2026 State of Holiday Season Report

The Holiday Feed Just Got Louder. Learn What It Takes to Cut Through.

Traackr's 2026 State of Holiday Season Report reveals the plays and signals separating the winners of Holiday 2025 from everyone else, plus exclusive creator payment insights from Lumanu. 

Based on US data across Q4 2025 and the first half of 2026, this report uncovers why the most crowded holiday window ever didn't reward the brands that spent the most, which content formats and creator tiers are breaking through, and how brands are rewriting the playbook for 2026.

What you will learn:

• The BFCM trap: Deal content grew 2.5x year over year, but attention per post collapsed 63%, proof the loudest week isn't the whole story.
• Retention beats reach: Top brands earned 57% of their holiday attention from creators they already had relationships with, versus 51% for the rest of the market.
• Boosting without a plan backfires: Boosted post volume more than tripled, but the payoff swung sharply by category. Some brands converted it into saves and shares, others lost ground.
• The polished holiday look underperforms: Multimodal AI analysis of more than 10,000 posts found close-up, warm-toned, multi-brand content earns far more saves than glossy single-brand exclusives.
• Affiliate power is shifting: TikTok Shop and ShopMy are surging in attention while LTK and Amazon decline.

With more creators, more content, and softer attention, brands can no longer win the holidays by showing up the loudest. This report delivers the data and the five-play playbook you need to cut through a crowded feed and build a holiday strategy that actually converts.

Download the report to get the full analysis and the five-play 2026 playbook that will help you win Holiday 2026 with creators.

This report draws on Traackr's analysis of the US market: more than 770K creators and over 12M pieces of content across Beauty, Personal Care, Fashion, Food & Beverage, and Adult Beverage. We benchmarked the Top 25 brands by Brand Vitality Score (VIT) against the rest of the market in each category, and ran multimodal AI creator content analysis on 10,279 posts to see what actually earns a save.

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