Something new started showing up in the Collabstr marketplace over the past years. A creator profile on the platform used to mean a person with a camera, but some of them now don’t. There’s been plenty of forecasting about virtual influencers and not much first-party data. Most of what circulates is market-sizing projections rather than transactions. So the team went looking at what’s actually on the platform, what brands are booking, and what they’re paying for it.
Where Is It Taking Hold?
Out of Collabstr’s entire live marketplace, 0.13% were flagged as AI creators. That’s a small share, though not surprising for a niche this young.The data was gathered based on particular profile inclusions like “AI influencer”, “virtual influencer” or “AI-generated” on the platform. The more useful signal is that this exists at all, with trackable listings. Creators tend to move first, and they’re moving now.
Beauty and Lifestyle together account for 26% of all AI creator profiles across this specific account type.
| Niche | Share |
| Beauty | 13.14% |
| Lifestyle | 13.14% |
| Fashion | 10.22% |
| Technology | 9.49% |
| Comedy & Entertainment | 8.03% |
| Art & Photography | 7.30% |
| Entrepreneur & Business | 5.84% |
| Travel | 4.38% |
| Animals & Pets | 4.38% |
| Education | 2.92% |
| Athlete & Sports | 2.92% |
| Health & Fitness | 2.92% |
| Food & Drink | 2.92% |
| Family & Children | 2.19% |
| Adventure & Outdoors | 2.19% |
| Model | 2.19% |
| Music & Dance | 2.19% |
| Celebrity & Public Figure | 1.46% |
| Skilled Trades | 0.73% |
| Gaming | 0.73% |
| Actor | 0.73% |
Distribution of AI-flagged creator profiles across niches.Collabstr platform data, as of July 2026.
Two different things are going on here. Beauty, Lifestyle and Fashion have the most AI profiles, partly because they’re big categories on the platform and also because the content is easy to recreate. Modeling clothes, skincare and products relies heavily on static imagery, which is exactly what AI generation does well, and static content is quite acceptable in these niches. The more telling question is which categories punch above their weight or where AI profiles show up far more often than the category’s normal size would suggest.
“Beauty and Fashion do, at almost twice their usual share. Lifestyle barely does, at 1.4 times. At the same time, Art & Photography appears five times more often among AI creators than its size predicts while Comedy & Entertainment, four times. Technology, more than thirteen, from a category that makes up less than 1% of creators and is not included into general top ten. The likeliest explanation is that this category selects for people with the professional skill to build an AI persona rather than perform as one,” Kyle Dulay, Co-founder at Collabstr.
| Niche | % of AI profiles | % of all creators | Index |
| Beauty | 13.14% | 6.30% | 2.1x |
| Lifestyle | 13.14% | 9.62% | 1.4x |
| Fashion | 10.22% | 5.34% | 1.9x |
| Technology | 9.49% | 0.71% | 13.4x |
| Comedy & Entertainment | 8.03% | 2.00% | 4.0x |
| Art & Photography | 7.30% | 1.40% | 5.2x |
Top AI-flagged profiles against its share of the full creator base. Collabstr platform data, as of July 2026.
Brands Are Paying 25% More per Order for AI Creators
AI creator bookings on Collabstr run 25% above the marketplace-wide average order value, about a quarter more for every paid order. The cheaper input is producing the more expensive order, and this is the opposite of how AI is supposed to affect a price.
According to the IAB’s latest research, cost efficiency has become the most frequently cited benefit of AI in advertising, identified by 64% of respondents, up from fifth place in 2024 (IAB, 2026). However, that finding refers to AI as a production tool, a faster and less expensive way to create the same creative asset. The data reflects a different market dynamic where AI is both part of the production process and the product being purchased (content plus digital persona).
“This explains why the gap points the way it does. Due to the small share on the live marketplace, there’s no volume competition pulling rates down yet. Another thing is what’s actually inside the order. A persona has to stay consistent across deliverables and hold up over a campaign rather than a single post, and that work doesn’t disappear when the camera does, moving upstream, into the setup a brand is still paying someone to do,” adds Kyle.
What could inflate the number? First, a gap this wide at 0.13% supply may not survive at 2%. The other is composition, the categories over-indexing hardest for AI aren’t Collabstr’s cheapest ones, so some of the difference may be category mix as well, and neither undoes the finding. Buyers are choosing this and paying above market to get it, and paying above market for something new is usually a value signal.
Smaller Markets Are Over-indexing Seven to Twelve Times
The geography is the least predictable part of the dataset and this gets more interesting when you compare it to where the creators live generally:
| Country | Share of AI creators | Share of all creators | Index |
| United States | 30.00% | 47.78% | 0.6x |
| United Arab Emirates | 12.86% | 1.34% | 9.6x |
| United Kingdom | 12.86% | 8.03% | 1.6x |
| India | 5.71% | 2.39% | 2.4x |
| Germany | 4.29% | 2.08% | 2.1x |
| Spain | 4.29% | 3.01% | 1.4x |
| Turkey | 2.86% | 0.48% | 6.0x |
| Bulgaria | 2.86% | 0.24% | 11.7x |
| Colombia | 2.86% | 0.57% | 5.0x |
| Norway | 2.86% | 0.41% | 7.0x |
Top ten countries by share of AI-flagged creator profiles, against each country’s share of all creators. Collabstr platform data, as of July 2026.
The United States is the largest creator market within the datasheet, close to half the base, and it produces less AI supply than that position would predict. Canada is the sharper version of the same point: the third-largest market at 6.88% of creators, and one AI listing (is not included in top 10).
Bulgaria holds a quarter of a percent of the creators and eleven times that share of the AI ones. The UAE runs close to ten times. Turkey, Norway and Colombia sit between five and seven. Australia, Mexico and South Africa, 5.7% of the creator base between them, have produced no AI listings for now.
Counts per country are small, so read the pattern rather than the rankings. Most AI listings still come from the largest market, the US accounting for 30% on its own. The difference is in rate rather than volume: several smaller markets show a higher proportion of AI creators than their overall size would suggest.
What This Means for Brands
Put the three findings together and see the picture. The categories with the most AI profiles, Beauty, Lifestyle, Fashion, are the ones with the highest content-volume demands, but the categories pulling hardest toward AI are smaller ones: Technology, Art & Photography, Comedy & Entertainment. Brands are paying 25.3% above the platform average for that work. The supply is forming in markets without a large existing creator base to draw from (but for the US). And what is more important, this is now bookable at a real price across specific categories. Rules and regulations are arriving alongside AI, like Article 50 of the EU AI Act and the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, prove that the category is maturing.
‘“0.13% seems like a small number today, but small numbers are how every new category starts. The niches and pricing are already forming, and the supply is already growing in the markets with room for it. The brands paying attention now are the ones who’ll already know what works by the time everyone else starts looking,” says Kyle Dulay.
