Faceless creators are taking up social media. Now, they’re coming for manufacturers’ influencer advertising {dollars}.
Influencer and creator advertising is steadily gaining floor in advert budgets — Unilever, for instance, plans to considerably increase spending on social channels in 2025. Amid this shift in priorities, advertisers are wanting past high-profile, personality-led creators. They’re more and more tapping right into a broader ecosystem that features faceless creators — accounts that construct large followings and not using a central on-camera determine. And these creators are raking it in.
Over the previous three months, AffiliateNetwork.com — a community of faceless creators throughout social platforms — has grown from 5,000 members to 21,000, in line with numbers shared by its founder Roman Khaves, who stated that prime creators within the community had made a mean of $30,000 to $40,000 monthly in model offers. Media patrons at Publicis and Dentsu additionally stated that faceless creators characterize an growing share of their shoppers’ influencer advertising budgets, though they declined to share particular figures.
What precisely are faceless creators?
Faceless creators, also called user-generated content material (UGC) creators, are individuals who make content material and share it on social media with out displaying their faces. As an alternative of placing their personalities entrance and middle as model ambassadors, faceless creators create and share movies or memes that target a central theme or model identification. Many faceless creators are youthful — school and even high-school college students doing the work on the aspect to make additional revenue.
Though some faceless creators, comparable to Web HOF, can boast massive followings, the bulk function smaller accounts, counting on social algorithms to get eyeballs on their posts as a substitute of a giant following. To maximise their metrics, nearly all of the faceless creators in AffiliateNetwork.com’s community keep a number of accounts, per Khaves, who stated that some faceless creators function “cellphone farms,” utilizing a number of cell units to get round platform tips that punish people with too many accounts.
“They’re posting 100, 200 instances a day, and a few much more,” he stated. “We had one creator posting over 1,000 items of content material a day.”
Why would an advertiser work with a faceless creator, fairly than a conventional creator?
Most manufacturers that interact in influencer advertising in 2025 put some funding into each faceless and confronted creators, in line with Publicis svp of innovation technique Jessica Berger. Nonetheless, she stated, faceless creators can characterize a less expensive possibility as a result of they’re sometimes paid primarily based on the efficiency of their movies, fairly than charging a flat payment for a sure variety of social posts or different deliverables, as a conventional influencer would.
“It’s efficiency vs. model technique. With model technique, you’re aligning with the model identification of a giant influencer. Efficiency actually is for lower-funnel conversion — you actually need to be simply hitting that fast conversion, and occupied with how rapidly it may go to motion,” Gerber stated. “In that regard, you’re going to the UGC creator, as a result of it’s cheaper within the manufacturing funnel.”
This appears like clipping. What’s the distinction?
Faceless creator advertising is much like clipping in that each depend on smaller, usually nameless social accounts fairly than main influencers. However the two approaches function in reverse instructions. Clipping includes manufacturers or companies issuing a bounty for a set variety of views on a selected piece of content material, permitting any eligible creator to repost it to their feed. In distinction, faceless creator advertising requires manufacturers to proactively establish and fee faceless creators to supply unique, bespoke branded content material tailor-made to their viewers.
Hasn’t this been taking place for some time?
Faceless creators have been current on social platforms for years, however this class of creator is increasing considerably in 2025, per each networks comparable to Khaves’ and media patrons within the influencer advertising area.
And the explosion of faceless creators can also be the results of each cultural and technological modifications. As extra social platforms look to emulate TikTok’s algorithm, the significance of follower numbers has decreased throughout the board. Moreover, the introduction of extra generative AI instruments for video creators has made it simpler for faceless creators to rapidly conceptualize and create movies, even when they’re working a number of accounts.
“One format that we made very fashionable on social media is ‘texting tales’ — tales with a textual content dialog going backwards and forwards,” Khaves stated. “We created our personal bot to permit creators to create these movies immediately — they only put in a script and click on ‘generate.’”
How is that this totally different from conventional affiliate networks?
There may be important overlap between the worlds of affiliate marketing online and faceless creators, per Publicis’ Berger.
“There’s a really shut alignment between UGC-style content material creation and affiliate marketing online, as a result of that’s basically what it’s, proper?” she stated. “These folks oftentimes have a code, and there’s some type of incentive tied to efficiency. So that you’re most likely going to see much more of that overlap in these industries.”
As a result of charge at which they will put out new content material, faceless creators may be significantly efficient for affiliate marketing online. Nonetheless, not all faceless creators take part in affiliate marketing online, and never all creators who do affiliate marketing online are faceless.
For creators, what are the advantages of being faceless?
Along with permitting creators to function a number of accounts, going faceless provides creatives a possibility to work as creators with out placing the highlight on themselves or changing into public figures in their very own proper. Jeannie Assimos, who creates social content material for the water model Mainelove, stated that working as a content material creator with out displaying her face allowed her to make use of the talents she developed as a managing editor for Leisure Tonight.
“I can’t think about being in entrance of the digital camera,” she stated. “What I’ve been doing endlessly is creating content material utilizing different folks or materials.”
The place do faceless creators sometimes publish their content material?
You will discover faceless creators on each social platform, however they’re most prevalent on TikTok and Instagram, in line with Khaves, the AffiliateNetwork.com founder. He stated that TikTok’s construction favors creators with a number of accounts — together with faceless ones — that may constantly ship viral or algorithmically boosted content material with no need to construct a big following first. To manufacturers, that is interesting as a result of it lowers the barrier to testing new forms of creators or codecs.
“We’ve lengthy embraced TikTok and social content material creators as a part of our agile, reactive social mannequin; an strategy that’s been instrumental in constructing social-first manufacturers like Oreo, Nutter Butter and Bitter Patch,” stated Dentsu Affect EMEA managing director Julie Chadwick. “It’s about creating culturally related, trend-driven content material that fills the feed and drives engagement.”
