Influencer Marketing Costs (2024)

As long as we’ve had advertising and marketing, brands have capitalized on famous faces to sell their products. If we see those to whom we aspire to use certain products and services, then we want to use them too – so we can relate to their experience and see how those products or services may fit our lives.

With the advent of social media, we’ve seen the emergence of a new kind of celebrity: the influencer. Not celebrities in the usual sense, in that their fame is inextricably tied up with the media through which they broadcast, rather than any specific discipline (not even socialite).

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Nonetheless, the content they post is aspirational. Like the celebrities of old, their fans want to be like them, using the same products as they do. Hence, the name ‘influencer’. Influencers offer some advantages over the celebrities of old. They are more accessible (and affordable) – “just like you and me”. They often have close relationships with their fans, they build a rapport that brands themselves can’t replicate. And they are often particularly influential in niches closely associated with specific product categories.

Influencer marketing has become a key marketing channel in the 21^st century. For many brands, this has become a de rigueur element of the mix. Today, plugging Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok influencer marketing components into an app marketing plan has become the norm.

Read on to see our set of stats on influencer marketing rates and influencer marketing costs on different social media platforms. We start with a section looking at the size of budget marketers have put aside for this form of marketing, giving an impression of how much money is moving around here. We also look at which are the best influencer marketing channels for app marketers to choose from.

Before we get stuck in, it seems fair to point out that there is considerable variance in the costs reported. We have collated what’s out there, but the only thing that seems fixed is that a significant number of variables come into play.

Which audience marketers are trying to reach, the type/quantity of media, levels of engagement, and many more factors must be in consideration when establishing influencer marketing pricing. So at the end of the day, price points can only be fairly established on a case-by-case basis. That said, we hope it will be useful to any marketers considering utilizing this channel to see some benchmark figures.

Influencer rates/preferred influencer marketing channels

Influencer marketing is more than a trend; it is widely held to be one of the most effective digital marketing channels available to contemporary marketers. A 2023 Tomoson report indicates that influencer marketing is capable to deliver up to 11 times the ROI of more traditional digital marketing channels. The report also reveals that the average Return On Investment that it delivers is in a ballpark of $6.5 per each dollar spent.

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Accordingly, brand marketers are willing to invest. The total global value of influencer marketing in 2023 was estimated at $22.1 billion by Collabstr Influencer Marketing report.

Investment has been on the rise. According to InfluencerMarketingHub report, in 2024 Influencer marketing investment is expected to reach $24 billion, $9 billion up from the investment made back in 2022, which shows increasing level of trust into this channel by businesses of all sizes around the globe.

According to the InfluencerMarketingHub research, in 2023 67% of companies, that took part in the survey, increased their Influencer marketing budget throughout 2023, in contrast with 76% of brands that were planning to invest into influencer marketing in 2022. This decrease can partly be explained by the uncertainty with the fate of TikTok that has been facing a “be sold or ban” situation in the United States and overall macroeconomic situation in the world.

For a perspective, in  2020 49% of companies, surveyed for that year InfluencerMarketingHub research, kept their Influencer marketing budget on the level – $10k and down, while other 23%  spent up to $50k / year and about 9% were ready to spend more than $500k / year.

Influencer marketing spend in Q4, 2020 (%)

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

Another find from the InfluencerMarketingHub 2021 report was that last year the overwhelming majority of marketers had planned to invest more in Influencer marketing. In fact, 62% said they will increase their Influencer marketing budget in 2021. To give you some context – in 2020 only 57% of marketers planned to increase their Influencer marketing budget.

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And when it comes to where marketers get money to run Influencer marketing campaigns, almost 83% said they’d borrowed it from the overall marketing budget, at the expense of other marketing channels.

Overall marketing budget powers the Influencer marketing budget (%)

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

The same InfluencerMarketingHub report brings us the picture of what specific social media platforms marketers ran Influencer marketing campaigns on in 2021. A brief look on the graph below will show you that TikTok is rising as one of the major channels to run Influencer marketing campaigns in 2021. Only one company was used by a greater number of marketers – Instagram, with 68% of marketers ran ad campaigns on it and TikTok came second with 45%, followed by Facebook with 43%, YouTube – 36% and finally LinkedIn and Twitter closed the set with 16 and 15 percent respectively.

