In Graphic Detail: Virtual influencers click with young audiences, yet brands’ interest wanes
By Alexander Lee • September 11, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Younger audiences are warming up to virtual influencers — but marketers are still on the fence.
Over the past year, it’s become difficult to open Instagram or TikTok without scrolling by a virtual influencer. These are different from the faceless creators who use generative AI tools to mass-produce content; instead, they are fully AI-generated avatars whose appearance, voice and actions are fine-tuned by an individual or team of individuals behind the scenes.
Virtual creators have been around for years, but have received a new wave of attention this year as generative AI and avatar technology entered the mainstream. In July, a Wimbledon-inspired post by the virtual influencer Mia Zelu went mega-viral; earlier this month, Zelu and Miquela were the subjects of a buzzy New York Times profile.
Yet in spite of the increased prominence of top virtual influencers, brands’ demand for this type of creator has declined in 2025. This is part of the natural boom-and-bust cycle that occurs around disruptive cultural or technological forces, according to Kyle Dulay, the co-founder of the influencer marketing platform Collabstr. Currently, younger consumers appear to trust virtual influencers more than brands do, based on a comparison of surveys by organizations like Whop and the World Federation of Advertisers polling both groups on the topic — but Dulay is confident that the category will inevitably continue to grow.
“I do think it’s going to be a big thing, but right now, I definitely think it’s blown out of proportion,” Dulay said. “It’s a catchy headline; it’s fun to get clicks. But, generally, the data is not reflecting that right now.”
Here’s a look into some of the numbers behind marketers’ and consumers’ approaches to virtual influencers in 2025.
Brands’ interest in virtual influencers is down by nearly 30 percent between 2024 and 2025
In October 2024, 86 percent of brands consented to include AI creators in their influencer marketing campaigns, according to an analysis by Collabstr of thousands of campaigns processed by the platform over the past year, which the company shared with Digiday in August. By last month, that number had fallen to 60 percent — a drop that co-founder Dulay credited to brands’ growing wariness of potential backlash against their use of AI technology.
Currently, 96 percent of brands that have no plans to work with virtual influencers cite consumer trust issues as their reasons for caution, according to an April 2025 study by the World Federation of Advertisers.
The top virtual influencer gets low engagement and is losing followers
Miquela Sousa is arguably the world’s most well-known virtual influencer, and her Instagram follower count of nearly 2.5 million is nothing to sniff at. Miquela is a fictional American character, singer and social media personality created by Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou in 2016.
But a look into Miquela’s numbers shows that her following has been dropping consistently over the past year, with an average monthly loss of nearly 15,000 followers, according to numbers shared with Digiday by the data platform CreatorDB.
In the past year, Miquela’s following has dropped by 141,837. Her engagement is also relatively low compared to human influencers, with the virtual influencer in the 14th percentile for overall Instagram engagement. (A representative of Dapper Labs, which owns Miquela, did not respond to a request for comment.)
“We also do strategy for most of the brands that we work with, and I can safely say we never really considered working with any of these channels,” said CreatorDB CEO Clayton Jacobs, who didn’t name brands. “When we’re doing analysis and analytics, one of the things we do look at is growth rate.”
Gen Z consumers are warming up to AI creators
Despite marketers’ skepticism around virtual influencers, a significant portion of young people appear to be comfortable with this type of creator, with 40 percent of the Gen Z cohort following a virtual influencer on social media, according to a May 2025 study by the marketing platform Whop that polled 2,001 U.S. Gen Zers.
Furthermore, there is a good chance that they will be influenced by them to make a purchase at some point; Whop’s study found that 33 percent of respondents had made a purchasing decision because of an AI influencer.
Most brands have no plans to work with virtual influencers
The World Federation of Advertisers’ April 2025 study — which surveyed 33 advertising executives representing 27 multinational brands, with an estimated total global ad spend of $65 billion — also found that 60 percent of respondents had no plans at all to adopt virtual influencers. Only 15 percent of the advertisers who responded said that they had tested virtual influencers so far.
Georgia Goodwin, the chief client officer for the influencer marketing agency Digital Voices, said that her company had drawn a “very strong line” against working with virtual influencers that impersonate humans, citing ethical concerns, including that working with virtual influencers risked taking sponsorship dollars away from individual human influencers who might need it more.
“Our philosophy is democratizing media and putting big media budgets back into the hands of individuals to create a better life for themselves,” Goodwin said. “So, actually putting budget into AI influencers who are potentially owned by media corporations doesn’t fit with our values and our purpose.”
