Black Creators Are Building the Culture, but Do the Checks Reflect It?
A lawyer's viral post reignited a conversation the data has been trying to have for years — Black influencers are being systematically underpaid inside a $32 billion industry.
When a lawyer who has negotiated brand deals for some of the internet's biggest creators took to Threads this week, she wasn't sharing a hot take. She was sharing what she had seen across multiple deal rooms. "As a lawyer who has repped large creators, the disparity in pay between Black creators and white creators is ASTOUNDING," wrote user @lizzybaby2 in a post that has since collected over 1,600 likes. "You're offering a Black creator with millions of followers $15k, but a white creator with 300k followers $200k and a brand trip?" The post went viral. But the numbers behind it have been documented for years.
The influencer marketing industry is now worth an estimated $32.55 billion globally in 2025, according to data compiled by Later and market research firm Mordor Intelligence — nearly five times what it was worth in 2019. That growth has not been distributed equally.
The Study That Started the Conversation
In 2021, PR firm MSL partnered with Brittany Bright, founder of The Influencer League — an educational platform built to help creators of color monetize their work — to conduct what became the most cited study on the subject. Surveying over 400 U.S.-based influencers, the research found a 29 percent overall racial pay gap across all creators of color, with the gap widening to 35 percent specifically between Black and white creators. For context, the racial pay gap in finance is 16 percent. In education, it's 8 percent.
"The number is bigger than we expected," said Diana Littman, CEO of MSL U.S., at the time of the study's release. "If you look at benchmarks across other industries, this is worse."
The raw numbers told the full story. According to the MSL data, white influencers earned an average annual income of $67,032. Black influencers averaged $43,756. In practical terms: for every $135 a white influencer was paid, a Black influencer received $100 — often less.
"If I could solve one thing in this industry that hurts BIPOC influencers, it would be pay transparency. The absence of a pay standard disadvantages BIPOC influencers at every turn."
Brittany Bright, Founder & CEO, The Influencer LeagueThe Tier Problem
Part of what makes the pay gap so difficult to close is how it compounds at the tier level. MSL's research found that 77 percent of Black influencers fall into the nano or micro-influencer category — defined as creators with fewer than 50,000 followers — where the median annual income is less than $28,000. Within that tier, half of Black creators earn between $0 and $10,000 annually from brand deals. Only 27 percent of white creators in the same tier fall into that lowest income bracket.
The Agency Factor
The viral Threads post pointed a specific finger at agencies, not just brands. "I say agencies because a lot of managers and agents will lowball to close the deal instead of working harder to articulate the value prop and advocate for their creator," @lizzybaby2 wrote.
Researchers and industry insiders have documented the same pattern. Brittany Bright, writing in a March 2026 open letter to the creator economy, noted that the disparity persists even when controlling for follower count, engagement rate, and content quality. "These aren't market rates," she wrote. "These are the result of opacity, weak bargaining power, and structural discrimination."
The lack of pay transparency is widely identified as the mechanism that keeps the gap in place. Without access to industry-standard rate data, Black creators often negotiate from a disadvantage. "Real transparency means both parties operating from the same data," Bright wrote. "Right now, brands have a model that tells them what a creator's content is worth to them. Creators have nothing equivalent. That asymmetry is the whole problem."
The Gap Is Growing, Not Closing
Three years after the original MSL study, a 2024 report from SevenSix Agency — a U.K.-based influencer management firm that surveys hundreds of creators annually — found the pay gap between Black and white influencers had not narrowed. It had widened. In 2022, SevenSix measured the gap at 22 percent. By 2024, their data showed Black influencers earning 34 percent less than their white counterparts. The firm described it as the largest pay gap they had ever recorded in their annual reporting.
Stanford University research published in 2023 added another dimension to the data: creators of color are not only paid less when they do receive deals — they are more likely to be asked to work for free and less likely to receive product discounts or complimentary items that are routinely offered to white creators as part of standard partnership packages.
A 2023 MSL follow-up report found that while 73 percent of white influencers had landed their first paid deal within a year of starting, only 46 percent of BIPOC creators had reached the same milestone in the same timeframe.
What Accountability Looks Like
The @InfluencerPayGap Instagram account, created in April 2020 by Adesuwa Ajayi — a Black woman who worked at the talent agency AGM — became one of the earliest crowd-sourced efforts to surface the disparity in real time. Ajayi asked creators to submit their highest-paid brand deal via DM, along with their race, follower count, engagement rate, and fee. She anonymized and reposted the submissions. The account grew rapidly, creating a public record of what the industry had kept private.
On the brand side, MSL committed in 2021 to developing an Influencer Pay Index to track compensation across its platform and publish that data regularly. "It will allow us to have very transparent conversations with both clients and influencers," Littman said. Whether that index has been fully implemented and made publicly accessible remains an open question.
What is not an open question is the scale of the market in which these disparities are occurring. The influencer marketing industry that produced a $15,000 offer for a creator with millions of followers is the same one projected to reach $40.5 billion in 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence. The money is there. The question is where it goes — and for whom the industry chooses to close the gap.
"This industry has spent too long treating creators like metrics instead of business owners, like content factories instead of strategic partners."
Brittany Bright, The Influencer League, March 2026
MSL / The Influencer League — "Time to Face the Influencer Pay Gap" (2021)
SevenSix Agency — Influencer Pricing Report (2024)
Brittany Bright, The Influencer League — Open Letter to the Creator Economy (March 2026)
WWD — "Racial Pay Gap Between Black and White Influencers Is 35 Percent" (2021)
Inc. Magazine — "3 Ways Brands Can Bridge the Black Influencer Pay Gap" (Feb 2025)
Marketing Brew — "Black Influencers Are Still Facing Pay Inequity" (2023)
National Partnership for Women & Families — "Influencing Change: Closing the Pay Gap for Black Creators in Beauty" (2024)
BeautyMatter — "The Inequality Behind Beauty's Creator Economy" (2025)
NBC News — "Racial pay gaps are an issue in every industry. Nowhere is it worse than in influencer marketing." (2021)
Later — 2025 Influencer Marketing Report
Mordor Intelligence — Influencer Marketing Market Size & Forecast (2026)
