Consolidation is here: The first half of 2025 saw 52 M&A deals in the creator economy

Once upon a time, the internet was a wild west landscape where anyone with a novel idea and a web browser could strike it rich, but the deal activity of 2025 is telling a different story. Consolidation has come for the creator economy, with a higher number of mergers and acquisitions compared to previous years.

Information about M&A activity in the creator economy comes from Quartermast Advisors, a boutique M&A advisory firm that recently published a report analyzing deals from the first half of 2025. To compile its ledger of creator economy consolidation, Quartermast looked at “press releases, SEC filings, and news coverage about public transactions,” while also leveraging “our deep professional networks and market expertise.”

Through that research, Quartermast found that M&A activity has surged year-over-year. There were 52 of those deals in the creator economy during the first half of 2025, compared to 30 from the first half of 2024. That was good for a 73% uptick. Most of the relevant transactions (79%) involved North American companies.

The M&A deals of 2025 are notable for both their volume and their range. Recent transactions that have crossed our radar have touched fields as diverse as entertainment (Skybound’s acquisition of Nine Four), influencer marketing (gen.video picking up Bounty), talent management (Whalar Group adding Sixteenth), and Roblox development (Super League acquiring Supersocial).

Quartermast found that software companies were the most common M&A targets in the first half of 2025, showing up in 27% of deals. The next categories on that list were media companies (19%), agencies (14%), and talent management firms (14%).

With those deals, venture capital titans are worming their way into the creator economy. Quartermast noted that the two biggest M&A transactions of the first half both involved private equity firms. The influencer marketing platform Later

, backed by Summit Partners, acquired social commerce brand Mavely for $250 million. PSG Equity chose a more direct path to the creator biz by paying $150 million for a majority stake in membership platform Uscreen.

The deep-pocketed firms taking stakes in the creator economy are looking to advance the industry by combining proprietary resources with the insights, know-how, and personnel offered by digital media companies. Publicis Groupe, which followed up its blockbuster acquisition of Influential by scooping up dealmaker Captiv8 in 2025, is one of the main buyers looking to leverage the institutional knowledge of creator-facing firms.

“Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of Captiv8 advances its goal of building the most powerful influencer marketing platform,” reads the report. “Merging Captiv8’s technology with Influential’s scale and Epsilon’s identity graph enables brands to unify creator strategy, activation, and measurement across social, commerce, and media channels.”

Quartermast is expecting the M&A binge to continue in the second half of the year, with international firms potentially getting in on the fun. International targets accounted for just 21% of M&A transactions in 2025 H1 after reaching 40% a year prior. Quartermast is projecting a reversal of that trend over the next six months, so observers should pay attention to global markets to determine whether the current flurry of activity is a major trend in the creator world — or if it’s merely a passing fancy.