Calculate How Many Followers You Need to Become a Full-Time Influencer
I remember the feeling when one of my Instagram posts got a couple of hundred likes: ” Now this is my career – I’m an influencer .” Sadly, I have yet to reach those dizzying heights again, but it doesn’t matter: a few viral posts don’t make a full-time influencer career. To truly make money on social media, an influencer usually needs to get at least a few thousand followers and a lot more views. How much exactly? Music licensing company Lickd.co has created a calculator to help you figure this out.
How the calculator works
Lickd.co’s Social Income Calculator (located here ) will tell you how many followers, views, and sponsorships you need to get the amount of income you expect (hope?) To receive. For example, as the company points out , to earn the US $ 34,103 average permanent salary per year, you would need at least one of the following:
- TikTok: At least 10,000 subscribers and 93.2 million views per year.
- YouTube: At least 1,000 subscribers and 8.2 million views per year.
- Instagram: At least 5,000 followers and 105 sponsored posts per year.
Of course, as a content creator, you are not limited to just one platform – depending on the content you create, there could be some overlap between different platforms for your content, further increasing your income. However, even if you hit the full three and get $ 102,309 a year, you still have to pay about 30% of that amount in taxes, plus any costs associated with producing all of your videos.
The key metric is views, not subscribers.
According to the calculator, if you want to make $ 100,000 per year on YouTube alone, you need to generate around 24 million views per year. This translates to 461,568 page views per week. Consequently, a 5-day work week would require about 92,000 views per day, so a minimum number of subscribers or subscribers who will be reliably familiar with your content is also important.
The calculator doesn’t tell you that the real problem is how to attract and retain half a million views a week. Because, in truth, it’s very difficult to do. On YouTube, 3% of content creators generate 90% of revenue , and many of the highest paid users are already celebrities. To become a popular content creator across all platforms, you need high production values, some kind of niche, interesting or unusual; and you will need to post frequently – perhaps twice a day if you are just starting a channel.