A brand asks for your rate and you have no idea what to say. Most advice online gives a price per follower tier, and published tables for the same tier differ up to 50 times, as Virev's income study found. A price built on your own views is one a brand can check against your account.
The method below uses five Virev studies from October 2026. Each section links the study its numbers come from. In short, take the median views of your last 10 posts, cut them for the sponsored drop, multiply by $15 to $30 per 1,000 views, and put usage rights and exclusivity on their own lines.
Price a sponsored post in four steps
1. Take the median views of your last 10 posts
Open your last 10 reels, TikToks or videos and write down the views. Sort them and take the middle value. Use the median, not the average, because one viral post pulls the average up and the brand will not get that post again. Skip pinned posts and anything boosted as an ad.
The Instagram money calculator, TikTok money calculator and YouTube money calculator read the median views of a public account for you.
2. Cut the views for the sponsored drop
A sponsored post gets fewer views than your usual post. Virev's influencer rates study compared each creator's sponsored posts with their own normal posts. The median Instagram creator's sponsored reels got 0.89x the views of their normal reels, and the median TikTok creator's sponsored videos got 0.75x.
On Instagram the drop grows with size:
| Followers | Sponsored vs usual views |
|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 1.04x |
| 10K to 100K | 0.91x |
| 100K to 500K | 0.86x |
| 500K to 1M | 0.79x |
| 1M+ | 0.84x |
Multiply your median by the number for your size. If you promise your usual numbers, the brand finds the gap after the post goes up.
3. Multiply by $15 to $30 per 1,000 views
Agencies that price by the view quote $10 to $34 per 1,000 views, across the four per-view sources in the influencer rates study. $22 is the middle. The same study suggests creators quote $15 to $30 per 1,000 views, a range a brand can check against your account.
Price tables that start from followers cost more. Priced at the table rate for their follower count, the median Instagram creator's sponsored reel costs $43 per 1,000 views, and the median TikTok creator's sponsored video costs $72. For 68% of Instagram creators, the table price was higher than their views are worth at $22 per 1,000. A brand that thinks in followers may accept the table price, but a brand that thinks in views will push you down to the view price.
Pick your spot in the range from what you can show. Quote near $30 if your audience is a close fit for the product, your comments are real questions, or your past sponsored posts held your usual views. Quote near $15 if your views come from one country the brand does not sell in, or your sponsored posts fell well below your normal ones.
4. Add usage rights and exclusivity as separate lines
The price from step 3 covers making the post and publishing it on your account. Anything else is a separate line on the quote:
- Usage rights cover the brand reposting your content, running it as an ad, or getting the raw file, and each one is priced by where it runs and for how long.
- Exclusivity covers the days you agree not to work with a competitor, and its price is the deals it stops you from taking.
For exclusivity, Virev's study of what influencers make found that creators with brand deals ran a median of 4 sponsored posts a year. For that creator, three months of exclusivity can block about one deal, so the line should cover about one post fee. Our guides to budgeting usage rights separately from production and scoping exclusivity show the brand side of both talks.
Worked examples for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
Each table uses the median creator of each tier in Virev's data, from the influencer rates study and its CSV. "Sponsored views" is the median views of that creator's own sponsored posts, so the drop from step 2 is already in it. "Table price" is the published price for the median creator of the tier. The brackets hold the median low and the median high of the published tables for that tier.
Instagram reels
| Followers | Sponsored views | At $15 to $30 per 1,000 | Table price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 2,949 | $44 to $88 | $110 ($37 to $191) |
| 10K to 100K | 14,958 | $224 to $449 | $635 ($188 to $1,601) |
| 100K to 500K | 69,956 | $1,049 to $2,099 | $3,553 ($1,600 to $9,072) |
| 500K to 1M | 178,190 | $2,673 to $5,346 | $8,266 ($5,043 to $12,715) |
| 1M+ | 388,260 | $5,824 to $11,648 | $13,894 ($10,000 to $42,011) |
Say you have 40,000 followers and your last 10 reels have a median of 16,500 views. Step 2 takes that to 16,500 times 0.91, about 15,000 views. At $15 to $30 per 1,000 that is $225 to $450, and $330 at $22. The table price for your tier is $635, so a brand that buys on followers may pay more, but $330 to $450 is the number you can defend line by line.