The most popular Influencer Marketing platforms in 2021 (%)

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

So now we’ve got the overall picture of the influencer rates, influencer marketing spend, and top platforms.

Below, we look at some of the most popular influencer marketing platforms and the costs associated with leveraging each one.

Instagram influencer pricing

Say influencer, and most people  – at least for now – will think of an Instagram influencer. And where there are influencers, there’s marketing. Instagram influencer marketing has become a key part of many brands’ efforts – particularly when they’re aiming to target certain demographics. Indeed, the platform seems tailor-made for brands wishing to interact with prospective customers, with 90% of its 1.1 billion+ users following a brand. In Q4 2020, the total value of Instagram influencer marketing reached $8 billion.

Naturally, we have seen prices rise in proportion as the platform has become ever more indispensable. And influencers have become more confident of their power to sell products for brands, as this form of marketing moved from informal arrangements to a central pillar of a long-term strategy. Obviously, the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a disruptive force in so many areas of businesses, and the influencer marketing businesses felt its heat as well.

Now, the questions that we want to address first are – how much do Instagram influencers make? What is an Instagram influencer’s salary or, at least, a ballpark of it?

An Instagram post cost varies, it depends on how many followers a particular Instagram influencer has. There are five influencer categories based on the follower’s number – Nano, Micro, Mid, Macro, and Mega. Introducing these categories lead to the creation of influencer rate sheets for posting on various social media platforms. In particular, the Instagram post rates range from $10, posted by Nano influencers to $10k and more, posted by Mega influencers.

An Instagram rate sheet for posts in 2022

Source: AndrewMcCarty.com

Of course, this means average doesn’t tell the whole story. It goes without saying that there are significant differences in the scale of Instagram influencer marketing – which is of course part of its appeal to brands. Accordingly, we see a great deal of variance in the cost of influencer marketing.

Another unnamed influencer (100,000-250,000 followers, 2.5% engagement) shared a pricing model for different packages she offered. (see the table below) This also includes pricing for giveaways and takeovers, as well as photos and story mentions.

Her pricing model seems set a little below others we have seen, with economies of scale applying for more involved campaigns.

Instagram Influencer pricing (packages)

Source: Later

Another influencer with slightly fewer followers (though in the same range) told Later that they would charge $1,000 per Instagram post, $200 per Story, and $2,000-$5,000 for a 60-second video.

Two travel bloggers with a follower count in the 50,000-100,000 bracket (micro-influencers) charged $500 per post. These smaller bloggers often see posts with higher engagement, so can offer better influencer marketing ROI, posits Lately, citing Neoreach data which suggests 30% better ROI from micro-influencers, versus macro. Measuring ROI is frequently cited as the biggest challenge for marketers using influencer marketing.

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Using a different influencer-marketing pricing model, a little more focused on results, brands might expect to pay somewhere in the $250 to $750 for 1,000 engagements (Digiday/WebFX).

We get a more precise measure by virtue of a 2019 survey of 2,500 influencers conducted by Klear and published in eMarketer.

On Instagram, influencer pricing adheres to the fairly simple formula of more followers = higher cost. Prices rise fairly proportionally until we reach the point of celebrity influencers (with over 500k followers). At this point, we see close to a fourfold leap up from power influencers (with 30-500k).

In terms of formats, you’ll pay a premium price for a video – somewhere around 50% more than you would for a post. Stories are the cheapest, presumably due to their ephemeral nature.

Influencer Rates Worldwide, by Influencer Tier, 2019

Data source: eMarketer

Of course, follower count is not the only variable which might affect the cost of Instagram influencer marketing pricing. Geography also plays a part. A 2017 survey from eMarketer found that UK marketers were willing to pay £1,203 ($1,581) for a micro-influencer (under 10,000) post on Instagram, and £60,476 ($79,528) for a celeb influencer (1 million followers up). Influencer marketing in the UK seems to be pitched at a fairly robust price point, albeit one that it seems these marketers have been willing to pay.

