How much do you get paid for a million views on each social media platform?

YouTube pays the most obviously


Social media is a really weird place. It’s this world where people often aren’t what they seem, publicising parts of their lives that large amounts of other people seem to really care about, and making HUGE amounts of money whilst they do so. There are as many people using it just for a laugh as there are people whose whole livelihoods depend on it – and livelihoods are certainly made on it. Kylie Jenner reportedly earns up to one million quid per Insta post, whilst some TikTokers have made over one million pounds in a year.

Yeah yeah, we’ve all heard of the astronomical amounts our favourite influencers, YouTubers and creators make on a good day, but everyone seems to be a bit up in the air about exactly how much you can earn on different platforms. So, for one million views, streams or followers on every social media platform, just how much money can be made?

Spotify – £2,000 to £3,800

Spotify isn’t known to be the most lucrative platform to earn money online, and whilst it doesn’t pay as much as other platforms, it’s not bad at all. Spotify pays between £0.002 and £0.0038 per stream, which means 1,000,000 streams could have a payout of between £2,000 and £3,800.

TopRatedCasinos analysed Spotify data and estimated that Britney Spears earned £1,780,213 for the 500m+ streams of her hit single Toxic, whilst earning just over £300,000 for her 94m+ view song Criminal.

Apple Music – £5,900

Next up is Apple Music, who pays its users around £0.0021 more per stream than Spotify at around £0.0059. This means that one million listens could pocket artists nearly six grand which is pretty good all things considered – although it may well be harder to achieve this figure on Apple compared to Spotify.

And who uses Apple Music nowadays anyway?

YouTube – £1,000 to £35,000

YouTube has always been a confusing platform when it comes to paying creators, as there seems to be such a huge disparity with how much people are paid.

Save The Student, for example, suggests that a video with one million views can rake in a touch over £1,000 – yet also claims that more popular channels can earn up to £7 per 1,000 views, bringing the pay for a video with one million views up to £7,000.

However, Insider spoke to five creators who had had varying degrees of success on YouTube and found that a video with one million views can net a creator up to $40,000 dollars.

Instagram – £14k+ per post

For this, we went on the pay per post for an Instagram account that had accrued one million followers. Petalcard reports that people with up to 500,000 followers can rake in on average $670 per post, whilst others have been known to earn up to $20,000 according to Finance Buzz.

However, it’s not all that much for those that aren’t outright influencers. The owner of @goldenretrievers on Instagram with 1.9 million followers at the time spoke to Medium, telling them that with a shout-out or other paid featured every day, along with a sponsorship every other month, they earn around $8,500 a month.

Twitter – £10k+ per post

I know, right? Who’d think of Twitter as the first place to earn big money online? Having said that, you must have seen the annoying adverts from celebrities promoting films they don’t care about, or even people with viral tweets then making threads with products beneath them?

So, what is the price for a sponsored post from an account with one million followers? Well, this calculator says you can earn well over 10 grand for each post if you have one million followers and have a pretty good engagement rate. It’s pretty cool – grab the @ of your favourite celebrity and see how much they could make per tweet.

Despite having a current engagement rate of 0.08 per cent, for example, Justin Bieber and his 114 million followers could net him between $854,000 and $1,000,000 for one tweet… to think you’d only need to sell out with ONE TWEET promoting someone’s business to have enough money for several houses is crazy.

TikTok – £10k+

Onto TikTok now, which very much relies on a similar model to YouTube – you can get loads of views, but you’re only going to get paid for them if you’re a popular, regular creator.

As such, it can vary massively. We recently interviewed some popular TikTok creators, one of which had six million followers and was making £1,000 a month through the creator fund. However, he told us that creators can make up to £10,000 per video on this program.

However, creators that don’t have as many followers don’t get anywhere close to £10,000. This redditor, for example, made just $24 for 1.6 million likes through the creator fund which is rather lousy.

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