Research
Four Out of Five Paid-Partnership Ads in Europe Ran Dark in July
482k partnership ads, €36–55M in modeled spend – and four out of five of those ads left no matching public post anywhere. July's numbers from the Paid Partnership Report.
July's EU totals from the Paid Partnership Report: 482k boosted partnership ads and a modeled €36–55M behind them.
4.0B impressions with no public trace
61% of July's boosted-partnership reach was dark, up from 58% in June. Counted by ads instead of impressions it's starker: 81% of all paid-partnership ads in Europe last month had no matching public post.
Where July's boosted-partnership reach went
Adjusted reach by whether a matching public post exists, EU-27, July 2026
EU-27, Meta. Dark = no engagement on any public post. Same methodology as the report.
The dark end held the month's biggest placements too. The largest single creator boost in Europe all month reached 11.4M people on a modeled €46–69k, fronted by Vickaboo (@vickaboox), a creator with 145k followers, and it carried no visible engagement anywhere. Heliocare Italia reached 8.6M through Italian creator Lorenzo Bises, and Jacobs put German rapper Marteria in front of 7.6M with nothing on the profile to show for it.
BetterMe ran 12,991 partnership ads in July with a single creator, 88.3M impressions, none of it public. If you watch profiles for sponsored content, that campaign doesn't exist.
Food and drink owned the public boosts
Four of Europe's five biggest public partnership ads in July were food or drink: evian at 7.6M, Coca-Cola at 6.8M behind retired France international Djibril Cissé, Jacobs at 6.3M with German creator Tom Döringer, and Doritos at 6.1M with the F1 podcast P1 with Matt & Tommy. Revolut took the fifth at 6.0M.
Beauty still moves the most volume. L'Oréal Paris alone took 123M adjusted impressions across 394 ads and 171 creators, and ran 61% of it in the open. Very few advertisers at that scale boost that publicly.
Country spotlight: Netherlands
The Netherlands took 72M boosted-partnership impressions in July across 12,709 ads, with 1,336 creators fronting them. 69% of that reach was dark, well above the EU average.
Dove led the market at 4.2M impressions across 25 ads and 10 creators. Philips Home Living spread 3.8M across 51 creators, the widest roster among the market's biggest boosters. Department store de Bijenkorf put 2.9M impressions behind five dark ads with a single creator, and the NN Dam tot Damloop road race sat among the top boosters too, at 2.9M across three ads, all of it dark.
Where these numbers come from
Meta ads marked as a paid partnership, across all 27 EU countries. Reach is adjusted for how long each ad ran inside the month. Spend is a model built from reach breakdowns and CPM benchmarks, shown as a range. The per-country detail – top public and dark boosts, brand rankings, the creators behind them – is in the report, free per country.
See the full picture
Media intelligence across the entire creator economy – every partnership, boost, and mention.
