How many content creators are there in each European country?

At least 1M content creators in Europe (Feb 2026)

EU-27 + Great Britain, with fresh data from February 2026

This is one of the questions I get asked the most, by brands, agencies, journalists, investors and sometimes even policymakers.

How many content creators are there in Europe? And how many per country?

It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is surprisingly hard to find. There is no official European source for it. No Eurostat dashboard. No universal registry. No industry standard that everyone agrees on. And platforms are not communicating about it either.

And yet, everyone wants the number.

So I decided to share our Kolsquare data here for the EU-27 plus Great Britain.

Before we dive into the numbers, let’s clarify something important.

Why there is no official number for creators in Europe

The creator economy is not a regulated industry. Most creators are not registered anywhere. Many operate across borders. Some publish daily, others once a month. Some have a huge audience but little engagement. Some are anonymous, some are brands, some are media, some are real people.

The term « Content Creator » is also not universal. Some call them « Influencers », others « Youtubers » or « Bloggers »… at Kolsquare we prefer to call them « Key Opinion Leaders » or « KOLs ». (see more in my previous article here)

Even the definition of a creator is not universal.

Should we count someone with 1,000 followers? 5,000? 10,000? Should we count accounts that haven’t posted for a year? Should we count brand accounts? Meme pages? Media outlets? Sports clubs? Politicians?

The result is that most market estimates are either vague or inflated, or both.

Our approach: a pragmatic and transparent estimate

What you will find below is not “the absolute truth”. It is an estimate based on clear and strict criteria, applied consistently across all countries.

It is designed to answer a very practical question: how many creators are currently active and relevant for brands, by country, on Instagram and TikTok.

The data is based on February 2026.

Criteria for Instagram creators

To be included in the Instagram count showed below, a profile must match all the conditions below. It must:

• be a person, not a brand or an organisation.
• have at least 5,000 followers.
• have published content in the last 3 months.
• be an account declared as Creator or Business.

And it must have at least 30 percent of its audience located in the country.

This last point matters a lot. We do not count creators by nationality, or by location (even if it can be important in setting up campaigns). But we count creators by the country where their audience is actually located. That is what makes the data useful for marketing teams.

Criteria for TikTok creators

To be included in the TikTok count, a profile must match all the conditions below. It must

• be a person, not a brand or an organisation.
• have at least 10,000 followers.
• have published content in the last 3 months.
• have at least 5,000 average views.
• have posted at least 15 videos.

And it must have at least 30 percent of its audience located in the country.

Again, the objective is not to count every TikTok user. It is to estimate the number of active, brand-relevant creators by market.

Three important limitations you should keep in mind

First, these numbers do not remove duplicates across platforms. Some creators are active on both Instagram and TikTok. In this article, Instagram and TikTok are counted separately. So if you add them together, you will overestimate the number of unique individuals.

Second, this is not the full creator economy. This dataset does not include other major social platforms in Europe such as YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, X, Facebook or Pinterest.

Third, you can always play with selection criteria (by reducing to 20% of audience location instead of 30% for the smaller populated countries for example, or by reducing the volume of follower to 3,000 on Instagram, and 5,000 on TikTok). Which means that there are potentially much more content creators.

In other words, the real number of creators in Europe is significantly higher than what you see here.

That’s why, even with conservative criteria, we consider that Europe has at least 1 million K.O.Ls.

EU-27 + Great Britain: the February 2026 numbers

Below are the number of creators per country, for Instagram and TikTok, based on the methodology described above.

Top markets by total volume (Instagram + TikTok)

1. Italy leads the ranking with 235,578 creators identified across Instagram and TikTok (including duplicates tho)
2. France is extremely close with 229,262.
3. Great Britain comes next with 221,060.
4. Germany follows with 165,786.
5. Spain completes the top five with 153,397.

This top five is not surprising. It reflects a mix of population size, platform adoption, and the maturity of influencer marketing as an industry.

The full table: EU-27 + Great Britain (Feb 2026)

Country	Instagram creators	TikTok creators	Total (IG + TikTok)
Italy	146,953	88,625	235,578
France	92,467	136,795	229,262
Great Britain	127,516	93,544	221,060
Germany	74,989	90,797	165,786
Spain	102,575	50,822	153,397
Poland	45,684	45,708	91,392
Romania	17,377	33,117	50,494
Netherlands	21,966	11,433	33,399
Greece	21,699	11,187	32,886
Portugal	23,649	8,351	32,000
Belgium	8,052	8,251	16,303
Sweden	12,062	3,722	15,784
Hungary	7,593	7,081	14,674
Austria	4,354	6,029	10,383
Czechia	12,017	3,728	15,745
Denmark	8,211	2,332	10,543
Finland	5,751	1,757	7,508
Ireland	7,717	2,424	10,141
Slovakia	4,957	2,776	7,733
Bulgaria	5,561	2,112	7,673
Croatia	3,390	1,491	4,881
Slovenia	1,597	1,054	2,651
Lithuania	3,102	1,219	4,321
Latvia	1,455	752	2,207
Estonia	988	268	1,256
Cyprus	1,938	790	2,728
Malta	731	132	863
Luxembourg	108	56	164
TOTAL	764,459	632,535	1,396,994

What this tells us about Europe’s creator economy

Three things stand out according to me.

First, the creator economy is not evenly distributed. The biggest markets concentrate a massive share of the total creator volume, and they set the pace for the industry.

Second, TikTok has become structurally important in Europe. In some markets, TikTok volumes are already comparable to Instagram, and in France it is clearly ahead, even with restrictive criteria as described.

Third, the “long tail” of smaller countries is still meaningful. Even when the total number of creators is smaller, these markets can be extremely active, with high engagement and strong local influence.

Final thoughts

If you work in marketing, communication, or public policy, the creator economy cannot be treated as a vague trend anymore. It is now a measurable market, and it deserves better data.

This is exactly what we are trying to bring to the industry at Kolsquare: transparency, methodology, and European-level benchmarks.

And this is only the beginning.

As platforms evolve and creator behaviour changes, these numbers will evolve too. We will keep refining the methodology, and we will keep publishing data that helps the market make better decisions.

Data is February 2026. Source Kolsquare.