This is indeed massively increasing. In My country Nigeria, I have seen manufacturies and other private individual enterprises selling and gaining visibilities through social media influencers.

They prefer social media influencers than running Ads. Even if they'll run Ads, they as well go to influencers to help them with marketing.

And here is the big reason:

Those Social Media Influencers usually have loyal, organic, active followers, and the tendency of gaining huge visibility on any post they make.

Recently I was on Facebook scrolling, and I came across a video of Nigerian Popular Comedian. I believe that video was a brand content/partnership advert.

It was a clothing store that he was promoting.

To my surprise, within 24 hours of making that video, he was having already having 2 Million views on the video.

Now, imagine a scenario where the store chose or decided to run an advert using just the Facebook ads model, they might not get such an amount of reach within 24 hours. It might be difficult—my take per se.