Influencer marketing spending in the US is set to grow more than 30% this year and surpass a key milestone. According to our inaugural forecast on US influencer marketing spending, the category will exceed $3 billion in 2021 and will surpass $4 billion next year.

Rather than risking the high up-front fees of a campaign, affiliate channels can serve as a low-risk means of testing influencers for marketing partnerships.

On today's episode, we discuss social media moderation: How is new regulation keeping social media marketers honest, which social platforms are taking the lead on self-moderation, and how have brands already fallen foul of local laws. Tune in to the discussion as eMarketer principal analyst Bill Fisher hosts senior analysts Jasmine Enberg and Matteo Ceurvels.

On today's episode, we discuss which platforms have the most creator-friendly environments, how influencer marketing is evolving, and what the next stage of the creator economy will look like. We then talk about Pinterest's new livestreaming feature, the popularity of influencer marketing on TikTok, and how companies should navigate social media coming out of the pandemic. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg.

Down to collab? A look at influencer income

The explosion in vertical video is creating both opportunities and challenges for the Story format. Stories are evolving quickly on Instagram and remain a top venue for influencer activations. But Twitter’s decision to kill off Fleets shows they aren’t popular on all platforms.

Creator economy crescendo: Amazon is quickly building out areas of its business that center on influencers, as the walls between social media and ecommerce erode and creators' roles in those spaces start to blend together.

The major social platforms hit the ground running in 2021, making substantial investments into many of today’s top social trends: audio, influencers, and short video, to name a few.

Clubhouse has buzz, but social audio isn’t as simple as it looks. The most promising marketing use cases are for thought leadership, virtual events, and influencer marketing.

User-generated short videos are all over the internet, from TikTok to Instagram Reels to Triller, and the marketing opportunities are exploding. Here’s how the main venues compare across usage, paid advertising, organic and influencer marketing, and commerce.

Many marketers had long underestimated the value of creators in their marketing mix. That’s no longer the case. Most brands today have incorporated influencer marketing into their media plans, and many intend to allocate even more funds to the tactic this year.

Once relegated to the children’s market, virtual characters are entering the mainstream in China. Fictional as these digitally rendered avatars may be, they hold real jobs, from pop star to influencer, to even news anchor. And they’re becoming increasingly interactive and humanlike, thanks to improvements in technologies such as AI, motion capture, and virtual reality (VR). Recent advancements in augmented reality (AR), in particular, have enabled virtual avatars to step out of social media and make live appearances alongside flesh-and-blood celebrities.