How many followers to make money on Instagram? About 10K (2026 data)

On Instagram, paid work starts to show up at about 10,000 followers. In our data, 1 in 20 creators with 5,000 to 10,000 followers posted a paid partnership or #ad post in six months, and 1 in 11 creators with 10,000 to 50,000 did, at a published price of about $385 a post. TikTok creators need about seven times the audience for the same odds, and YouTube starts sharing ad money at 1,000 subscribers.

Below 5,000 followers, money is rare on every platform. 2.8% of Instagram creators with 1,000 to 5,000 followers had a paid post in six months, and those who did had one, worth about $68 at published prices.

Most pages that rank for this question give a rule of thumb: "no magic number", 1,000 followers for small deals, 10,000 for TikTok's payouts. We counted instead. This page puts three things side by side for each follower band: how many creators carry paid posts, what one post sells for, and what each platform pays out.

The answer by follower count

We split creators into seven bands by followers (subscribers on YouTube). For each band the table gives the share of creators with at least one paid post in their last six months, the published price of one post, and what creators with deals made from them a month.

*Deals a month covers only creators who had at least one paid post. It is their paid posts in six months, times the price for their size, divided by six. Price per post is per video on YouTube. We do not hold YouTube's paid promotion label, so YouTube has no paid post share or deal money.

What the table shows:

• On Instagram, the share of creators with a paid post nearly doubles from 1K-5K to 5K-10K and again to 10K-50K, then grows more slowly.
• The 1 in 20 line falls at 5,000 to 10,000 followers on Instagram and at 50,000 to 100,000 on TikTok.
• Even at 1 million followers, about 4 in 5 Instagram creators and 6 in 7 TikTok creators posted no paid post in six months.
• Creators who do get deals post few of them, with a median of 1 or 2 paid posts in six months in every band on both apps.
• Published prices climb faster than the odds, so the money gap between bands is wider than the deal gap, and an Instagram creator with deals made $17 a month at 1K-5K, $137 at 10K-50K and $1,385 at 100K-500K.

Spread across every creator in a band, with or without deals, brand money is small until well past 10,000 followers. It averages $1 a month per Instagram creator at 1K-5K, $29 at 10K-50K and $533 at 100K-500K.

What each platform pays, and when it starts

Here is what TikTok and YouTube paid the median creator in each band directly, next to the brand money above. Creator Rewards covers creators in the eight program countries, and YouTube ads cover channels in the US, UK, Canada and Australia that are in the Partner Program.

Each app has its own rules for paying creators directly. We read them on the official help pages on October 15, 2026.

Instagram

Instagram has no ad revenue share open to every creator. Its bonus program pays for views, and Meta's help page says "only a select group of creators are invited". The bonuses run for creators in Japan, South Korea and the US, and the reels bonus needs at least 5 million views in the previous three calendar months. Branded content does not earn a bonus. So on Instagram the money question is mostly a brand deal question. About 1 in 20 creators at 5K-10K followers had a paid post in six months, and 1 in 11 at 10K-50K.

TikTok

TikTok's Creator Rewards Program is open to creators who:

1. Are based in a country where the program runs.
2. Have a personal account, not a business account.
3. Are at least 18 years old, or 19 in South Korea.
4. Have at least 10,000 followers.
5. Have at least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days.

Each paid video has to be original, at least one minute long and posted after joining, and it earns only after 1,000 qualified For You views. Sponsored videos do not earn rewards.

In our data the follower count is the harder part of the gate. Of 2,753 creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers in the eight program countries, 87% already had 100,000 views a month. Short videos are the bigger limit, because 31% of them posted no video over one minute in our window, and the median creator in the band made about $4 a month from the program. Our TikTok pay per 1,000 views study has the rates behind that estimate.

YouTube

The YouTube Partner Program shares ad money with channels that reach one of two goals:

1. 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 qualified watch hours on long-form videos in the last 12 months.
2. 1,000 subscribers and 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days.

YouTube's page on program changes says that from February 1, 2027, new channels will need 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 watch hours in 365 days, or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days. Channels already in the program keep their status. Fan funding, Creator Partnerships and YouTube Shopping stay at 500 subscribers with 3,000 watch hours in a year or 3 million Shorts views in 90 days.

A YouTube channel with 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers in the US, UK, Canada or Australia makes about $34 a month from ads on new uploads, if it is in the program. That grows to $136 at 10,000 to 50,000 subscribers. Our YouTube pay per view study explains the per-view rates behind it.

