Overview

At 1stCollab, we have assembled the world’s largest dataset of creator prices and today we wanted to be the first platform to publish a large-scale report on creator asking prices. We believe it is crucial for both brands and creators to have a clear understanding of market rates when forming partnerships. This report aims to provide brands with insights into reasonable creator asking prices and creators with valuable information on what their peers are offering.

In this post, we’ll break down the data we’ve gotten around how creators are pricing themselves. Note that this post will focus on a creator’s initial offer / asking price, which tends to be the standard rates they will provide in a media kit or publicly list. It does not include any data about the final accepted rate from the creator (that’ll come in a later post). 

Some of the main findings from our data deep dive include:

• Follower Correlation: A clear link exists between follower count and price. Creators with under 10k followers/subscribers averaged $560, while those with at least 1 million followers/subscribers charged an average of $10,159 per post.

• Format Pricing: TikTok and YouTube Shorts are the most affordable formats. In contrast, YouTube Dedicated Videos and IG Reels for very large creators were the most expensive.

• Geographic Price Variation: Creator prices differ significantly based on audience and country. For instance, a North American creator typically costs more than six times that of a South American creator.

Check out the rest of the post for a deeper dive into the data along with tips for how you can optimize creator pricing for your brand!

Our Dataset

We have the world’s largest dataset of standardized pricing and negotiation data for creators. For this particular analysis, we sampled our 2025 pricing data for creators. Here are the properties of this data set:

• We sampled 100k unique creators and their initial asking / offer prices for deliverables in a campaign.

• These 100k unique creators spanned across 100 brands we’ve partnered with, representing a diverse range of use cases and verticals.

• To simplify things we only looked at offers with the following properties:

  • Only posting one video to one account. We didn’t include long-term partnerships, cross-posting, repeat deals, UGC, or any other more complex deliverable formats.

  • All deliverables included NO usage rights, exclusivity, or any other requirements beyond creators posting to their accounts.

• The numbers below represent a creator’s initial asking price. It does not include any information about counter offers, the negotiation process, or the final agreed upon price for deliverables. 

• We work with creators who can speak English. Our creator product isn’t localized (yet!), so almost all the creators represented in this data set have a proficient level of English (though not necessarily English accounts). This explains why many of the countries we’ll highlight below have a significant English speaking population.

• All the bucketed data below includes data from at least 250 unique creators. So while there are certainly many outliers (including creators asking for over $1M+ for a post video!), our data sets are usually large enough to be robust to those outliers. 

Diving into Results

Disclaimer: While I dislike pricing creators solely based on follower/subscriber counts due to their poor correlation with actual performance and ROI, this method remains prevalent among brands and creators. Therefore, I'm providing data on how prices currently vary by these metrics. Future posts will delve into more effective pricing strategies.

How do follower / subscriber counts impact a creator’s initial offer price?

First, here’s a chart that breaks down creator asking prices by the number of followers / subscribers they have. Not surprisingly, there’s a very strong correlation between a creator’s follower / subscriber count and their initial asking prices.

For simplicity, here’s also that same data in table format:

We’re including both the median and average asking prices in this initial cut so it’s easy to see the differences in those summary statistics (e.g. in each bucket, there are some creators asking for very high prices, skewing the average to be higher). The remaining graphs below will focus on average prices.

What’s the difference by platform?

Let’s now break the above graph down by different platforms. The graph below shows the three major platforms (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube) and how creator prices change based on their platform.

A few trends might stand out here:

• TikTok is generally the most affordable platform across all creator sizes when pricing creators by follower / subscriber counts. 

• YouTube is almost always the most expensive platform, until you get to the mega creators (1M+ subscribers / followers). For mega creators, Instagram becomes the most expensive platform.

What might explain some of these trends?

• Audience value. TikTok has a younger audience with less spending power, so brands typically are more willing to spend larger budgets on YouTube and Instagram, which targets higher spending audiences.

• Follower value. Followers are most valuable on Instagram, as their main feed continues to be heavily follower based, unlike YouTube and TikTok, which has shifted almost completely to recommendations based feeds. As a result, creators with higher follower counts on Instagram are likely to see more consistent distribution compared to other platforms, explaining why mega influencers continue to be disproportionately valuable on Instagram.

• Content formats. YouTube’s data is skewed by the different ad / content formats it supports. We break this down a bit further in the next section.

One cut deeper: what’s the difference by content format?

The chart below breaks apart YouTube’s primary video formats with separate bars for YouTube Shorts, Integrations and Dedicated Videos.

Looking at this, a few other trends emerge:

• When doing an apples to apples comparison of formats, YouTube Shorts is priced fairly similarly to TikTok videos. 

• The main driver of YouTube’s higher price is the higher price of YouTube dedicated videos, which are by far the most expensive format across all buckets, until we look at mega influencers, where IG Reels remains the most expensive format. 

How does the creator’s country or region impact their price?

One of the most obvious drivers of creator prices will be the country the creator lives in which is a rough proxy for their audience. To illustrate this point, we looked at some of the countries where we most commonly partner with creators and broke down average creator prices by those countries. 

To remove bias from follower / subscriber counts, we focused only on creators with follower / subscriber counts in the 100k - 1M range.

Not surprisingly, we see that there’s nearly a 6x difference when comparing the most expensive country in our list (Canada) to the least expensive country (South Africa). Note that because we primarily work with English speaking creators, our top countries list isn’t fully representative of all the top countries with influencer marketing. 

Finally, to broaden our analysis, we bucket countries into different regions / continents to cover all markets.

Even in the more generalized context we can see the stark contrast with creator prices looking at different regions, where the top region (North America) had creators with 100k - 1M followers / subscribers typically asking for about $4200 a post, whereas creators in South America typically asked for $660 a post.

How to prices (and performance) that are much better than average

So as a brand, what are some ways to beat the averages and ensure you’re getting good rates for your partnerships?

• Let creators know what market rates are. Show them the data to help ground them in what rates are generally reasonable. Easiest way to do that is sending them this blog post :) 

• Ask for packaged deals from creators. Asking creators to cross post significantly decreases prices on a cost per post basis (and saves the creator time!), so asking for different packages is an effective way to get better deals. 

• Reach out to more creators and negotiate. Reaching out to more creators gives you more power to negotiate across creators. The majority of creators are also open to negotiating down from their initial offers, especially if they love your product!

• Reallocate budget to what’s working. Influencer marketing is a continuously iterative process and over time you should see your ROI improve. Monitor the formats, regions, and creators that are driving positive ROI and shift budgets over to those areas while dropping aspects of your campaign that aren’t delivering. 

• Price creators on other leading indicators of performance. The vast majority of brands continue to price creators based on follower / subscribers–a metric that’s a very weak leading indicator of performance. There’s massive opportunity in pricing creators based off of metrics that are much better indicators of future performance: view count, engagement rate, recent activity and trends to name a few.

Of course, if you want help with implementing all these best practices for your campaign, reach out to us–we’d love to help you optimize your campaign performance!

Future analysis / blog posts

There’s so much more data we’re excited to share about creator pricing. Here are some of the future topics we plan on writing posts about:

• Creator prices by vertical. Perhaps the biggest factor in determining creator prices is their vertical. Certified doctors and software engineers, for example, will be far more expensive than lifestyle college bloggers.

• Prices for UGC (user-generated content), usage rights, and exclusivity. We’ll break down prices of some of the most common add-ons and other deliverables around influencer marketing. 

• Negotiation data. What % of creators are open to negotiation? How much of a discount do creators generally take? We’ll share some of our insights through negotiating with hundreds of thousands of creators.

Let us know if there are any topics you’d love us to dig into!