Founder's thesis — May 2026
The European creator economy in 2026 is the most underrated market in the world
Most marketing publications still write about influencer marketing as if it were a US story with European footnotes. After running e-commerce campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, and after spending the last two weeks listening to creators signing up to Collabios, I think they have it backwards. Here is the thesis I am betting the company on — sourced 2026 data on the left, what I have actually seen on the right.
Six things to take away
- Meta Ads CPM is $16.08 in the United States in 2026, against $9.05 in Germany, $6.95 in France and $6.65 in Spain: the same impression costs roughly half as much in those markets (Lebesgue, 2026 e-commerce benchmarks).
- Coherent Market Insights sizes the European creator economy at US$41.15 billion in 2026, growing about 25% a year, while influencer marketing specifically accounts for about €4.2 billion in 2025 (FluxNote).
- Eastern European e-commerce turnover grew 18% in 2024, the fastest of any European region, while Western Europe grew 6% (European E-commerce Report 2025, Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce). Creators in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic are the most under-priced supply in the European market right now.
- eMarketer forecasts that micro and nano influencers will claim 45.5% of influencer marketing spending in 2026. The era of the mega-influencer single-bet campaign is over.
- UGC content drives 28% higher engagement than branded content and costs 30–80% less than traditional influencer deals (Marketing LTB, Whop).
- United States marketers consistently underestimate Europe: 510 million people, fragmented language markets that reward local creators, and a regulatory environment that punishes lazy translation. Europe is the better market for a small brand with a small budget — full stop.
Coherent Market Insights sizes the European creator economy at US$41.15 billion in 2026 and projects US$199.53 billion by 2033, a 25.3% compound annual growth rate. Influencer marketing is one slice of it: about €4.2 billion in Europe in 2025, growing roughly 15% a year, per FluxNote. Lebesgue's 2026 e-commerce benchmarks put Meta Ads CPM at $16.08 in the United States against $11.81 in the United Kingdom and $9.05 in Germany, and this thesis argues Eastern Europe (Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia) is the most underpriced creator supply in Europe.
This founder thesis published by Ghassen Daoud (Collabios, May 2026) draws on published industry reports (Coherent Market Insights, FluxNote, Lebesgue, eMarketer and the European E-commerce Report 2025), with market figures updated in September 2026. It is an opinion piece, not an analysis of Collabios bookings. It covers the EU vs US CPM gap, EU-native regulatory compliance (Loi 2023-451, UWG §5a, AGCom Codice di Condotta, RD 444/2024) as structural competitive advantage, the hidden EU e-commerce bridge via the Moroccan diaspora, and price tiers per country. US marketers treat Europe as one country — that is the costliest mistake.
The CPM gap nobody talks about
If you run e-commerce in 2026 and your unit economics work, you do not have a creative problem. You have a CPM problem.
I have personally bought paid traffic on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States I burned through ad budget at a CPM north of $50 in some niches. The purchasing power was real, but so was the competition — and a small budget cannot survive a baseline above $16. I lost money on dropshipping in the US more than once before I admitted that the math was structurally broken for me.
Then I switched campaigns to Spain. My CPM dropped to around $10. The same creative, the same offer, the same product — suddenly profitable. That single jump in unit economics is the reason I am building a European-first marketplace rather than another US export with a translation layer.
The 2026 Meta Ads benchmarks point the same way. Lebesgue measures a $16.08 CPM in the United States, against $9.05 in Germany, $8.58 in the Netherlands, $7.96 in Belgium, $11.81 in the United Kingdom and $8.40 in Switzerland. On the most expensive input in any paid-traffic budget, the US pays roughly double the German, Dutch or Belgian rate. If you have ever wondered why some European e-commerce brands scale faster than their US counterparts on a fraction of the spend, this is most of the answer.
$16.08
$11.81
$9.05
If your CPM in the United States is $16 and your CPM in Germany is $9, you are not running the same business. You are running two completely different unit economics.
The European creator economy by the numbers
Before I share the contrarian half of the thesis, here are the boring numbers that should already be making US-centric marketing teams uncomfortable.
US$41B
Estimated size of the European creator economy market in 2026 (US$41.15 billion), projected to reach US$199.53 billion by 2033, a 25.3% compound annual growth rate (Coherent Market Insights, April 2026).
€4.2B
European influencer marketing spend specifically in 2025, growing 15% year on year (FluxNote).
$16.08
Meta Ads CPM in the United States in 2026, against $11.81 in the United Kingdom and $9.05 in Germany (Lebesgue, e-commerce benchmarks, July 2026).
45.5%
Share of 2026 influencer marketing spending forecast to go to micro and nano influencers (eMarketer, Creator Economy 2026).
