The influencer who can't get canceled — how big a business is that?

A while back, I stumbled across the account of a Brazilian girl.

Outfit posts, makeup posts, slices of daily life, day after day — and on the side, pushing products for her "employer." Her comment section was buzzing. And guess what: she doesn't exist at all.

Her name is Lu, full name Lu do Magalu — a virtual persona created by Magazine Luiza, the Brazilian retail giant, working as an influencer and a digital shopping assistant at once. As of 2025 she is still one of the most-followed virtual personas in the world, steadily bringing the company real engagement on e-commerce and social media.

My first reaction: fun. My second: this is bigger than it looks.

The job of "influencer" may be about to be redefined.

What is a virtual influencer?

So what is a virtual influencer?

Put simply, it's a digital human made with AI, 3D modeling, and motion capture. A face, a persona, a personality, a fan base — everything but a body.

She doesn't need sleep, doesn't need vacation. She won't get tangled in gossip, won't make drunken slip-ups, and above all won't get canceled. Whatever hours the brand sets, she keeps.

You might say: isn't that just a fancier cartoon character?

Actually, no. The difference is that she was grown to the exact spec of an influencer: posting content, taking sponsorships, engaging with fans, driving conversions. Behind her is a business with a clearly marked price tag.

How big? Let me run the numbers for you.

The math gets a little scary

Market research firm SNS Insider published a report that tallies the global virtual influencer market from top to bottom:

In 2025, the global market sits at about $8 billion. The report projects that by 2035, that number will reach $231.4 billion. Across the ten years in between, the compound annual growth rate is 40%.

What does 40% mean? It means growing 40 percent a year, ten years straight. 2026 is expected to reach $11.2 billion first, then keep multiplying — $8 billion becomes $231.4 billion, nearly 29 times bigger.

Insane.

Nearly 29 times. If you pulled out almost every hot sector of the past decade and compared slopes, you could count on one hand the ones that could stand next to it.

The US is even more extreme. A market of about $2.96 billion in 2025; by 2035, the report expects $82.5 billion — annual growth of 39.5%, basically in lockstep with the global pace.

At this point you have to ask: what's driving it?

Why are brands so willing to pay?

My answer is one word: certainty.

Think about it: when a brand works with a human influencer, what is it after? Reach, trust, and fans who actually listen to him. But there are three things about a real human that a brand can never get: time, emotions, and risk.

Humans get tired; when the schedule is full, it's full. Humans get moody; have an off day, and the content falls flat. Humans get canceled; one scandal, and the brand pays along with them.

Virtual influencers lock all three down. Online 24/7, emotions permanently stable, persona written in code — adjust it whenever you like.

What's even more brutal is the cost and speed. Now that generative AI has matured, the speed and cost of producing virtual influencer content leave the human collaboration model in the dust. A human shoots four videos a month; a digital human can put out dozens a day, and churn out countless versions per platform and per audience.

A human influencer is rented traffic. A virtual influencer is an asset you own.

And the job keeps getting heavier. It used to be posting and seeding interest; now that e-commerce and social commerce have taken off, virtual influencers step on stage directly to do product demos and drive sales — from content all the way to checkout. The report specifically lists this as one of the biggest trends.

What kind of "person" sells best?

Inside this business, things are splitting apart.

The first split: human-looking, or not?

In 2025, photorealistic human likenesses held 57% of the market — the dominant slice by far. Why? Because only something human-looking creates emotional connection, and only then is the audience willing to believe.

But the ones that don't look human are growing the fastest.

Why? Think about it: a game character, a metaverse mascot, a cartoon cat — none of them carries the burden of "how human should I look." Brands can customize them any way they like; age, looks, and mode of appearance are all unrestricted. Gaming, entertainment, metaverse — these settings actually prefer them.

The second split: what exactly is the brand buying?

The bulk is "solutions," 67% in 2025: tools for building digital humans, platforms for managing marketing campaigns, systems for analyzing data. The fastest-growing is "services": customizing personas for you, planning content, running accounts on your behalf.