TikTok videos
| Followers | Sponsored views | At $15 to $30 per 1,000 | Table price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 896 | $13 to $27 | $124 ($50 to $221) |
| 10K to 100K | 6,214 | $93 to $186 | $569 ($221 to $1,134) |
| 100K to 500K | 34,000 | $510 to $1,020 | $2,825 ($1,167 to $6,314) |
| 500K to 1M | 92,675 | $1,390 to $2,780 | $6,335 ($3,688 to $11,340) |
| 1M+ | 259,800 | $3,897 to $7,794 | $9,393 ($6,266 to $18,298) |
Sponsored TikToks reach a small share of followers, 8% to 27% by tier, so the view price sits far below the tables. The per-view quotes in the study come mostly from Instagram work. Published TikTok tables cost a median $72 per 1,000 views, so a TikTok quote can sit at the top of the range.
Say you have 30,000 followers and a median of 8,300 views. At 0.75x a sponsored video gets about 6,200 views, which is $93 to $186 at $15 to $30 per 1,000. If your views beat your tier, put that first in the quote. A creator with 6,000 followers and 6,000 to 15,000 views a video is far ahead of the 896 sponsored views the median 1K to 10K account got.
A sponsored video is worth more to most TikTok creators than the platform's own pay. Virev's TikTok pay study found that the 115 creators who showed their Creator Rewards or Creativity Program payouts got a median of $0.40 per 1,000 views. For the median creator with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, Creator Rewards comes to about $7 a month.
YouTube integrations
We could not detect sponsored YouTube videos, so this table uses each channel's usual long-form video and no sponsored drop. Influencer Marketing Hub quotes $50 to $100 per 1,000 views for YouTube integrations, as cited in the influencer rates study. Published YouTube price tables cost a median $144 per 1,000 views of a channel's usual long-form video, across 9,546 channels in the same study, so the per-view quote sits well below the tables here too.
| Subscribers | Usual video views | At $50 to $100 per 1,000 | Table price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1K to 10K | 2,293 | $115 to $229 | $434 ($169 to $954) |
| 10K to 100K | 11,762 | $588 to $1,176 | $1,198 ($479 to $2,609) |
| 100K to 500K | 48,582 | $2,429 to $4,858 | $6,370 ($3,179 to $11,340) |
| 500K to 1M | 85,634 | $4,282 to $8,563 | $15,387 ($10,670 to $22,681) |
| 1M+ | 179,075 | $8,954 to $17,908 | $30,802 ($20,000 to $50,000) |
Say your channel has 50,000 subscribers and your last 10 long-form videos have a median of 11,800 views. A sponsor segment at $50 to $100 per 1,000 is $590 to $1,180. The same views earn about $49 from ads at the $4.14 median per 1,000 long-form views in Virev's YouTube pay study, so one sponsor read pays 12 to 24 times what the ads on that video pay.
Expect fewer deals than offers
The price is one half of the money. The other half is how often a brand says yes. Virev's study of how many followers you need to get sponsored found that 2.1% of Instagram creators with 1,000 to 2,000 followers posted a sponsored post in six months, 7.5% at 10,000 to 20,000, and 21.7% above 1 million. Across 49,185 Instagram creators, 83% had no sponsored post at all in about a year, and the median creator with deals made about $3,900 a year from them at published rates, according to the income study.
Real payouts also run below the tables. Collabstr, a marketplace, reports that Instagram creators list packages at an average of $214 and get paid an average of $193, and 80% of its deals cost under $300, as the influencer rates study notes.
What brands check before they pay
Brands that price by the view look at the same numbers you used. Have them ready in your media kit:
- Brands read your median views, and your sponsored posts against your normal ones, because a creator in the cheaper quarter of a tier gives 5 to 7 times more views per dollar than one in the dearer quarter at the same table price.
- Brands compare your views per follower with your tier, where Instagram sponsored reels reached 69% of followers at 1K to 10K, 42% at 10K to 100K and 19% at 1M+.
- Brands check engagement on your median post, and sponsored posts got 0.69x the likes and comments of the same creator's usual post in Virev's sponsored post engagement study.
- Brands look at how often you post, because the most active quarter of creators in each follower band was two to four times as likely to have a sponsored post as the least active quarter.
- Brands check where your audience lives, because a buyer in one country gets little from views in another.
The Instagram engagement rate calculator and the TikTok engagement rate calculator give the median-post rate a brand sees for your account. Run them before you send a quote, and put the result next to your median views.
Sources
- Influencer rates 2026: $110 to $13,894 per Instagram post
- How many followers do you need to get sponsored? 1 in 13 at 10K (2026 data)
- How much does TikTok pay per 1,000 views? $0.40 median
- How much does YouTube pay per view? A median $4.14 per 1,000 views (2026 data)
- How much do influencers make from brand deals? $3,900/year
