It's an unexpected place to spot a recession indicator — from videos reviewing the latest in skin care to picturesque posts of summer vacations — but the impact of turbulent financial markets and seesawing tariff policies threatens to upend the multibillion-dollar influencer industry for millions of online creators.
Recession jitters have made online audiences and brands more discerning about their spending, possibly roiling the traditional income streams that influencers have come to rely on.
"It really does beg the question of what do creators do if the economy isn't there to support them?" Sam Ogborn asks. Ogborn is a content creator and marketing strategist who has worked with brands like Red Bull and Walgreens. "If they're so reliant on fans to buy from them and support them, what happens when that starts to go away?"
Recession fears grow as consumers' confidence declines
Posts sharing luxury handbag collections or exotic vacations were once popular on TikTok and Instagram, but now influencers are facing backlash in their comment sections for what some followers see as excessive displays of wealth during an economic downturn.
It comes as a majority of Americans say they feel "stressed" or "concerned" about their finances, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. Over half (54%) said they feel the economy is doing poorly. And it has impacted what audiences want to watch online.
Peyton Knight, a marketing executive at Ladder and founder of Last Digital, which assists companies in managing their social media presence, says the financial anxiety has contributed to a decline in trust between followers and content creators. She says, "The consumer is what really dictates what's happening in the market. And I think the consumer has pushed back and said, 'Enough.'"
Hauls and headwinds
Despite influencers' ability to harness their followers' buying power to promote a business or sell out a product with a single post, as recession fears grow, consumers' confidence in their spending power declines, causing brands to recalibrate.
This year, nearly 76% of brands are dedicating advertising funds to online creators. That's a 10% decrease since 2024, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. Only 12% of those brands said they plan to allocate more than half their budgets to influencer marketing, a 12 percentage-point decline since last year.
Knight explains, "Where brands may have used 20-plus creators on a particular campaign, now on average [they are] using single digits for their influencer campaigns, just depending on the scale."
The influencer bubble
Nearly 12 million people in the U.S. consider themselves full-time influencers, according to one study, earning an average of $178,000 a year, a number boosted by the earnings of mega-influencers like Addison Rae and MrBeast. However, economic stressors and increased scrutiny from online audiences could cause the industry — and incomes — to shrink.
Knight believes that the inability of some influencers to innovate as monetary support from brands dries up will cause the decline of what she calls the "one-hit wonders": "Some people just have their moment and then they go away. They try, but they don't become the next Doechii."
But the influencers who have staying power will survive, she says. "These people actually create the content I want to consume, that is, in some way, shape or form, is bettering my life or making me interested in a topic."
Weathering the storm
Ogborn encourages influencers to take an unconventional approach to weathering the storm by looking at how brands reacted during the 2008 recession. "If I were a smart creator, that's what I would be doing right now — is studying what that looked like and starting to understand how behaviors shifted, instead of scrambling to figure out what to do next. Because creators at the end of the day are brands," Ogborn says.
For some influencers, it may mean pivoting their content away from shopping hauls and more toward embracing underconsumption. Ogborn says as consumers want to buy less and save more, "it makes sense that a lot of people now watch that kind of content and find ways to be scrappy in their own lives, because they don't want to just buy a new item anymore and pay the cost of the tariff."
"The only constant is change"
For many influencers who grew up during the 2008 Great Recession, financial turbulence is nothing new. They remember the housing crisis, banks failing and the feeling of economic unpredictability. Yet content creators Kira Abboud and Caralyn Mirand Koch, who remember that time well, remain hopeful about the future of their industry despite the feelings of instability.
Mirand Koch, a lifestyle and fashion creator who has over 400,000 followers on Instagram, says she tries not to operate from fear, but instead remains adaptable, "whether that means shifting partnerships, or fine-tuning my content mix, or just leaning deeper into what my audience is asking for. Whether it's more lighthearted humor or more lifestyle content and not just necessarily so focused on selling."
Diversifying, Mirand Koch says, has been key to her success: knowing that social media platforms can come and go, but that "you still want to have your roots and your core of who you are and where your community can find you." For her, it has meant growing her audiences on other platforms like TikTok and Pinterest, as well as promoting her website.
Abboud, a fashion and styling creator who has over 600,000 followers on Instagram and over 200,000 on TikTok, also encourages creators to look inward and work to better understand where their followers are emotionally and financially during this uncertainty. She says it's important for her community to feel secure, whether it's by offering clothing at lower price points or promoting more local brands: "I need to think about what my consumer is doing, so I can give them what they need so they do feel as though their buying power is with me."
While there is uncertainty of what the future will look like for creators and their followers, for Mirand Koch one thing is clear: "The only constant is change, and you just have to constantly be open-minded and adapt to what's happening — which is a scary place to be comfortable with."
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