Creator economy research from KALO IQ

Published reports

The reports below are free to download and cite. Use the attribution Source: KALO IQ [Report Name], [Quarter/Year]. No prior permission needed.

How our research is made

Three rules that govern every KALO IQ research report. They protect brand customer confidentiality, creator privacy and the legal posture of every published statistic.

Data source: the KALO IQ platform

Every data point we publish is derived from real platform activity, not surveys, scraping or estimates. The platform tracks creator-brand deals end to end, including discovery, outreach, deal terms, content publication and measurement.

100 million verified US creators

The creator pool is exclusively US-based and hand-verified by our team. We do not include international creators or unverified profiles in our research datasets.

Manual verification process

Every creator on the platform is checked by a human verifier before being listed. The verification step confirms US residency, real audience signals and active posting cadence.

10-person verification team

The verification team processes roughly 8,000 to 12,000 creator profiles per week. The team has approved approximately 104 million US creators since 2015 and rejected an estimated 32 million for fake-audience signals, dormancy or non-US residence.

What we never publish

The methodology page in every report names what is excluded from the data. The exclusions are not optional and they apply to every report we ship.

• Individual brand names or any statistic that could identify a specific brand.
• Individual creator names, handles or rates.
• Deal-level data that could be reverse-engineered to a specific transaction.
• Any vertical or category with fewer than 10 brands in the bucket.
• Any data younger than 30 days at publication, so the data is not actionable competitive intelligence.

Aggregation protocol

Statistics are always reported as percentile distributions, medians, percentage shares or year-over-year deltas across cohorts, never as individual data points. Year-over-year comparisons use the same cohort of brands measured in both periods to avoid composition bias.

Upcoming research roadmap

The KALO IQ research calendar publishes one major report per quarter. Each report is announced via newsletter four weeks before publication. Email press@kaloiq.com to get embargo access 48 hours before public release.

Q2 2026 publications (July 2026)

• DTC Creator Spend Index Q2 2026. Refresh of the Q1 dataset across the same 200+ brand cohort. Same methodology, new quarter. Tracks how the TikTok-vs-Instagram share crossover from Q1 plays out through Q2.

Q3 2026 publications

• 2026 US Creator Verification Report. Analysis of fake follower rates across competitor platforms versus the KALO IQ verified pool. The contrarian-data report of the year.
• Beauty Creator Pricing Index. Specialized cut focused on the beauty DTC vertical, the largest by absolute creator spend.

Q4 2026 publications

• DTC Brand Creator ROI Benchmarks. Outcome-side data. What ROAS DTC brands actually got from creator spend in 2026.