Influencer Marketing Hub offers a calculator for influencers to work out what they should be charging, based on follower count and engagement. Of course, it could as well be used by markers looking to determine influencer marketing pricing.

We ran some random British celebrities through it in early April 2022 – it looks back over the last 12 posts, so results may differ at different points – to see what it said.

Tottenham and England footballer Harry Kane was first. With 12.3 million followers, 185k average Likes, giving him an engagement rate of 1.51%, his estimated earnings per post are set at $24,518-$40,864.

Music is another popular influencer genre, so we put award-winning musician Dua Lipa through. With her 82 million followers, 2 million average Likes, and engagement rate of 2.7%, she could be raking in $162,666 -$271,110 per post.

Comedian and actor Lolly Adefope commands a higher engagement rate than either of our two previous examples at 7.09% – with 9,090 average Likes generated from a smaller follower base of 112,707. That would earn her $342-$570 per post.

But what if you want to go REALLY big? At the very top of the Instagram influencer food chain we find the megastars who dominated the marketing/advertising landscape before all these influencers came along.

Ok, so here is how much you would need to pay if you want your product or service being introduced to the top celebrity Instagram followers. The list is 60/40 gender split, with women dominate – 6 women against 4 men.

The world famous soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo’s post, which has 423 million followers on Instagram, costs between $620k and $1M. Hollywood action movies star Dwayne Johnson, who has 154 million Instagram followers, post on Instagram costs anywhere between $504k and $840k. Ariana Grande’s marvelous voice allowed her to summon 303 million followers, asks for a single post on Instagram between $500k and $833k. At the bottom of the list is Kendall Jenner, with 229 million Instagram followers, who charges “only” $580k per post.

Top Celebrity Instagram post price, up to (in $M)

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

YouTube influencer marketing pricing

One of the consequences of lunching a video sharing service such as YouTube back in 2005 was that over time the YouTube influencer phenomena emerged. Some of influencers have become one of the world’s biggest celebs in their own right, the medium itself was, and still is, very conducive for people to share all sorts of information and become known and recognized in countless number of areas. YouTube was, along with Instagram and Facebook, one of the earliest platforms for the Influencer phenomena to emerge.

So, how much does YouTube influencer marketing cost?

On the graph below we stack together influencer post pricing for multiple platforms to show you the striking difference between YouTube influencer post rates and the rest of top social media platforms.

Now, the graph covers the 2014-2019 time frame plus 2021. Such timing allows us to see clearly how introduction of TikTok and the massive exodus of influencers from YouTube and Instagram to TikTok have changed the influencer marketing pricing landscape.

As you can see,  you’ll have to shell out big money for influencer marketing using YouTube videos – though 2019’s $6,700 is not the high point. In 2017 you’d have to spend close to $8,000 for the pleasure. Prices dipped in 2018 to $4,085 and rose up to roughly $4,500 in 2021 – again, the existence of TikTok leaves YouTube a smaller part of the influencer marketing pie.

This pricing is based on a charging $20 for every 1,000 subscribers an influencer has on her or his YouTube channel, a scale continued up to $20,000 for an influencer with 1 million.

Various factors could well play into influencer YouTube videos pricing fluctuations: influencers become better known, smaller influencers are brought into the marketing mix (much better for some brands, we might note), bigger or smaller brands invest, etc.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic hit influencers really hard, many influencers who ran ad campaigns for the traveling industry had to stop and cancel any campaigns abruptly.

To take a more end product-focused view, marketers utilizing YouTube influencer marketing might expect to pay $50-$100 for every 1,000 views. To give you some perspective, in 2021 an average YouTube video CPM (cost-per-mile or cost-per-view) was about $27 per 1,000 views, so at that point it was about essentially doubling your expenses, if you decided to work with YouTube influencers, as opposed to running ads via the YouTube ad platform yourself.

Finally, in comparison, shelling out on a tweet ($422) or a Facebook post ($395) is very much a discount option.

Average cost of  a paid post per platform, 2014- 2019, 2021 ($)

Source: Izea, BusinessInsider

A representative of influencer marketing platform HYPR quoted in the 2017 Digiday report added a little bit of complexity to the pricing model quoted above. Beyond 50,000 subscribers, we might add $2,000 per 100,000 followers (50,000 followers would be equal to $1,000 using the above scale). When we reach 1 million it’s a bit more complicated, given the level of celebrity. At this stage we might expect to see a spend of $25,000-$50,000 per influencer marketing video.

