The IAB released its Creator Economy Ad Spend & Strategy Report last year. The headline numbers are doing the rounds and they're worth paying attention to.
U.S. creator ad spend is projected at $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year on year. That's almost 4x the growth rate of the wider media industry. The category has more than doubled in three years, from $13.9 billion in 2021 to $29.5 billion in 2024. Forecast for 2026: $44 billion.
48% of all creator ad buyers now call creators a "must buy," ranking the channel just behind paid search and social.
If you run a creator, social, influencer or talent management agency, this looks like the dream tailwind. Demand is up. Buyer attention is on the category. Strategic acquirers are circling.
Here's the part founders in the space need to be honest about. A category being hot doesn't automatically mean your specific business gets a premium valuation. The structural risks that have always sat under creator agencies haven't gone away. In some ways the buyer pool is paying closer attention to them than before.
This is what's actually being priced when a founder in this space sits down with us at Succeed.
The buyer appetite is real
The first thing worth saying clearly: the appetite is real and we're seeing it across the buyer network.
In June, Accenture acquired Whalar from Whalar Group, the third creator-adjacent acquisition by Accenture Song in three years, following Unlimited in 2024 and Superdigital in 2025. M&A experts are saying that influencer marketing is one of the specific skill sets buyers are actively trying to acquire right now. Alongside data, digital marketing and PR.
The moral of the story is, buyers want in.
But this is where the translation breaks
The translation breaks when founders assume that buyer appetite = premium multiple = clean deal structure for them specifically.
Here's the spread we see across agency M&A in 2026.
Project-heavy creative shops trade at around 7-8x EBITDA. These are agencies that look like services businesses, where the asset is the team's time. The buyer pays for the cash flow but discounts hard for the lack of structural moats.
Tech-enabled platforms with recurring revenue, proprietary IP and operational independence command 10.6x to 12x+. These are agencies that look like platforms, where the asset is the system, the audience or the data, not just the labour.
The question for a creator agency founder is simple. Which one are you?
Most creator and social agencies, despite operating in a category that ad buyers think of as cutting edge, sit closer to the first definition than the second. The revenue book is project-heavy. The retainers are short. The margins live or die on a small number of talent relationships. The audience itself often belongs to the creators, not the agency.
That's not the buyer's problem. That's the founder's.
What gets priced
When a creator or social agency does pull a premium multiple, it's usually because the founders did one or more of the following things deliberately, over years, not in the run-up to the sale.
They turned the audience into the asset. Social Chain, before its IPO, didn't sell creator services. It built audiences first (the asset), then sold brands access to those audiences. Dom McGregor and Steven Bartlett figured out their product was the ability to influence people and start global trends. The agency model was downstream of the audience model. That ordering matters.
They built proprietary tech, IP or data. The agencies trading at platform multiples have something the buyer can't replicate by hiring a team. A creator vetting and matching algorithm. A measurement framework brands rely on. A talent contract structure that's actually defensible. A data set on creator performance no one else has.
They productised the messy bits. Pricing logic that doesn't depend on the founder's judgment. Onboarding that follows a documented system. Campaign delivery that runs the same way regardless of which account director is leading. None of this is glamorous. All of it is what a buyer's QoE process looks for.
They diversified platform exposure. A creator agency that's 80% TikTok is a different risk profile from one that's 30% TikTok, 30% Instagram, 20% YouTube, and 20% emerging platforms. Single-platform concentration scares buyers because they've watched what happens to agencies who didn't pivot in time.
What gets discounted
The discounts in this category are specific and they're more aggressive than in traditional creative agency M&A. A few of the ones we see most often.
Founder-as-product. This is the biggest one. A lot of creator and social agencies are built around the founder's own following, the founder's own relationships with talent, and the founder's own ability to win the room. Buyers love the energy. They don't pay for it. Because the moment the deal closes, that asset is locked into an earn-out and starts walking out the door the day the earn-out ends.
