What the Creator Economy M&A Boom Tells Agency Founders About Building for Scale

The creator economy generated 81 acquisitions in 2025. That is a 17% year-on-year increase, and the market is forecast to reach $528 billion by 2030.

Most founders read that and think: interesting sector. What they should think is: what does this tell me about how buyers value businesses, and am I building mine accordingly?

The answer is instructive.

Agencies are trading at a median of 7.1x EBITDA, with a range of 5.3x to 9.2x. The spread matters. A business at the bottom of that range and a business at the top look very different to an acquirer, even if their revenue figures are similar.

What drives a business toward the upper end? The same things that drive scale in the first place: recurring revenue, diversified client base, systems that do not depend on the founder, and positioning clear enough that a buyer can see the logic without being walked through it.

The most in-demand acquisition targets in 2025 were software businesses (26%), agencies (21%), and media properties (16%). Agencies represent a significant slice of that activity. But the agencies that attract serious interest are not simply well-run service businesses. They are businesses with structural assets: proprietary methodology, retained revenue, audience or data that compounds.

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Deal volume has been rising steadily since 2020, and 2025 was a record year. Buyer demand surged as strategics and PE firms looked to enhance their capabilities, achieve greater scale, and strengthen their creator relationships.

The buyers are agency groups, talent networks, media companies, and increasingly non-endemic players from food, retail, and CPG. These non-endemic buyers increasingly view creators as distribution, not just marketing - and the same logic is starting to apply to agencies that have built real expertise and audience relationships.

That market appetite is real. The question is whether your business is in a position to meet it.

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The founders who scale well are not necessarily the ones doing the best work.

They are the ones who treat the work as an engine for something larger. That means building delivery infrastructure that does not collapse when headcount changes. It means creating revenue that renews rather than revenue that has to be won again every quarter.

It means developing a positioning that has genuine market meaning, not just a competent website.It also means investing ahead of revenue. The agencies appearing in M&A transactions did not start preparing for acquisition the year they went to market.

They built businesses that were ready, and the readiness was the result of decisions made years earlier. Average transaction sizes increased meaningfully in 2025, signalling growing confidence in the category's durability.

Landmark deals set strong benchmarks for valuation and strategic ambition. The market is not cooling. But it is becoming more selective. Buyers are prioritising profitable growth and defensible business models over raw scale or audience reach.

If you are building an agency and thinking seriously about what it could become, the time to make those structural decisions is not when a buyer approaches. It is now, while you have the time to make them properly.

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