Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
- The price an influencer can charge a brand for a piece of sponsored content is heavily dependent on the category they are in, according to a new report from the influencer-marketing firm Izea.
- Influencers who focus on sports, beauty, fashion, DIY, video games, and food tend to make more money for sponsored posts from brands, Izea found.
- Those who tend to post about music, family life, and technology earn the least.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Athletes and sports influencers earn the most for sponsored content of any creator category on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, according to a new report from the influencer-marketing firm Izea.
In the report, Izea, which connects marketers and influencers, looked at the negotiated rates for sponsored social-media posts from 2014 to 2019 on its platform. Izea said its data spanned "tens of millions" of deals across "tens of thousands of influencers," from micro-influencers to celebrities.
Sports influencers, a category that includes professional athletes like LeBron James and YouTubers like Dude Perfect, charged an average of $3,109 for a sponsored post between 2014 and 2019. Influencers who created content about music, by contrast, earned an average of $339 per post during the same period.
In its study, Izea compared the average cost of a sponsored post for 15 content categories. The company did not control for the audience size of creators in a particular category, which meant that professional athletes bumped up sponsorship rates among sports influencers.
Influencers who focus on sports, beauty, fashion, DIY, video games, and food all charged more than $1,000, on average, for a post. Those who created content about music, family life, and technology tended to earn less, under $500 for a sponsored post, on average.
Here's the average cost for a sponsored post by influencer category (2014-2019), according to Izea:
- Sports: $3,109
- Beauty: $1,425
- Fashion: $1,393
- DIY: $1,220
- Video Games: $1,090
- Food: $1,007
- Lifestyle: $986
- Entertainment: $929
- Health: $819
- Business: $742
- Travel: $722
- General: $507
- Technology: $448
- Family: $382
- Music: $339
Often, influencers who find themselves in categories that typically earn less from sponsored posts find other revenue streams to focus on.
For instance, personal-finance YouTuber Andrei Jikh - who might be categorized as "business" by Izea's methodology - earned over $100,000 last year directly from YouTube ads that run alongside his business-oriented content. "Personal finance, financial minimalism, finance, credit cards, brokerages, etc., pay a lot more money than most other topics on YouTube," Jikh told Business Insider.
Family therapist and influencer Kati Morton decided to lean into Patreon as a way to get consistent income from her followers on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
And some TikTok creators who focus on dancing and music have built a steady revenue stream charging hundreds of dollars to integrate songs in their posts.
Here's the full chart from Izea:
IZEA
For more on the business of influencers, check out these Business Insider Prime posts:
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