How to Maximize Your Revenue Per Follower

Which Platform is Revenue Per Follower the Highest?

We were poking around our creator income data and got curious–which platform allows you to earn the most revenue per follower? Are followers “worth more” on certain platforms than others?

Here’s we found.

The Y-axis labels indicate creators’ primary platform (ie. creators whose primary platform was YouTube, etc.) The X-axis reflects their total income/follower count.

What does this tell us?

Creators whose primary platform is YouTube have an average $1 in revenue per follower (RPF).

Creators whose primary platform is TikTok have an average RPF of roughly $0.15. On IG, the RPF is around $0.29.

This would indicate that subscribers on YouTube are “worth” the most. IG followers are worth a little less. And TikTok followers are worth the least.

Now, we’re not saying your audience isn’t worth anything. Each platform has its purpose. This is just to provide insight on which platform you might want to focus on depending on your goals.

While this factors in all of their income, the value of a follower remains similar for platform payments and brand deals.

This graph shows the platform payments received for creators whose primary platform is TikTok. Despite TikTok being their primary platform, TikTok paid them the least.

These creators made more, despite their smaller audiences, on platforms like YouTube and Meta/IG.

While this chart covers only brand deals, it nets out to around $0.202 to $0.08 per follower. This doesn’t come close to the RPF for YouTube, but it’s still close to/more than TikTok.

Have questions about creator income data? Let us know what you’d like us to dig into in the next newsletter.

What’s the Takeaway?

If you’re debating which platform to focus on, this might be useful data to consider. While growing on platforms like YouTube and Instagram might be a bit more challenging, the RPF is much higher than TikTok.

Karat CEO Optimistic in Light of TikTok Ban

Karat’s own Eric Wei spoke with Tech Crunch about the potential TikTok ban and its impact to the startup and creator communities, “I think two years ago, this would have been devastating. Now…eh.”

Eric’s optimism comes at a time when creators have been proven to triple their income through TikTok’s biggest competitors.

“As a creator, you need to be thinking about diversifying and how to support yourself…”

And cites this potential ban as an opportunity for startups to mobilize and support creators. “If you build products in startups that help creators make money, then actually, from an addressable market point of view, this is good for you.”

Eric stays confident that with the right resources, creators and startups alike will have what it takes to find opportunities to thrive in the midst of chaos. 

Quick Links

📈 YouTube hits all-time high for Q1 ad sales.

👻 Why now might be the best time to get on Snapchat.

😬 Why Jelly Roll left social media and how it’s changed him.

👀 Threads paying creators to post about positivity.

See ya next week,

Karat