Referring back to the more precise eMarketer/Klear stats, we again see that celebrity influencer marketing commands a considerable pricing premium over mere mortal influencers. Indeed, you would have to pay nearly five times more for an influencer with over 500,000 followers as compared with one with 30,000-500,000 followers.

It does not quite follow, however, that more followers = higher marketing expense. For whatever reason, according to these YouTube influencer marketing pricing stats, it seems you will pay more for a micro-influencer than for a power-influencer. Perhaps a reasonable assumption might be that these influencers exert a higher level of influence over their fanbases. Potentially they are operating in specific niches in which they claim a level of expertise. There’s no hard evidence for it here, but potentially power-influencers might be able to drum up regular business, which means they can afford to charge less per post. The other less edifying possibility may simply be that the sample is smaller in this bracket.

At all levels, YouTube is the most expensive influencer marketing channel, at least for now when TikTok hasn’t risen to the same heights YouTube has. Yet. Perhaps we might assume a certain expectation that YouTube videos would have slightly higher production values than the more personal/intimate format of an Instagram video. That said, pricing is relatively similar between the two video platforms at the power influencer and celebrity level. Lower down the follower count hierarchy, the YouTube influencer marketing premium is considerably more pronounced.

YouTube influencer rates by number of followers ($)

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

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Facebook influencer marketing pricing

As we mention above, in most cases, Facebook influencer marketing is relatively cheap compared to other platforms. This is according to Izea, who pins the price of an influencer Facebook influencer post at a relatively bargainous $395. While the cost of a Facebook influencer post cost more in 2019 than it has in previous years, the cost has not followed a steady upward curve. Indeed, like Instagram and YouTube (according to Izea’s data at least) 2018 saw a decline in the cost of influencer marketing on Facebook – again, we are free to speculate as to why.

WebFX, on the other hand, set Facebook influencer marketing rates a little higher than Izea (remember, Izea’s averages make a like-for-like comparison imprecise at best). According to this source, you might pay $25 for the services of an influencer with 1,000 followers, $250 for one with 10,000, and so on (up to $25,000 for an influencer with 1 million followers).

The Klear influencer marketing stats published on eMarketer show an interesting dynamic in terms of Facebook influencer marketing pricing (this only considers posts, not breaking down media types). At the lowest nano level, it is the cheapest; climb up to micro-influencers and it is in the mid-point – more expensive than Instagram but cheaper than YouTube (though recall at the micro-influencer level there is a considerable premium on YouTube).

It again becomes the discount option at the power level, barring Instagram Stories. Like YouTube, for some reason, influencer marketing is cheaper at the power than the micro level. Again we might speculate that it has something to do with engagement or sample size.

Then we have the celebrity level: here Facebook once again commands a premium over stablemate Instagram, though is considerably cheaper than YouTube. We might assume this is a consequence of wider reach relative to the former, but lower required investment to produce content than the latter.

Facebook influencer rates by the number of followers

Data source: WebFX

2021 data from Influencer Marketing Hub gives you the Facebook influencer pricing range based on tiers. It starts with just $25 for a Facebook post from Nano-influencer and all the way up to Mega-influencer that would charge you more than $25,000 for posting about your product or service.

Facebook influencer rates by tiers

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

Snapchat influencer marketing pricing

WebFX reckon you might pay $10 for every 1,000 views for Snapchat influencer marketing, up to $10,000 for a Snapchat influencer delivering 1 million views. Until November, 2020, follower count wasn’t public on Snapchat, so back then this measure was the only really way to accurately gauge the reach (or influence) of a Snapchat influencer.

Several years ago influencer Cyrene Quiamco gave Digiday a slighter higher scale.

Snapchat influencer post rates by the number of views

If we consider views to be analogous with followers, then this would put Snapchat influencer marketing at a similar price point to Instagram influencer marketing. In reality follower count will be higher, thus making Snapchat the cheaper option.

