YEAR-OVER-YEAR CPM REVIEW
A MULTI-YEAR LOOK AT INFLUENCER CPM VOLATILITY BY VERTICAL ON YOUTUBE & INSTAGRAM [JANUARY 2023 – DECEMBER 2025]
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INTRODUCTION
You don’t work in influencer marketing if you have never been asked to estimate the views or CPM¹ [dollars paid per 1,000 impressions on a piece of content] for a campaign or a specific creator. One of the most common questions we get from brands entering — or scaling — influencer marketing is deceptively simple:
“What CPM should we expect to pay?”
It’s a fair question. CPM is one of the fastest ways to gut-check creator rates, forecast budgets, and compare influencer marketing to other paid media channels. The problem? There is no such thing as a universal CPM.
Across platforms, formats, creator size tiers, and, importantly, content verticals, CPMs fluctuate far more than most benchmarks would suggest. While industry averages can be helpful at a high level, they often mask the underlying reality: some content categories have become significantly more expensive over the past few years, while others are simply less expensive. Now please keep in mind that a higher CPM does not necessarily mean poorer performance. Performance all depends on the goals of the campaign and what you are measuring it against. However, if awareness and upper funnel metrics are the core objectives, then CPM is going to be one of the key benchmarks for measuring success.
To better understand what’s really happening, we analyzed historical sponsored content across YouTube and Instagram between January 1, 2023 and September 30, 2025², segmenting CPM performance by vertical genre³. The goal wasn’t to crown “cheap” or “expensive” categories — it was to understand how and why CPMs shift differently depending on the type of content being created.
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WHY CPMs DON’T EVOLVE TOGETHER
At a glance, it’s easy to assume CPMs rise and fall with macro forces: platform algorithm changes, seasonal demand, or ad budgets tightening. And while those factors matter, they don’t affect every vertical equally.
Influencer CPMs are shaped by a variety of ever-changing variables. However, a handful stick out as primary drivers:
-- Advertiser demand within a content vertical
-- Creator content supply & saturation
-- Historical performance & audience responsiveness
-- Requirements for a campaign⁴
-- Brand safety
These factors can vary significantly across verticals, and thus, CPMs diverge -- sometimes dramatically.
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CPM TRENDS BY VERTICAL: YOUTUBE & INSTAGRAM
Figure 1 below shows a line graph of the nine content verticals we looked at across YouTube and Instagram from 2023 through Q3 of 2025. Please note that the X-axis represents the year the content was posted, the Y-axis represents the CPM in dollars [USD], and the data points are the median CPM⁵ in that vertical after the content had been live for 90-days exactly.
Five of the nine verticals saw declining CPMs from 2023 to 2025: Beauty/Fashion, Cooking/Food, Education, Sports, & Travel. The remaining four saw CPMs increase over the same period: Business/Entrepreneurship, DIY/Makers, Family/Couple, & Health/Fitness.
Three verticals decreased each individual year-over-year: Beauty/Fashion, Education, & Travel content verticals showed a steady decline. Only two verticals increased each year-over-year: Business/Entrepreneurship & Health/Fitness.
The median within each year across verticals remained relatively constant at $36 in 2023, $41 in 2024, and back down to $36 in 2025. Because increases and decreases were fairly balanced, the overall median stayed stable. While correlation doesn’t imply causation, at The Outloud Group, we’re not surprised to see a bit of a plateau in CPMs after the rapid rise of influencer costs that took place between 2020 and 2023.
CPM TRENDS BY PLATFORM: YOUTUBE & INSTAGRAM
Figure 2 below shows a line graph of the average of each median CPM across YouTube compared to Instagram from 2023 through Q3 of 2025. Please note that the X-axis represents the year the content was posted, the Y-axis represents the average CPM in dollars [USD], and the data points are the average CPM⁶ across each platform.