510M
Population of the European Union plus the United Kingdom — roughly 1.5× the United States.
The Eastern Europe thesis — why I am betting on Warsaw, Bucharest and Sofia
Everyone is looking at Berlin and Paris. I am looking east.
My contrarian take, the one I am most willing to defend in public: creators in Eastern European countries — Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Greece — have more upside in 2026–2028 than their peers in the established Western markets. The data is on my side. Eastern European e-commerce turnover grew 18% in 2024 against 6% in Western Europe, according to the European E-commerce Report 2025 from Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce.
The reason is the same reason Spain saved my dropshipping business. Lower CPM, similar purchasing power per capita in the urban centres, less competition from large incumbent brands, and a creator scene that has not yet been professionalised into the awkward sponsored-content cadence you see in older markets. The audiences trust their creators more. The creators charge less. The brand outcomes are better per euro spent. That is a market about to be re-priced.
There is one regulatory caveat. In Poland, the consumer authority UOKiK can fine influencers and brands up to 10% of turnover for advertising that is not tagged as such (UOKiK, February 2024), and the rest of the region enforces its own disclosure rules. The opportunity is real, but the compliance bar is going up alongside it. If you take the thesis seriously, you also have to take the local disclosure regimes seriously.
The most under-priced supply in the European creator market right now is in Warsaw, Bucharest, Sofia and Prague. By 2028 it will not be.
Europe's hidden e-commerce bridge — the Moroccan diaspora
Almost nobody in mainstream marketing writing has covered this, and it is one of the most useful sourcing observations I have picked up since starting Collabios.
The Moroccan diaspora has built one of the most active small-business e-commerce ecosystems bridging Africa, Europe and the Gulf. Operators I have worked with personally run drop-shipping and e-commerce stores into Spain and France from Morocco, and a meaningful number of them also serve Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain in parallel. Their cost base is leaner than a European-only operator's, their language coverage spans Arabic and French and Spanish, and they are wired into European logistics far more deeply than a casual observer would guess.
For brands building creator partnerships in Spain, France or the broader EU+Gulf corridor, Moroccan operators are an under-recognised supplier base and an under-recognised partner pool for collaborations. I am not making a generalisation about a nationality. I am pointing at a working ecosystem that has been hiding in plain sight, and that maps onto exactly the kind of multi-market campaigns Collabios is built to support.
Five things US marketers consistently get wrong about Europe
I have run campaigns in the United States. The most common mistakes I see US-trained marketing teams make when they try Europe are not strategic — they are about basic facts.
1
They assume the United States is the bigger market
It is not. The European Union plus the United Kingdom is roughly 510 million people. The United States is 333 million. Add the rest of the European Economic Area and the Western Balkans and the gap widens further. Yes, US GDP per capita is higher on aggregate, but European purchasing power in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia is fully comparable. Europe is the bigger consumer market by people, not the smaller one.
2
They treat Europe as one country
It is twenty-seven member states plus the United Kingdom, twenty-four official languages and roughly the same number of regulators with their own influencer disclosure regimes. A campaign that works in Spain will not necessarily land in Germany, and the creator who succeeds in France will not automatically translate to Italy. The local-language layer is not a finishing polish, it is the entire game.
3
They underestimate purchasing power outside the capitals
GDP per capita in Catalonia, Bavaria, the Île-de-France, Lombardy, Stockholm and Zurich is comparable to wealthy US states. The narrative that Europe is poorer than the United States falls apart the moment you look at regional data.
4
They use English-only creative and wonder why it does not convert
European audiences reward local-language creators heavily. A French creator speaking French to a French audience will convert at multiples of an American creator speaking English to a French audience. This is not a preference — it is how the algorithm decides what to surface. English-first creative caps your reach in every European market that is not the United Kingdom, Ireland or the Netherlands.
5
They forget that lower CPMs change the math
A creative that barely breaks even at a $16 US CPM earns a real margin at a $6.65 Spanish or $5.55 Polish CPM (Lebesgue, 2026). Same offer, same creator quality, completely different unit economics. US marketers tend to budget Europe as if it were a smaller version of the United States. The math is not smaller — it is structurally different, and the structure favours small budgets.
Country price tiers — most expensive, middle, most affordable
Influencer prices track cost of living and ad-market competition. Based on lived experience and 2026 CPM data, here is how I would group European markets for someone planning a first campaign.
Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland
Highest cost of living in Europe, premium brands compete heavily for limited Scandinavian creator supply, and Swiss CPM and creator rates sit at the very top of the European range. Best fit for established brands with budgets that scale, not for a first test.
