How Many Followers and Subs Do You Need to Start Earning Money on Instagram and YouTube?

Social media influencing is a serious job that can easily pay your bills.

By Ashri Khandelwal | Updated: 13 May 2021 10:49 IST

How Many Followers and Subs Do You Need to Start Earning Money on Instagram and YouTube?

Photo Credit: Pexels

Social media influencer

Highlights

Social media Influencing is a rapidly growing business
More people want to quit their jobs and take up influencing
Lickd.co can tell you how many followers you need to make money

The world of social media applications like Twitter, Instagram among others have given birth to a new breed of unconventional occupation we call “Influencer”. Now, more than ever, people are looking to give up their day job and take up influencing full-time. But, as glamorous and easy as it may look, it's tough to gain thousands of followers, millions of views and create your audience on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms. You need to define your niche, continue creating quality content, be consistent and build a strong community of your own. But, once you crack the algorithm and build your social media empire, you can start earning big money.

Hopper HQ's 4th annual Instagram rich list 2020 shows that Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, earns around Rs. 7.6 crores per post, while Kylie Jenner makes a whopping Rs. 7.3 crores per post. Popular creator Ajey Nagar, who runs the YouTube channel Carry Minati, earns around Rs. 50 lakhs per month. Now, that's a lot of money - enough to convince people to quit their permanent job and become social media influencer. But, contrary to what we think, you can still start earning money without having millions of followers or subscribers on Instagram and YouTube.

This calculator tells you how many followers and subscribers you need

We came across an interesting website called lickd.co that can calculate how many followers, views and subscribers you need to make a certain amount of money in a year. It uses various industry estimates, so you can do the math and figure out the numbers that you need to earn a stable income online.

All you need to do is just head to lickd.co and enter the desired amount of salary you wish to earn in a year. So, for example, this calculator suggests that if you want to earn Rs. 50,000 a month from social media, here's how many followers and views you would need on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.

Instagram: 5,000 followers and 25 sponsored posts a year.
YouTube: 1,000 subscribers and 19,13, 876 yearly views.
TikTok: 10,000 subscribers and 21,621,622 yearly views.

Now, that's a rough estimate, but you can get an idea of how many followers, views and subscribers you need to earn stable income on these platforms. But, as it depends from industry to industry in jobs, there are a lot of factors that define how much money you can make through social media in various topics like beauty, travel, lifestyle, business or tech. It all varies on what kind of content you are making, how engaged your audience is, how competitive your niche is and how much you are getting paid for your sponsored posts.

Even with all the things in place, “social media creators' salaries can vary massively. Certain niches pay more than others and are more competitive than the next, your own personal branding can also play a huge part in whether you land long-term brand partnerships which often provide a more stable income,” notes the website.

You can still use this calculator and find out how many followers and subscribers you actually need to kickstart your social media business. And, make your goals accordingly.

Is Mi 11X the best phone under Rs. 35,000? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Later (starting at 23:50), we jump over to the Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

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