Creators earning more than $250k a year pick Instagram over TikTok for branded content by 60% to 30%, inverting the overall split where TikTok leads 52% to 43%, according to a CreatorIQ survey of roughly 5,000 mostly US creators. Instagram also edged TikTok on long-term business potential, 38% to 35%, with YouTube third at 23%. TikTok is where smaller creators get paid, since Spark Ads lets brands cheaply boost posts from micro influencers and TikTok Shop opens affiliate revenue to anyone with 1,000 followers, but the larger budgets follow creators to Instagram as they scale. Talent firm Illuminate Social said 64% of the brand partnerships it handled this year involved Instagram against 14% for TikTok.
