How much influencers are really paid

You don't need to have a lot of followers to make a lot of money.

Influencer Kat Clark (right) who is number 30 on The Influence Index. Picture: Instagram / @kat_clark

You don't need to have a lot of followers to make a lot of money.

Micro-influencers with an audience as small as 50,000 followers could make up to $200,000 a year through brand deals.

At the other end of the spectrum, Australia’s most powerful creators with millions of followers are making up to $10,000 for a single TikTok post, influencer marketing rate cards seen by The Oz reveal.

Parenting content and mum-fluencing is the most lucrative niche, according to founder of influencer marketing platform TRIBE, Jules Lund.

The top earning creator at TRIBE, which specialises in micro-creators, makes parenting content and has made $211,160 since joining in 2018, with just 26,378 Instagram followers.

Her niche makes her valuable to brands for food, lifestyle, house and garden, kids and fashion-related content.

Mothers make up a massive 19% of The Oz's The Influence Index, including Kat Clark at number 30 who has 136K followers on Instagram and 2.6m on TikTok. She shares her experiences raising her two bi-racial daughters as a young mum, as well as healthy recipes.

“The reason why parenting content works is because fans really rely on each other for recommendations. There’s a lot of options out there and they trust each other,” Lund said.

“Mums feel incredibly empowered while they’re raising children that they can generate a significant amount of income to contribute to the household via their creative expression.”

While influencer marketing, prominent between 2010 and 2020, was about “aspirational” images, creator marketing was about "relatable” video content that is "flawed .... organic and messy”, he said.

Other agencies The Oz spoke to have creators with 25,000 to 50,000 social media followers who can make between $10,000 to 20,000 in a month.

TRIBE specialises in micro-creators or those with up to 100,000 followers, where the average creator has 18,519 followers and makes $306 for an Instagram post or story on average, and 153,567 TikTok followers and averages $557 for an average post. Yet Lund says much more than follower count is taken on board when an influencer gets paid. Yet Lund says much more than follower count is taken on board when an influencer gets paid.

University of Sydney digital marketing associate lecturer Dr Vicki Andonopoulos said particularly in Australia “micro-influencers are preferred because they are the ones that have actual ‘pull’ over their audience, and their audiences are usually very much like the influencer”. She said this means they are legitimate potential customers for brands the influencer chooses to engage with.

There is no standardised pricing for influencing in Australia so big names or those with massive reach will negotiate their own prices.

Brands will usually ask influencers for a package of content. Someone with 100,000 to 400,000 Instagram followers might get an average of $4800 for a post, $2900 for a video and $1000 for a story.

Some brands may also pay influencers a monthly fee - up to $12,000 a month - for a pre-agreed number of monthly posts. 

It is common for an influencer's agent to take a 20% cut. 

Instagram is still the primary platform brands are investing in, experts say, but TikTok is growing rapidly.

Co-founder of Free Folk Agency and Ivy Talent Co Grace Newman said “the secret ingredient” to making money as a creator is finding a niche which makes you the best fit for, not all brands, but the right brands.

“We work with talent who are creating incredible content or have cultivated a truly engaged audience, and because of this they are in hot demand. They may have 25k followers, and charge $2,000 or more per post, and that’s reasonable because they are exactly what the client is looking for to meet a specific brief, or tap into a certain audience base. We might then also book talent who have 200k+ followers, and charge the same rate,” she said.

CEO of creative agency We Are Social Australia Suzie Shaw says the key determinants of price for an influencer include how big and valuable a their audience is, in terms of demographics; whether their audience is local or overseas; whether they are famous outside of influencing because they’ll probably cost more; how good they are at creating commercial content; and whether they will work with a brand exclusively.

“One of the trickier things about finding talent in Australia is usually the biggest people have big international audiences ... For most Australian brands, our experience is they don‘t want to pay for an audience they can’t sell stuff to,” she said.