‘￡1,000 to post a photo’: How being an influencer can make you rich
Katherine Ormerod never planned to become an influencer. She had a successful career as a fashion journalist, working with a number of respectable publications, including The Sunday Times. As a younger member of the team, she was often called upon to film things and post them on Instagram, although her priorities were more traditional – writing and editing.
The fashion-related updates gained a decent following. But, in a strange twist of fate, things only really took off for her online because of a tricky housing situation.
“In October 2020 I was expecting our second child, so we left our flat and moved into a [bigger] rental,” she says. “But we had bought the flat at a bad time, and the rent [for it] didn’t cover our mortgage, so we ended up in a bit of a hole.
“The electricity [in the rental property] was on a meter, the windows didn’t close, there were mushrooms growing in the bathroom. It wasn’t salubrious. I was six and a half months pregnant and thought I couldn’t bring a child into this space, so I just started decorating. There was no strategy whatsoever.”
She had an unusual amount of trade knowledge for someone in fashion. Her father had worked as a painter and decorator, her grandfather was an “amazing” carpenter and her great-grandmother had hand-crocheted shag-pile carpets.
“Everyone could stitch and knit and saw,” she says. “And because my mum was a single parent, I grew up a lot with my grandparents. They taught us everything. Then Covid came, and I thought ‘let’s use all these skills’.”
She started posting her work on Instagram, where it instantly met with an enthusiastic response. “All these people who had followed me for high heels and Victoria Beckham suddenly got really into rattan,” she says.
“It was surprising. I don’t look like a woman who owns tools or has much grit. To see someone like me nine months pregnant up a ladder, with a bandsaw, trying to do something for her family, I think it resonated with people.”
Her following grew: she now has more than 81,000 followers on Instagram. Before long, brands ranging from Fortnum & Mason to Ralph Lauren were asking to work with her, paying for her to talk about their brands or feature their products.
When influencing was a less mature subject, money was murky. “I was doing all my own negotiations; I could have been paid a 10th of what other people were being paid. I just didn’t know the numbers. At the beginning nobody told each other what people were earning. It was all vague and opaque. It was a Wild West.”
“At the beginning I was earning maybe ￡500 for a post,” she says. “Let’s say it’s gone up since then.”
She signed with an agent, who encouraged her to do fewer but bigger deals. Eventually, this work replaced writing to become her whole income.
Ormerod’s case is a classic tale of the influencer dream, in which social media has enabled ordinary people, rather than celebrities, to make a living simply out of filming their lives.
The curator economy has made stars of ordinary people on every topic you could think of, from fitness to parenting to skincare, pets, gardening and crafts. In some cases they have become household names. Mrs Hinch, real name Sophie Hinchcliffe, has become a bestselling author and broadcaster for her household cleaning tips. Joe Wicks, the Body Coach, was already a star online before Covid introduced him to a whole new audience.
At their best, these figures have succeeded by focussing on a large but under-served market (household cleaning), or by being more engaging than their competitors. There were plenty of fitness coaches before Wicks, but few were as charismatic or tech-savvy. In beauty, for example, creators have brought about a near revolution in marketing.
It follows that the creator economy, as it is known, has become an enormous business, worth an estimated ￡195bn per year, with top influencers taking home as much as ￡50,000 a month in revenue.
But while a living might be possible, few would call it easy. A survey last year by the Washington Post found that only 12 per cent of full-time creators make more than ￡39,000 per year.
Still, where once brand partnerships were the preserve of actors, musicians or sports stars, the influencer economy has favoured ordinary people, who appear to lend a higher sense of trust to brands seeking to speak directly to consumers.
After all, no recommendation is more powerful than word of mouth; the more someone feels like they could be your friend in real life, the more weight their opinion will have. It follows that influencers have also come to replace traditional experts.
Where once customers might have gone to Which? Magazine for advice on consumer purchases, younger men and women are likely to seek the advice of one of social media’s army of niche experts. Whether you are after a pizza, a sofa or a cleaning product, there will be someone there waiting to tell you what to do.
Eva Katzler got into influencing because she loved small businesses: alongside various jobs, she had been blogging about companies and products she liked. Under a pseudonym, Poppy Loves… she acquired thousands of followers. Initially, the commercial opportunities were tiny.
“I didn’t think for a minute it would be a way that I could earn,” she recalls. “Then I started to earn small bits and pieces. People were paying anything from a tenner to a hundred pounds for very random things.”
As with Ormerod, it has grown to provide a steady income, alongside other work as a lifestyle coach. But as influencing grew to be dominated by noisier personalities, Katzler found that her anonymised style of posting, where she was not the centre of attention, started to look outdated.