Instagram against TikTok at the same size

Instagram creators carry paid posts 2.3 to 2.6 times as often as TikTok creators of the same size in every band under 500,000 followers. The gap narrows at the top, to 1.5 times at 1M+. Prices per post are close at the same follower count, $385 against $382 at 10K-50K. So a TikTok creator with 30,000 followers has about the same price per post as an Instagram creator of the same size but gets deals less than half as often.

Creator Rewards does not close that gap below 100,000 followers. At 50K-100K, the median program-country creator made $24 a month from it, while TikTok creators with deals at the same size made $272 a month from them.

Related studies

• Our study of how many followers you need to get sponsored splits the paid post share into nine bands and tests the 10,000 follower step, gifts and niches.
• The influencer rates study compares published prices with the views each creator's sponsored posts get.
• How much do influencers make? adds up a year of sponsored posts for 49,185 Instagram creators.
• The Instagram follower growth rate study shows how fast creators of each size gain followers, which tells you how long the next band takes.
• How much to charge for a sponsored post walks through setting your own price.

What to do with this

For creators

• Expect the first paid post somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 Instagram followers, because 1 in 20 creators at 5K-10K had one and 1 in 11 at 10K-50K did.
• On TikTok, plan for brand deals and Creator Rewards to stay small until about 100,000 followers, because 1 in 13 creators at 100K-500K had a deal in six months.
• If you want TikTok's Creator Rewards, post videos longer than one minute, because shorter videos earn nothing however many views they get.
• If you are building a YouTube channel, reach 4,000 watch hours before February 1, 2027, when the goal for new channels rises to 8,000.
• To see what brands pay creators your size, type your username into our Instagram money calculator, which prices a post from your real engagement and reel views. The TikTok and YouTube calculators do the same.

For brands

• Most creators under 50,000 followers have never posted a paid deal, since 91% of Instagram creators at 10K-50K had no paid post in six months.
• A creator at 5K-10K followers lists at about $148 a post on Instagram, so 23 of them cost about the same as one post from a creator at 100K-500K at $3,425.
• TikTok creators of the same size price about like Instagram creators but have half the deal history, so check their past brand videos before you brief them.
• Virev creator search covers 180M+ creators and filters by follower band, niche and country, with each creator's recent sponsored posts. Start a 3-day trial to search creators by follower band.

How we measured, and what can be wrong

• Instagram and TikTok accounts come from the export behind our get sponsored study. They are public accounts with 1,000+ followers in Virev's crawler and at least 6 posts dated September 1, 2025 to September 29, 2026, with brands, media, businesses and organizations removed.
• The six-month window is the 180 days before each creator's latest stored post. We kept only creators whose stored posts go back at least 180 days, which leaves 227,611 Instagram and 128,120 TikTok creators.
• A paid post on Instagram has the paid partnership label or an ad tag in the caption (#ad, #sponsored, #paidpartnership, #publi, #werbung, #광고, #PR and others), with giveaways removed. TikTok uses caption tags only, minus TikTok LIVE program tags, so the TikTok shares are lower bounds.
• Posts with no label and no tag are not counted. Undisclosed deals would raise every share in the table.
• A hand check of 50 caption-only paid posts from creators under 10,000 followers found 37 real brand ads, so the smallest bands may run a little high.
• Prices come from 143 published rate rows (Influencer Marketing Hub, Collabstr, Shopify and others, 67 of them for Instagram) collected in our influencer rates study. For each tier we took the median low and median high price in US dollars and placed each creator between them on a log scale of followers. These are list prices, not what any one creator was paid.
• Brand money a month multiplies each creator's paid posts in six months by their list price. It leaves out gifts, affiliate links, usage rights and deals that were never posted.
• Creator Rewards money comes from our TikTok pay study, which measured views a month on videos over one minute for 8,897 creators with 10,000+ followers in the eight program countries, read August to October 2026, at 45% qualified views and $0.65 per 1,000 qualified views.
• YouTube ad money comes from our YouTube pay study, which measured views a month on new long-form uploads for 3,696 channels in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, videos posted August 2025 to September 2026, at the median rate for the channel's topic. It assumes the channel is in the Partner Program, which many channels under 5,000 subscribers are not.
• Follower counts were read when each profile was crawled, between August and October 2026. Our crawler collects accounts for creator marketing, so it holds more active creators than each app as a whole, and none under 1,000 followers.
• This is an observational study. It shows how often creators of each size post paid content and what that is worth at list prices, not what caused any creator to get paid.

Download the data

The main table is in one CSV: how-many-followers-to-make-money-2026.csv. Each row is a platform and a follower band, with the number of creators, the share with a paid post in six months and its 95% interval, the median price per post, the median paid posts and money a month for creators with deals, the average brand money per creator, and the median platform payout. The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Please cite "Virev, October 2026" and link this page.