analysed over 3 million Instagram posts marked as sponsored. The exact amount of sponsored posts within the Instagram influencer market remains difficult to quantify but using Instagram’s Paid Partnership Feature, they tracked the most common sponsor hashtags and used machine learning algorithms trained on market values to determine the data.