Looking all the way back to 2016 – since when Snapchat has endured several peaks and troughs (though 2016 and 2019 were both good years so hopefully there’s some commonality) – Captiv8 estimated a snap from an influencer with 3-7 million followers would cost around $75,000. A snap from an influencer with 50,000-500,000 followers would be more like $1,000.

On this scale you might expect to pay $11-25 per 1,000 followers for a big Snapchat influencer, and $2-20 for a micro-influencer, which puts it close to what you would pay as a marketer on Snapchat Ads.

Snapchat influencer marketing, cost per follower range

Source: Buffer

In the UK in 2017, a Snapchat micro-influencer represented the form of influencer marketing on which marketers were willing to spend the least, according to eMarketer influencer marketing stats, with £1,052 ($1,386) the stated cap. A celeb snap would cost £52,702 ($69,414) – not cheap, but also the lowest cost celebrity influencer marketing rate available in this market.

Twitter influencer marketing pricing

Twitter perhaps doesn’t get the same sort of coverage as some of the other influencer platforms, but it remains to be one of the world’s most notable social media platforms with the monthly active user base of more than 330 million people – and where there’s social, there’s influencers.

According to the BusinessInsider stats above, the average cost of an influencer tweet is $284 (2021). Interestingly, while all other platforms saw a decline in terms of the cost of influencer marketing in 2018, the average price of an influencer tweet shot up, 6-fold, from $48.

Here the WebFX influencer marketing stats are in sync with those of BusinessInsider, with Twitter offering the lowest cost influencer marketing option, at $2 a tweet for a Twitter influencer with 1,000 followers up to $2,000 for a Twitter influencer with 1 million.

In the 2017 UK eMarketer survey, marketers said they would pay £1,351 ($1,779) for a micro-influencer tweet, and as much as £64,798 ($85,339) for one from a celebrity.

TikTok influencer marketing pricing

Obviously taking a look at the influencer marketing rates in 2022, you just can’t have a complete picture without TikTok. In May 2021 the mega popular social media platform app was the most downloaded app, beating YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Originally attracting only younger generation, by 2021 TikTok became the major challenger for Instagram & YouTube video content sharing dominance. Today influencers of all tiers have TikTok on their radar and many of them are successfully switched to it from other platforms and quite successful in showing what is possible when it comes to making a video ad viral.

According to InfluencerMarketingHub, TikTok influencer post pricing looks the following.

TikTok influencer post pricing

Source: InfluencerMarketingHub

Comparing TikTok influencer post pricing with the YouTube one, we see that the former is way more affordable. On top of that, you need to factor in a TikTok’s superior level of engagement, based on its highly competitive environment that has been sparking so much creativity for the last several years.

Other

Before social media really became a big thing, we still had a form of influencer marketing: blogs. Back in the Dark Ages (2006), before anyone had even come up with the concept of an influencer,  you could get a influencer blog post for a paltry $7.39. Like all good things this, of course, edged its way upwards.

2014 was a key year. With social media marketing now entrenched (Facebook took off for real in 2012, Instagram followed in 2012) the average cost of an influencer marketing blog post jumped up more than 10-fold, from $35.72 to $407.46. Growth after this point was rapid, with prices breaking the four-figure mark in 2017, and climbing as high as $1,403 in 2018. 2019’s figure of $1,442 represents something of a levelling out – for now, at least, this is how much marketers are willing to invest in this form of influencer marketing.

We might note that, of the formats analysed by Izea, blog posts are the second-most expensive on average. The specificity, persuasive potential, and search engine friendliness of blog posts are obviously of high value when trying to influence potential buyers.

Average cost of a paid blog post, 2006 – 2019 ($)

Source: Izea

WebFX also place influencer blogging among the highest-priced forms of influencer marketing. In this estimation, you might expect to pay $60 per 1,000 unique views. As with all of these rather imprecise measures from WebFX, we might expect a good deal of variation – if the blog draws on technical expertise, for example, naturally the price point will creep upwards.

Pinterest is another popular channel for influencer marketing, though we could not find any indication of how much you might pay for Pinfluencer marketing. An API introduced in 2018 was designed to help marketers measure the impact of Pinterest influencer marketing.