United Kingdom, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Netherlands, Ireland
Mature markets with deep creator supply, established disclosure regimes, and Meta CPMs of roughly $7 to $12 (Lebesgue, 2026). The UK skews higher and could arguably be moved up a tier. France, Germany and Italy host the largest creator workforces on the continent. The middle band is the right starting point for a brand that wants scale and predictability.
Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
Lower CPMs, less professionalised creator scenes that translate to higher engagement, and significant headroom on creator rates. Portugal, Italy and Spain are under-explored relative to their consumer power. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are tiny markets but punch above their weight in tech and software niches. This tier is where I would test a first €5,000 campaign.
UGC vs influencer in Europe — what 14 days of Collabios sign-ups reveal
Honest disclosure: Collabios launched 14 days before this thesis was published. We have somewhere between 20 and 30 creators signed up, and zero completed bookings yet. That is a tiny sample, and it should not be read as a benchmark. But the composition of those 20–30 sign-ups already tells me something.
The clear majority of early Collabios sign-ups are UGC creators rather than follower-driven influencers. From the founder seat, the reason is structural. UGC creators are happy to onboard because their work product is the deliverable — they do not have to expose an audience or risk a feed mismatch. They respond to brand outreach faster, they accept smaller test budgets, and the onboarding friction is lower because there is no audience-vetting back and forth.
External data points the same way. UGC content drives 28% higher engagement than branded content, and costs 30–80% less than traditional influencer deals (Marketing LTB, Whop). For a brand running its first European creator test, UGC is the lower-risk, lower-budget, faster-iteration entry point. Influencer partnerships are the right second move once you know what creative converts.
If you have never run a European creator campaign before, start with three UGC briefs across two countries, see which creative converts, and only then commission an influencer to amplify the winning angle to their audience.
Two real campaigns — one that worked, one that did not
Both campaigns below were ones I ran personally before Collabios existed. I am sharing them because the lessons are more useful than the outcomes.
I collaborated with a TikTok creator based in the United States to promote one of my other projects. Their feed used non-facial content — gaming visuals in the background, trending audio in front. It scaled because the format was production-light, the audience was already accustomed to that style of sponsored placement, and the audio cue did most of the conversion work. The lesson: a creator's format matters more than their follower count, especially on TikTok where the algorithm cares about completion and shares, not about who the creator is.
I ran a campaign for an e-commerce store of mine in the sports niche, specifically a swimming product. I chose a US-based Instagram Reels influencer. She shot the video, posted the story, and then took it down within hours because she felt — correctly, in hindsight — that her audience would not be interested in that product category. The collaboration ended in good faith. She refunded the campaign, we ended the brief on good terms, and I learned that audience fit beats reach every single time. There was no contract dispute. There was only an honest creator who knew her audience better than I did.
Audience fit beats follower count. A 15K micro-creator with the right audience outperforms a 500K macro-creator with the wrong one. That is why you should look at a creator's audience before you book, on Collabios or anywhere else.
The €5,000 playbook for testing the European market
If you have €5,000 to test European creator marketing for the first time, do not buy one big campaign. Do five small ones.
Divide the €5,000 into three to five small test budgets. The objective in test one is not revenue, it is learning what creative converts in which market.
Test at least two formats — UGC asset for paid amplification, and an organic in-feed creator post — so you can compare an own-channel result against a distributed one.
Test at least two countries from different tiers. Pair a middle-band market (France or Germany) with a most-affordable market (Poland or Spain) to expose the CPM and rate delta.
Measure engagement and conversion, not reach. Reach is the vanity metric the platform reports; conversion is the number that pays your salary.
Double down on what works. The fifth test should cost three to four times what the first one did, and it should be a near-clone of whichever earlier test produced the best return.
Marketing is a series of experiments, not a single bet. The biggest mistake a first-time European brand makes is buying one expensive creator and hoping it works. Buy five small ones and learn.
Three predictions for 2026–2027
Predictions I am willing to put my name on.
01.
Collabios becomes Europe's number-one creator marketplace
Most existing platforms are US-built tools with a European tab. Collabios is European-built from day one, with local-language disclosures, EU-native escrow, and creator supply that maps onto where European brands actually want to spend. I expect Collabios to be the platform European brands and Eastern European creators name first by Q4 2027.
02.
Eastern Europe's share of European influencer spend doubles by 2028
Brands chasing lower CPMs will follow the CPM. Creators in Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Baltics will absorb a disproportionate share of the next two years of European influencer marketing budget growth. The brands that move first will lock in the under-priced supply before it re-rates.
03.
