The Creator Index Report 2026: what 81,043 creator profiles actually look like
Most "state of influencer marketing" reports quote surveys, platform press releases, or numbers from someone else's report. This one does not: every figure below comes from the 81,043 creator profiles Koinon Link has indexed itself, recomputed daily.
It answers a question few people answer with data: what does a large creator pool actually look like underneath?
Key findings
8.2% of indexed creator profiles show bought-follower patterns. Of 81,043 accounts, 6,667 have follower-growth and engagement structures anomalous enough to be moved out of default results. The spread between platforms is wide: Threads at 15.5%, YouTube at 1.2%.
Only 7.1% publish contact details you can reach directly. Everyone else is reachable only through platform DMs. X (Twitter) leads at 24.7%, while on 3 platforms in this index almost nobody publishes one — a gap that drives outreach workload and appears in no platform-comparison deck.
32.8% reach grade A or B. Put differently: in an unfiltered creator list, roughly 1 in 3.1 clears our baseline authenticity bar.
38.7% have content samples on file. That is what decides whether you can tell what a creator actually posts about — without samples, audience matching is guesswork over follower counts.
Platform by platform
| Platform | Indexed | Suspected inflated | Public contact | Grade A/B | Content samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | 34,895 | 12.6% | 8.8% | 10.4% | 25.4% |
| 15,852 | 1.4% | 0.0% | 69.2% | 46.6% | |
| X (Twitter) | 9,171 | 10.3% | 24.7% | 54.0% | 95.8% |
| YouTube | 6,488 | 1.2% | 3.5% | 39.4% | 20.7% |
| 5,078 | 1.6% | 0.0% | 11.3% | 12.4% | |
| Xiaohongshu (RED) | 2,863 | 7.8% | 4.1% | 28.4% | 34.8% |
| Douyin | 2,789 | 8.6% | 1.1% | 30.2% | 39.3% |
| Twitch | 2,384 | 11.4% | 0.0% | 46.8% | 43.8% |
| Threads | 1,136 | 15.5% | 14.4% | 27.3% | 99.6% |
| 387 | 8.5% | 20.3% | 25.1% | 37.0% | |
| All platforms | 81,043 | 8.2% | 7.1% | 32.8% | 38.7% |
Two denominators: "suspected inflated" is a share of all indexed profiles (the numerator has to sit inside the denominator); every other column is a share of the validated pool (indexed minus quarantined, 74,376 profiles), because quarantined accounts never reach your shortlist anyway.
Why these numbers are hard to get elsewhere
Most public creator databases can only report how many profiles they hold. Producing the ratios above requires a judgement on every account: follower-growth shape, engagement structure, content samples, audience composition. The heaviest layer is the audience profile — 42,846 of those have been built one account at a time.
So this is not a report about how big the platforms are. It is a report about how many of these people are actually usable — which is the question that matters before you spend anything.
Go deeper on any of these
Each finding above has its own research page with the full breakdown by platform and size tier — see the related reading below this page.
Methodology
The sample is 81,043 creator accounts indexed and validated inside Koinon Link. It is not every creator on these platforms, and it is not a random sample — it comes from our keyword-driven collection, which skews toward AI software, e-commerce and gaming.
"Suspected inflated" is our own anomaly detection, not a platform-official flag: it looks at whether follower growth arrived in vertical steps, whether the engagement-to-follower ratio sits far outside the normal band for that platform and size tier, and how templated the engagement looks. It means "worth a manual check", not "this account is definitely cheating".
All figures are recomputed daily; this page shows the most recent run.
Cite this page
Koinon Link (2026). The Creator Index Report 2026: what 81,043 creator profiles actually look like. Data as of 2026-08-27. https://koinonlink.com/research/creator-index-reportStatistics are licensed CC BY 4.0: attribute “Koinon Link” with a link to this page. Figures recompute daily — include the data date when citing. Machine-readable version: /research/creator-index-report.json