“As the pool of influencers grew, and it became a place to find fame, where I was trying to do something good, it made it much harder to grow a following because it wasn’t about me. I started it in my 20s, I’m now in my 40s. There have been massive changes.”
She eventually started to share snippets of her own life, at last using her own name, but says she knows she will never be a vast account. “I’m a fairly private person,” she says. “And there’s a definite ceiling to my popularity and how much I could grow, because I’m not a very exciting personality to be following.”
For businesses on the other side of influencer deals, the growing maturity of the economy has made the return on investment less obvious. In 2015, Taymoor Atighetchi founded Papier, a stationery company, which has grown up alongside influencing. He says that when they launched, “gifting” influencers free products was a good way of generating sales.
“You could call it the good old days,” he says. “You could message anyone with a degree of influence, which at that point was measured in follower count and likes – now you can’t really trust likes – and send them a message.
There was no standard practice, no advertising standards rules on posting. (Today, Advertising Standards Authority rules mean influencers must indicate when they have been paid or received a gift.) The return on investment used to be pretty high. Nobody had cottoned on to the idea they could charge for posts.”
It wasn’t long, however, before agencies sprung up to mediate between the influencers and their clients; making sure they were paid what they were worth – with a cut for the middle-man, of course.
“The agencies changed things by saying to talent ‘you should charging a lot for this’,” Atighetchi says. “Now even if we reach out to someone with 20,000 followers they’re like ‘here’s my agent’. You can’t use gifting alone as a strategy.”
Instead, Papier now has a multi-layered approach, using a rotating stable of “micro-influencers”, accounts with fewer than 20,000 followers, as well as some larger paid partnerships. The combination of greater personal trust and engagement with their followers, as well as the modern Instagram algorithm, means that smaller accounts deliver a better rate of return. “In the early days when a celebrity posted, everyone would get excited – now a Kardashian might post and it’s great, but I know that it won’t translate into millions of dollars of sales.”
One of the early influencer marketing agencies in the UK was Billion Dollar Boy, founded in 2015 by Ed East and Permele Doyle. In less than a decade, they have gone from negotiating tiny deals to sealing huge contracts on behalf of multinationals.
“The deal sizes were very small early on,” East says. “We started working with film companies and would get YouTubers to turn up to premieres and pay them ￡400. The Youtuber would make a video and get to meet a famous actor and then make ad revenue from YouTube too.
“Then in 2016-17 we won our first proper deal, with Garnier. I remember putting the pitch together, which felt like the first of its kind, where we mapped out a calendar saying we’d have these types of influencers posting this regularly for these reasons, and then we’ll have these different influencers about a different hair colour this month. It felt like a proper strategy. They hired us and it was ￡300,000 or ￡400,000 for the year.”
Other deals followed quickly, and the amounts grew. “Today we’re doing deals that can be [worth] up to ￡10m or more, for holding companies like Unilever or Diageo, working with multiple brands within the groups.”
These large agreements involve working with a whole range of different influencers, from celebrities such as American actor and wrestler John Cena to niche content creators making quilts.
Along with exposure, these creators produce innovative content that might be used elsewhere in a campaign. “One way of thinking about an influencer campaign is that you are putting a contract out to tender to hundreds of one-man or woman agencies, who then submit their interpretation,” says East.
As the market has matured, he adds, it has become more competitive for the creators. “When you speak to friends at the dinner table they might say ‘I can’t believe that person gets paid ￡1,000 to post a photo. What they haven’t appreciated is that person has been creating content every day for five years, that people comment on and follow and like.
“It takes time to cultivate an audience. It’s a real skill and it’s hard graft. It isn’t easy to become a successful influencer. You could compare it to the sports world. There are your megastars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, but that is 0.0001 per cent of that world. It’s not easy but it’s a fast-growing world, and small teams of people can create very high quality assets.”
For all it has made a handful of influencers into stars, the new world can also take a personal toll. Ormerod has recently taken up writing again, alongside her “influencing”, as a hedge against its unpredictable ups and downs.
“I sat down one day and realised I was becoming professionally popular – or unpopular, being the salient point,” she says. “I felt I couldn’t do that any more. It wasn’t good for my mental health at all. I was really caught up in things – whether people liked things, what was performing and looking at what other people were doing.”
Katzler agrees. “I think where the world of influencing worries me is that young influencers feel they have to lay everything bare,” she says. “The rubbish bits, the scary bits, everything you’re going through as a teenager. I’m so grateful to have been able to leave so much of that behind. So many young influencers feel they have to be raw and completely 100% open to get the engagement. The changes in the influencer world have been extreme.”
Creative, fulfilling and – for the lucky few – well-rewarded, influencing is a way to use social media to translate your personality, or expertise, into a career. Influencers just have to be careful that in the rush to flog things for brands, they don’t give too much of themselves away.