If you’ve grown tired of the endless sponsored posts in your Instagram feed, of the glut of attractive young white people hawking brands they’ve never actually worn on YouTube, then we have bad news. Influencers are only getting started.

Maybe that comes as a surprise. People have been confidently predicting the death of the influencer ever since they first appeared pouting out of your phone screen, citing things like fake followers or a lack of authenticity. It hasn’t happened. They’re smouldering on, finding new platforms, new ways of speaking to their audiences and new ways to carve up big brands’ marketing budgets.

“This is just the beginning,” says Brittany Hennessy, co-founder of Carbon and the author of Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand In The Age Of Social Media. “[Influencer marketing is] essentially the digital version of word of mouth.” As new social platforms muscle out old media as the place people go for inspiration and information, brands are looking for new ways to get in front of customers. “Influencers are only going to get better at creating engaging content and brands are going to spend more money than ever before.”

That influencers have risen as print has collapsed is no coincidence. Brands have always needed a way to expose you, the consumer, to their clothes. In the days when glossy magazines were the only way to keep abreast of trends, that involved a delicate dance in which brands paid for ad space, and fashion editors prioritised their clothes in shoots. Now, they pay influencers to wear their clothes and post the pictures on Instagram. A much neater relationship on both sides of the curtain.

Brands also like influencers because it’s easier to see where their money goes. “They typically want their marketing to result in sales,” says Amy Odell, former editor of Cosmopolitan.com and a columnist at Business of Fashion. It’s always been tough to tell if an ad in the front of a magazine led to a sale in a shop. “But it’s a lot easier to track influencer sales because they can use [trackable links] and stuff like that.”