What Instagram influencers really earn
🔸 Plus: Premier Inn shares rose after bookings from Taylor Swift fans 🔸 AI has already taken 21% of freelance jobs 🔸 Atom Bank went to a four-day week — and it was (relatively) easy 🔸
Your 2-minute guide to demystifying money and making you richer
The markets, year-to-date
S&P 500: 5,487.03 ⬆️ 15.69%
FTSE 100: 8,205.11 ⬆️ 6.46%
Bitcoin: $65,714.00 ⬆️ 48.66%
GBP to USD: $1.2703 ⬇️ 0.19%
GBP to EUR: €1.1846 ⬆️ 2.73%
The real economics of being an Instagram influencer
Jessica Rose Williams has a perfect life: She lives in a cute little apartment near the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris with her fluffy white cavachon. She spends her days shopping, sitting on park benches, looking at art, drinking coffee, gazing into the distance, joyfully carrying large bunches of flowers, and taking photos of things that are beige.
We know all this because Williams posts it all on Instagram where she has 35,000 followers. She makes a living as an influencer.
A couple of weeks ago Williams did something very brave: She wrote a long article for The Times’ Sunday magazine (hard paywall) about the financial reality of being an influencer. It’s a real eye-opener.
It appears that she lives an expensive life of luxury. And designer brands do, in fact, give her an endless amount of free products, she says:
“There were bikinis, silk pajamas and boxes of preserved roses that last forever all sent to my house. I was offered a free five-star hotel stay in exchange for one photo on my Instagram; tourist boards funded an entire trip for a dedicated blog post; Chanel wanted to send me its latest beauty collection to feature in a YouTube video.”
“I even managed to get my cottage [she used to live in the Peak District] almost entirely furnished for free — sofas, bed, rugs — as long as I created content about it.”
But you can’t pay the rent with a bikini
This is a real issue in influencer-world. Turns out, a big part of being an influencer involves selling all the free products you receive on Vinted or eBay, for money. Because influencing isn’t as lucrative as it looks.
Williams primarily earns cash from sponsored content deals, her YouTube channel, and Substack newsletter. But her cashflow is modest:
Her monthly income ranges from £1,000 in a bad month to £5,000 in a good month, before tax.
She’s coy about how much brands offer her to show their products but says that many influencers will ask brands for £1,000 to get a mention in an Instagram reel, but often only receive £300.
Brands are “not pleasant to work with”, she says.
“The free hotel stay is never actually free. They want multiple posts on Instagram; the photographs have to be staged in a certain way; and everything must be approved before posting. If they are not happy with the content it must be reshot”.
Other influencers she knows work part-time jobs. One is a supply teacher even though she has hundreds of thousands of followers. Another has a life-coaching business where she charges £3,000 for a six-month course.
Many receive financial support from their partners: “Sugar daddies are common practice in the influencer world”, Williams says.
Her rent is £1,100 a month.
Tax is an issue
Expensive gifts like flights or holidays given during the course of business are taxable. That means a “free” stay at a resort will cost the influencer money if HMRC finds out about it.
If Williams earned her top rate — £5,000 a month — every month she’d be looking at £60,000 a year. Not bad. But her range of good months and bad months implies a median income of £3,000 a month, or £36,000 a year — before tax.
Not enough to actually afford the lifestyle she promotes.
Money? “Most influencers don’t earn much of it”, she says
She’s right:
On average, influencers earn £2,334 per month, according to a survey of 1,865 Instagram influencers conducted in 2021.
The average is heavily skewed by the small number of influencers who have more than 1 million followers: They earn £12,070 per month.
Most influencers are in the “micro” category, where they can expect to make £1,116 per month.
So yes, be envious of Williams’ perma-vacation in Paris. But bear in mind that having a regular job is pretty nice too.
And for dessert …
Shares of Premier Inn rose after the company reported that Taylor Swift’s UK tour had caused a wave of extra bookings from fans who travelled to her gigs.
41% of Americans say they believe the U.S. is at risk of entering a second civil war. So isn’t it weird that equities analysts never seem to mention it? The FT is half-serious about this.
Implementing a four-day week was easier than remote working, Atom Bank CEO says. All staff work 34 hours a week with no reduction in pay.
Guardian columnist Marina Hyde on why forcing banks to stop sponsoring the arts hurts the arts and not the banks. “Art must be allowed to exist in and of itself.”
AI may already have taken 21% of freelance jobs. A study from the Imperial College Business School, Harvard Business School, and the German Institute for Economic Research, found job listings for digital freelancers in writing and coding declined by more than one-fifth since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
Tennis star Roger Federer has won only 54% of all the points he has played for in his career. And yet he has won 80% of all his matches. “Slight advantages over the short-run that compounded through consistency over the long-run,” says Ben Carlson. (Moneyin2 on the miracle of compounding here.)
More from Moneyin2:
Do you want Moneyin2 to recommend your Substack?
Get in touch at jim@moneyin2.com!
We want to hear from you!
What money issues do you want us to tackle in this newsletter? Let us know at jim@moneyin2.com.
Follow us on social media
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads.
Partner with us!
If you want to sponsor Moneyin2 get in contact here.
 | A guest post by
|