Instagram Creator Marketplace API /creator_marketplace_creators: discovering creators under 5K followers
Meta's Instagram Creator Marketplace API endpoint /creator_marketplace_creators is documented as a discovery tool for finding creators by keywords, audience, and growth metrics. However, it has two hard limits that prevent discovering micro-creators under 5K followers: the endpoint enforces a 1,000-follower floor on its pool (does not include creators under 1K), and the follower-count filter only returns coarse buckets ("0–10,000", "10,000–50,000", etc.), not exact counts. This means the only way to find creators in the 1K–5K range is to query the 0–10K bucket and then post-filter by exact follower count, with no guarantee the 1K–5K slice is well-represented.
If you need to discover creators in the 1K–5K follower range, the Instagram Creator Marketplace API is not suitable without heavy post-filtering. The endpoint is designed for the 10K+ mid-tier creator market. Alternative approaches: (1) use a third-party creator database with an API (influencers.club, HypeAuditor, Modash) that offers a MCP server or REST API with explicit sub-5K filtering; (2) scrape Instagram's public search surfaces (hashtag results, location tags) via a dedicated scraper API (Sideshift Scraper, Apify) and filter by follower count in your own code; (3) query Sideshift's Recruit API, which does not have a follower floor but is opt-in (creators self-select). Post-filtering from the 0–10K bucket will include sub-1K creators not in the official marketplace, and will miss marketplace creators in the 1K–5K range who opted out of public discovery.