This Calculator Will Tell You How Many Followers You Need to Quit Your Job

You know it’s a bizarre age when people who livestream themselves sleeping or opening empty packages gain millions of views and followers. But what happens next? Can you ride off the back of these followers and actually quit your day job? Or will the 15 seconds of fame die out quicker than your phone battery?

Since we live in a time when people make unnecessary inventions to answer crippling questions like these, someone obviously found a way for you to find out when you’re influencing enough to become a full-time influencer and pay your bills.

Music licensing platform Lickd.co created a calculator to figure out how many followers, views, and sponsorship deals you’d need to make your goal amount in a year. The website calls it the “social income calculator” and uses industry estimates to arrive at conclusions.

“Influencers are a rapidly growing breed and the top ones are making some serious money,” the website said. “So it’s no wonder that more and more people are looking to give up the day job, with around 22,000 people each month searching for ‘how to become an influencer on Google’.” And if you’re okay with “Influencer” going on your business card, this might be worth checking out.

So, if you’d want to earn, say, $200,000 annually through social media, you’d need 615 sponsored Instagram posts, 47.8 million views on YouTube, and 540 million views on TikTok. To earn the average salary in the U.S. of $34,103, you’d have to rack up a massive 92 million TikTok views. Even to earn just $100 for a quick getaway, you’d need at least 10,000 followers on TikTok.

The website used Influencer Marketing Hub’s YouTube Money Calculator to find out that an average advertiser pays $7.60 for every 1,000 impressions on their ad, but Google keeps 45 percent of this ad revenue. This means that you can expect to make $4.18 for every 1,000 views. Similarly Instagram pays $250 to $350 per post for a minimum of 5,000 followers which can go up depending on the number of followers and audience engagement. Bigger accounts can earn over $4,000 per sponsored post.

In July 2020, TikTok launched The TikTok Creators Fund, for which they allocated a fund of 200 million dollars. The requirements to join are: be over 18 years old, have more than 10,000 followers as well as 10,000 views in the last 30 days, and publish original content according to the TikTok community standards. This TikTok calculator gives you an estimate of the total amount earned from videos with a sliding scale for followers and number of likes. So for an account with 10,000 followers and 59,000 total likes, the creator can earn up to $22 to $32 per post, depending on the engagement level. 

For someone with little social media presence and bleak chances of going viral, I’d much rather keep my day job.

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