Sports & Fitness Influencer Marketing Benchmarks

How much of the United Kingdom creator feed is Sports & Fitness?

Fourth of 21 puts Sports & Fitness in the crowded middle of the UK feed rather than near its top. At 15.36% it sits almost level with Beauty & Wellness at 16.27% and a little ahead of Food & Drink at 13.01%. Shopping & Fashion and Entertainment sit far above all three. The category's real neighbourhood is that band of similarly sized categories, not the two that lead the feed, so the contest for attention here is fought against wellness and food content as much as anything else.

Who are the most visible creators in Sports & Fitness in United Kingdom?

The engagement spread is wide for such a short list. THATGUYSJOKES engages at 4.41%, clearly apart from the others. David Beckham sits at 2.47% and aramco at 3.03%. The rate does not follow views here: the biggest view count on the list comes with the lowest engagement. A lower rate can also reflect heavier boosting, so part of that gap may sit in how the views were distributed rather than in the content itself. None of these names holds the category alone. The 20 most viewed creators hold 14.92% of its views, so attention is spread well beyond the top accounts.

1. 1David Beckham@davidbeckham473M views2.47% ER
2. 2THATGUYSJOKES@thatguysjokes321M views4.41% ER
3. 3aramco@aramco267M views3.03% ER

The 20 most viewed creators hold 14.92% of all Sports & Fitness views in United Kingdom.

What is a good engagement rate for Sports & Fitness content?

Paying takes engagement to under half its organic level in this category: organic content averages 4.23%, paid 1.9%. The listed brands all clear the organic benchmark comfortably, so what separates them is the paid side. Manchester United holds its paid rate closest to organic at 2.68%, with Coca-Cola almost level at 2.58%. Coca-Cola's paid rate added 1.51 pp on the prior quarter. Liverpool FC falls furthest, with 1.17% paid against 5.06% organic, which puts it below the category's paid average, and its paid rate dropped 3.45 pp from a quarter earlier. Two clubs with near-identical organic engagement end up far apart once paid support is behind the post.

Brand	Organic ER	Paid ER
Manchester United	5.13%	2.68%
Liverpool FC	5.06%	1.17%
Coca-Cola	5.07%	2.58%

How much of the category are official partnerships?

On commercial intensity, Sports & Fitness is the median category. It ranks 11th of 21 on the share of views from posts carrying a partnership, sponsorship or boost, and its 7.09% matches the cross-category median exactly. That leaves it far below Tech & Gadgets at 30.28% and below Beauty & Wellness, its close neighbour in the feed. Paid support inside each quarter has edged up over the period shown. It started at 5.89% in the earliest quarter, stepped up to 8.11% two quarters earlier, slipped to 7.91% in the prior quarter and reached 8.24% this quarter, the highest in the window.

Advertising you cannot see on a creator profile

Dark boosts are creator-collaboration ads that never appear on the creator’s profile. In Sports & Fitness, United Kingdom, Q3 2026 they carry 14.86% of the paid reach.

• 4M reach
  Jill Scott MBE@jillscottjs8

  Paid by eToro10 ads
• 2.9M reach
  S P E N C E R M A T T H E W S@spencermatthews

  Paid by Huel8 ads
• 1.9M reach
  Morenike@morenikeawee

  Paid by Bondi Sands1 ad

Also in the full report

• Timing of BoostingThe median boost starts 4 days after the post goes up.
• Brand Leaderboard20 brands ranked by the public views their creator content earned.
• Paid vs. Earned media20 brands compared on what they bought against what they earned.
• Top Dark Boosts17 more dark placements ranked by the paid reach they delivered.

How these numbers are measured

• Ranked by total public views in the category; share is the creator's category views divided by the category total.
• Cumulative ads reach counts the ads delivering in the quarter, pro-rated to the days each one ran inside it, and a boosted post and a dark ad count once each. No cross-ad deduplication, so one person can be counted twice.
• Creators counts everyone whose content for the brand was live in the quarter, matching the Share of Influence dashboard's own gates; views counts what brand-scored content gained inside it, so the two sit on different populations.
• The paid column counts the ads that delivered in the quarter, public and dark together, each ad's reach pro-rated to the days it ran inside it. The organic column counts views the brand's content gained in the same window.
• Dark boosts are creator-collab ads that never appear on the creator's profile.
• Posts were tagged with categories differently in Q2 2026 than in Q3 2026, so this page does not compare the category's share of the feed with earlier quarters.

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