To put it in a metaphor: tools are the shovel; services are the guide who digs for gold alongside you.

The third split: which industry spends most freely?

Fashion and lifestyle, 31% in 2025, are the biggest buyers. Apparel, beauty, luxury — they fall hardest for the "visual persona" play and naturally aim at young people. The fastest-growing, by contrast, is sports and fitness: AI coaches, virtual fitness figures, digital humans inside wearables — highly interactive, used every day.

The map of this business

The map is worth a look too.

North America is the biggest, taking 42% of the global share in 2025. Marketing agencies, AI technology companies, and brands willing to try new things all cluster there. The US alone accounts for 82.75% of North America's regional revenue.

Europe follows, dense with fashion and luxury brands. The UK is the region's demand hub, at 24.55%. Interestingly, there's one thing European brands can't get around when building virtual influencers: the regulatory debate over AI transparency and content disclosure. In Europe, business starts with compliance.

Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing of all. China is the region's largest single market at 31.4%, backed by a huge social commerce and livestreaming ecosystem, with digital-human technology companies bubbling up fast. Japan and South Korea go without saying: virtual idol culture has been accumulating for decades, and audiences there were already ahead of many Western markets in accepting two-dimensional characters.

The Middle East and Latin America are ramping up. The UAE leads the Middle East at 27.1% of its region; Brazil runs away with Latin America at 36.8% — Lu, from the start of this piece, lives in Brazil.

But everything has a flip side

At this point, it all sounds like good news. But everything always has a flip side.

The biggest weak spot of this business is precisely its selling point: the persona.

The persona is fake. The audience knows it's fake, and the brands know the audience knows. So where does trust come from?

There's a detail in this report worth chewing on: marketing with hyper-realistic "digital humans" earns noticeably higher audience trust than cartoonish images. In other words, the more lifelike, the more believable; the more cartoonish, the more suspect.

Here's the trouble. The industries with the highest trust thresholds — finance, healthcare — need a "credible face" the most, and are precisely the ones that dare not casually deploy a fake face. The more trust-sensitive the industry, the harsher it vets virtual influencers.

So brands have only one road left: disclose first. Tell the audience in plain words: this is AI, not a human. There's no hiding it — and trying only drives the audience away faster.

A virtual influencer's trust doesn't come from pretending to be human; it comes from calmly admitting it isn't.

Opportunities, and who's at the table

Looking ahead ten years, the opportunities sit mainly in two places.

One is metaverse retail. Once immersive digital stores go from experiment to everyday life, the virtual influencer becomes shop assistant, storefront, and brand ambassador in one.

The other is hyper-realistic technology. As noted, the more realistic, the more credible. Whoever makes their digital human the most "real," with emotional reactions most like a living person, takes the highest-premium orders.

Quite a few players are already seated at the table: Meta, Tencent, Baidu, Adobe, Samsung, Epic Games; digital-human specialists Soul Machines and Synthesia; virtual idol makers Superplastic and Brud. In 2025 ByteDance kept investing in digital-human technology for TikTok, so that brands and creators alike can mass-generate AI personas. In 2024, Aitana Lopez, the AI influencer built by the agency The Clueless, had already secured a steady string of brand collaborations in the fashion world.

Giants, platforms, and a whole stack of startups — all at the table.

A few closing words

Looking back, what the virtual influencer business sells is actually neither "virtual" nor "influencer."

It's certainty.

Controllable cost, controllable output, controllable persona, scandal-proof risk management. With 40% annual growth, brands have cast their vote for certainty.

But I want to leave you with the other side of the coin: when there is no real person behind that ever-more-real face on the screen, what is it that we actually trust?

The persona itself, or the company willing to take responsibility for that persona?

I don't have an answer to this question yet. But in the next decade, we will probably all be forced to figure it out.

And maybe by then, your favorite blogger will greet you first: Hi — I have no body.