In Dom McGregor's words:
"Most agencies I've seen are founder-dependent. Whether that's for delivery, strategy, sales, whatever. But the only way to create value in an agency is to make it not founder-dependent. Simple as that."
His advice on what to actually do about it is just as direct:
"Make yourself redundant as quickly as you can. That is it. Figure out the piece where you add unique value and spend your time there. Turn everything else into a commodity and then work on making yourself redundant."
Talent concentration. If five creators drive 60% of your revenue and they're on agreements they could walk away from, your business has the same risk profile as an agency where five clients drive 60% of revenue and they're on rolling contracts. Both get discounted heavily.
Platform rigidity. Social Chain itself, despite the eventual exit, had a costly version of this. Dom has spoken publicly about how the agency was built around Facebook and Instagram performance metrics, with options and bonuses tied to those metrics. When TikTok arrived, the team resisted pivoting because the incentive structures held them in place. That kind of structural rigidity is exactly what buyers look for in diligence and discount aggressively when they find it.
The Visionary blind spot. Founders in this category often fit the "Visionary" archetype. Talent magnet, brand leader, the person everyone wants in the room. The blind spot that consistently kills valuation for Visionaries is succession planning. They've built the audience. They haven't built the layer below them that runs the business when they stop being available.
Luke Tobin, founder of Unusual Group and Succeed, has built and sold multiple businesses over three decades. He's been on both sides of the table and knows specifically what founders get wrong when they go into a sale unprepared. His view on this, from his own work with creator-adjacent founders is that the agencies that exit well in this category are the ones whose founders treated their own personal brand as the marketing engine but not the delivery engine. The founder draws attention while a second layer of leadership runs the business.
The deal structures buyers are using in this category
Even when a creator agency does everything right, the deal structures in 2026 are designed to manage the risks specific to this category.
The standard structure has shifted to 60-80% majority stakes with 20-40% rollover equity. Buyers want the founder team locked in for the second leg of growth, not cashed out and gone. For talent-led businesses, that lock-in is non-negotiable.
10-25% of the purchase price is now typically tied directly to 3-5 year EBITDA performance, not headline revenue. That's a meaningful shift. A creator agency that grew on the back of one viral campaign can't price that into the deal anymore. Sustained EBITDA performance, post-close, in the buyer's hands, is what unlocks the back end of the consideration.
For founders in this category, that translates to one important reality. If you sell a founder-dependent, platform-concentrated, talent-led business, you don't get to leave. You get to keep running it under someone else's ownership for 3-5 years, hitting numbers, before the deal you signed actually pays out in full.
The founders who get the cleanest deal structures, less rollover, shorter earn-outs, more cash at completion, are the ones who removed the risks the back-end is designed to cover. They built the second layer. They diversified the platform exposure. They turned the audience into the asset.
That's the work, and it doesn't happen in the run-up to a sale.
The Succeed read
The IAB report is good news for the category. We agree with the macro story. Buyers are paying attention. Multiples for the right businesses are real. The next two years will see more deal activity in creator and social agencies than the previous five combined.
But the gap between "the category is growing" and "your agency is worth what you think it is" is wider than most founders in the space realise. The hotter the category gets, the more sophisticated the diligence becomes, and the more buyers know what to look for.
Our view on the wider opportunity is that creator economy and AI-native businesses are the two most future-proof agency models being built right now. We agree. The agencies coming up that bake these into their structure from day one will pull the strongest multiples in the next 5-10 years.
For founders already operating in the category, the question is whether you're 18 months into building a sellable business, or 18 months out from realising you aren't.
Where to start
If you're a creator, social, influencer, or talent management agency founder thinking about exit in the next 12-24 months, the Exit Readiness Diagnostic by Succeed is the fastest way to see where your specific business sits against the things buyers will actually price.
It's a five-minute scored assessment across the five dimensions that drive multiples in this category. You get an indicative range, a sense of which dimensions need work, and a starting point for the conversation.
Take the Exit Readiness Diagnostic
https://www.succeed.co/contact
The category will keep growing. The window to position your specific business inside it doesn't stay open forever.