There is a bit of a convergence between the two platforms over the three year period with the gap shrinking significantly. The average CPM on YouTube in 2023 was $40 compared to $66 on Instagram [65% higher cost]. However, that gap has diminished to a nearly negligible 2% as of Q3 2025.
It is not surprising to see some leveling off & stabilization of CPMs across platforms given the increase in Influencer Marketing investments⁷ over the better half of the last decade.
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CONCLUSION
There’s no one clear takeaway from this analysis, other than CPM data must be evaluated in context — whether that’s year over year, by content vertical, by platform, or against specific campaign goals. Like with anything in the influencer marketing space, context is king, benchmarks matter, and having clear campaign objectives that are defined & measurable is the only way to succeed in the ever-changing competition for social viewership.
At The Outloud Group, we’ve run nearly 50,000 sponsorships over the last eight years and we’re always monitoring benchmarks for CPMs, engagements, click-through rates, conversions and all sorts of other data points. Yes, the data and individual spot performances can vary significantly from creator to creator, campaign to campaign, and even month over month, but it’s always key to be tracking this data, no matter how volatile, so that you can take a step back and evaluate your strategy based on trends over time.
Per this study, Sports content is currently sitting at the lowest median CPM of the verticals we reviewed at $28 per 1,000 views across YouTube and Instagram Reels. If awareness is a key objective and a brand knows their audience segment overlaps with sports-watching audiences, it could represent a strong investment — especially with the 2026 Winter Olympics coming in a few short months and the big football game in early February.
Ultimately, the data reinforces an important point: CPMs must be evaluated in context. A declining CPM in one vertical doesn’t automatically signal reduced value, just as a rising CPM in another doesn’t imply inefficiency. Advertiser demand, creator supply, historical performance, campaign requirements, and brand safety considerations all interact differently depending on the category -- and those dynamics are what shape pricing.
Platform convergence adds another layer. While YouTube and Instagram historically carried different CPM expectations, that gap has narrowed between Reels and YouTube integrations. As formats mature and buying behavior becomes more standardized, platform alone is becoming a less reliable predictor of cost than the content that’s being created and who it’s reaching.
For brands, this means moving beyond static benchmarks and “industry average” CPM targets. The strongest strategies account for vertical-specific trends, platform nuances, and the role CPM plays within the broader campaign objective.
If you’re a brand interested in launching an influencer campaign or find yourself in the midst of scaling and figuring out how to measure one, please email us at hello@outloudgroup.com. We’re always game to chat strategy and measurement, or review our template reporting dashboard together. We’ve got more data like this to help steer your ship — or just have a really good conversation!
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ABOUT THE OUTLOUD GROUP
The Outloud Group is a full-service influencer marketing agency that creates & executes strategic campaigns to deliver measurable results. We combine art & science to authentically tell brand stories at scale. You can learn more about our work with brands such as Fiverr, AG1, Chomps, KitchenAid, and Acorns at www.OutloudGroup.com.
New media. Old-fashioned relationships.
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¹ CPM is defined as “Cost Per Mille” or, more simply put, is the monetary compensation a creator receives from a brand per 1,000 views obtained on a sponsored piece of content
² 6,175 unique YouTube integrations and Instagram Reels garnering 1,510,291,323 views after 90-days posted between January 1st, 2023 and September 30th, 2025
³ This study looked at nine popular content genres [Beauty/Fashion, Business/Entrepreneurship, Cooking/Food, DIY/Makers, Education, Family/Couple, Health/Fitness, Sports, and Travel]
⁴ For the purposes of this study, we held the core requirements of the campaign for the sponsorships included the same [60-90 second YouTube integrations and ~60 second Instagram Reels with usage filtered out]
⁵ The middle data point CPM measured after each piece of content was live for exactly 90-days from posting within each content vertical
⁶ The average of the median CPM measured after each piece of content was live for exactly 90-days from posting on YouTube and Instagram
⁷ https://www.emarketer.com/press-releases/us-influencer-marketing-spending-will-surpass-10-billion-in-2025/
