How much money can an influencer earn for a photo? A study looked at how much social network stars charge for creating promotional content. TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? Which platform makes influencers the big bucks?

The Intellifluence platform conducted a study on 1,249 influencers in May 2021, in the US, Canada and the UK. The idea was to have more visibility on the expectations in terms of financial compensation requested by influencers.

According to the results, 69.5% of influencers prefer to be paid in products and money. Only 24.8% of the respondents answered "only money" while 5.7% prefer to receive only products.

Instagram, far ahead

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook? Depending on the platform, influencers make more or less money for a publication. According to the study, it's on Instagram that prices soar, with an average of $193 for a publication for accounts with the smallest audiences (less than 10,000 followers). On the other hand, content creators with a large community (more than 80,000 followers) ask on average 1,000 dollars to publish a promotional photo in their feed on Instagram.

Over on Facebook, prices for promotional content are dropping. Count about 169.63 dollars for influencers followed by fewer than 5,000 followers and 266 dollars on average for accounts with more than 25,000 followers.

And the amounts are even lower on Twitter with only $56.30 for a sponsored tweet published by an account with under 5,000 followers and $125.78 on average for accounts with more than 25,000 followers. Prices that are not surprising given the incessant flow of messages on Twitter, which greatly reduces the period of time any tweet on the platform enjoys high visibility.

When it comes to TikTok and YouTube, the video-oriented platforms make the distinction between relatively unknown, small-scale influencers and the stars of the social networks and the difference is significant. For YouTube accounts with fewer than 5,000 subscribers, an influencer can ask for an average of $207.32, and up to $731.44 for channels with between 15,000 and 20,000 subscribers. As for the platform's stars, their billing reaches peaks of 3666.67 dollars for the creation of a YouTube video.

On TikTok, content creators with fewer than 5,000 subscribers are more likely to charge around $180 for a TikTok video and the largest accounts with over 5 million subscribers up to $4,372.

The study points out that 41% of influencers feel that brands do not offer adequate compensation for their content.