The most overused number in influencer marketing may also be the most misleading. After analysing 14.9 million social posts, OpenSponsorship’s 2026 report concludes that a creator’s average engagement rate — the metric brands most often use to select partners — is a poor predictor of campaign success, with topic-specific engagement varying by four times or more from the same account’s average.
The finding matters because of the sums now involved. US creator advertising spending is projected at $44 billion in 2026 by the IAB, and CreatorIQ puts average annual creator budgets at $6.6 million per brand in the US and UK. OpenSponsorship argues that selections worth millions are routinely made on account-level averages when performance actually lives at the level of the individual post and topic: a creator who looks unremarkable overall may be exceptional on the subject a brand cares about, and vice versa.
The platform’s own deal data sketches where brand money is moving. Female athletes now account for 75 percent of deals on the marketplace, with track and field and golf leading by volume and marathon runners the fastest-growing category for 2026. Average deal size roughly doubled year on year, from about $2,500 in 2024 to $5,147 in 2025, and the average number of posts per deal rose from 2.9 to 3.5 — signs of deeper, more structured partnerships rather than one-off posts.
The roster is widening beyond sport. Non-athlete deals — podcasters, wellness and lifestyle creators, and college athletes in the name-image-likeness market — grew sevenfold between 2024 and 2025. Health and wellness is the fastest-growing non-sport creator category, driven in the data by creators addressing women over 40 on topics such as menopause, hormonal health and longevity, an audience the report says consistently outperforms engagement benchmarks.
OpenSponsorship frames 2026 as an unusually crowded commercial year, with the FIFA World Cup in North America, continued growth in women’s sports and a maturing college-athlete market converging. Independent sponsorship research agrees on the women’s sports trajectory: Ampere counts women-only deals in Europe’s top football leagues up 53 percent since 2022/23, and Platformation’s buyer survey finds 69.1 percent of brands investing in or considering women’s sport.
The consumer-insight lesson cuts across all of it. Audiences do not engage with accounts; they engage with posts, topics and people they trust on specific subjects. Measurement that respects that granularity — post-level, topic-level, audience-level — is becoming the difference between creator budgets that compound and creator budgets that evaporate. On Friday, October 9, 2026, the average is the enemy of the insight.
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