Free tooling becomes the table stakes of creator marketplaces
A marketplace that gives brands and creators access to free rate calculators, contract generators, country-specific disclosure helpers and engagement-rate tools will win the next two years of market share. Brands will not pay platform fees for a list of profiles any more — they will pay for the workflow that makes a campaign legally compliant, properly priced and properly measured. Collabios is building exactly that layer.
Go deeper
Supporting articles in this cluster
Each of these articles drills into one slice of the thesis above. Read them when you want the granular country-, regulation- or rate-level detail behind the broader argument.
Selling into Europe from outside the bloc? The compliance side of the same thesis lives in our EU compliance guide for cross-border sellers — GPSR, VAT/OSS and how to source country-native creators for each market you ship to.
Methodology
Methodology — and what we are being transparent about
Collabios launched 14 days before this thesis was written. We currently have between 20 and 30 registered creators, the majority of them UGC creators rather than follower-driven influencers, and zero completed marketplace bookings. This is therefore not a benchmark report. It is a founder's thesis backed by external 2026 industry data and my personal experience running e-commerce and influencer campaigns across the United States and Europe over the past several years. Every external number quoted is sourced and attributed.
When the data drops
Anonymized booking-level data from completed Collabios marketplace campaigns, with personally identifying details stripped before analysis.
A creator survey targeting 300 registered creators on rate cards, repeat-customer rates, and platform preferences.
Median rates by country × niche × tier, with 25th and 75th percentile bands. Means are skewed by outliers; medians are the more honest signal.
Gifted-only collaborations excluded from rate medians; UGC deliverables reported separately from in-feed influencer posts.
Cross-checks against Influencer Marketing Hub's annual benchmark and against publicly disclosed rate cards from named creators where available.
Get the first data drop the day it lands
Drop your email and we will send the first real Collabios marketplace data — country × niche × tier rate medians, no sales pitch in between. One email when it drops, unsubscribe in one click.
Single-purpose list. One email at launch, no resale, no profiling, no marketing drip in between.Press, journalists, analysts
If you cover the creator economy, EU regulation, or marketing-data trends and want an embargoed preview of the first data drop ahead of public release, write in. We grant previews seven days early in exchange for a fact-check pass.
Press contact: contact@collabios.com
Frequently asked
Coherent Market Insights sizes the European creator economy at US$41.15 billion in 2026 and projects US$199.53 billion by 2033, a 25.3% compound annual growth rate (report published 27 April 2026). Influencer marketing is one part of it: FluxNote puts influencer marketing in Europe at about €4.2 billion in 2025, growing roughly 15% a year. The two figures measure different things: the first covers the whole creator economy, the second only brands' influencer budgets.
Not yet. This thesis was published in May 2026, two weeks after Collabios went live and before any booking had been completed, so it is a founder's thesis. The external numbers (CPM, market size, e-commerce growth, UGC engagement) come from published 2026 industry reports. The hypotheses, opinions and personal stories are explicitly Ghassen Daoud's. Marketplace data will be published once enough bookings are completed; no date is set.
Three reasons. First, CPM is materially lower than the Western European average, which changes the unit economics of any paid-traffic campaign. Second, Eastern European e-commerce turnover grew 18% in 2024 versus 6% in Western Europe (European E-commerce Report 2025). Third, the creator scene is less professionalised, which translates to higher engagement per follower and more authentic creator-audience trust. The opportunity is real, but the regulatory bar is rising: in Poland, UOKiK can fine up to 10% of turnover for untagged advertising.
According to Lebesgue's 2026 e-commerce benchmarks (published 27 July 2026), Meta Ads CPM is $16.08 in the United States, against $9.05 in Germany, $8.58 in the Netherlands, $7.96 in Belgium, $11.81 in the United Kingdom, $8.40 in Switzerland, $6.95 in France and $6.65 in Spain. On the most expensive input in any paid-traffic budget, the US pays roughly double most Western European markets.
Onboarding friction is lower and the deliverable is content that the brand owns and amplifies on its own channels. UGC drives 28% higher engagement than branded content and costs 30–80% less than traditional influencer deals (Marketing LTB, Whop). For a first European creator test on a small budget, UGC is the right entry point. Influencer amplification of the winning angle is the right second move.
Buying one expensive creator and hoping it works. The right approach is to divide the budget into three to five small tests across formats and countries, measure conversion not reach, and double down on the test that wins. Marketing is a series of experiments, not a single bet.
Once enough bookings are completed for the numbers to mean something. As of September 2026, no date is set. The first release will include anonymized booking-level rates, engagement averages and creator supply numbers by country and niche, with a quarterly cadence after that.
Yes. The thesis is free to read and free to cite. We ask only that you link back to this page and credit "Collabios — European Creator Economy 2026 Founder's Thesis" so readers can verify the sourced numbers.