Influencers Talk Honestly About How They Make Money: Part 3

"I’ve grown it to a low seven-figure business some years."

This is the third part in a series on how influencers make money. Don’t miss part one and part two.

After Lindsey Lugrin won the #CastMeMarc Instagram competition in 2015, she appeared in an international ad campaign. Her fee? One thousand dollars.

“To this day, that is my highest paid gig,” she told me in a recent phone call. She has also appeared in New York Fashion Week, in Italian Vogue, and on Vera Wang’s website. “I found myself in this position where I’m good enough to do the work, but not good enough to get paid,” she said.

Lugrin’s Marc Jacobs campaign.

So she started FYPM (Fuck You Pay Me), a Glassdoor of sorts for creators, meant to address the influencer marketing industry’s lack of pay standards and transparency. In fact, some agencies and marketers recruiting influencers now include clauses in contracts or NDAs prohibiting creators from sharing information about campaigns on social media or review sites like FYMP. This industry isn’t just haphazardly opaque — it’s opaque by design.

Once Lugrin started collecting information from creators on certain brands — how much they pay, if they paid on time, etc. — she saw that rates were, and remain, “all over the map.” The site just rolled out agency reviews to help creators identify the agencies that, Lugrin said, don’t pay anything. With certain brands, “you can make between $0 and $5,000, and with this new feature, you can see that every $0 review for this same brand came through one platform.”

Lugrin has raised $1.35 million in a pre-seed round and plans to raise more, suggesting her site is at the forefront of a cottage industry promoting transparency in influencer marketing. Since launching FYPM a few years ago, she’s seen rates more than double. And she’s been hearing more frequently from brands who want to set fair rates (and, in all likelihood, avoid going viral on TikTok for making insultingly low offers).

“It’s still not uncommon for brands to talk down to [creators] and tell them they’re asking for too much,” Lugrin said. “If you have experience and you create good content, only you know if what they’re asking you to do is worth your time.”

Ahead, three more influencers discuss how they monetize their content.

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Mandana Ansari

mandy

A post shared by mandana ansari (@mandy)

• Instagram followers: 417K

• TikTok followers: 51.6K

• Started as an influencer around 2011; went full-time as a content creator in 2016

• Also runs her own marketing agency

I’ve been a full-time influencer for six years now. I was doing it on the side [of a full-time job] for about five years before that. I also do consulting for brands.

Eight years ago, my best friend died by suicide, and I just started showing up more authentically online, sharing the bad and the good. At that time, it was all about a curated feed. The biggest content pillar for me is mental health. During Covid, I didn’t really have a slow time with all the mental health apps coming up and brands focusing on why something makes you feel better.

I was at a full-time job doing digital marketing for a skincare company when I got approached by a talent agency that wanted to sign me. They were like, “You have great engagement, but we really want you to pick a niche. You should just do curvy fashion.” That’s so far away from what my why is, so I was like, “No, I’m a multi-hyphenate person.”

I had a really good job. But I was like, Why am I loyal to a job where I’m working for somebody else when I could be putting in more effort doing this, not just for me but also helping other people learn how to do this for themselves? Financially, it no longer made sense to be tied to this job that I’d been at for six years.

I saved eight months of my income before leaving. Even with that I remember panicking two weeks after I left because I had to get health insurance. I’d been working in a salaried role since I was 18 — I did not know insurance costs a lot.

Eighteen months after the first agency approached me, I signed to another agency, and I’ve had one since. It’s really about knowing what your strong suit is, and for me, it’s not invoicing, it’s not legal. It’s also really nice to have the protection [of an agent].

People think it’s really great to have a manager, but you need to justify it. If you’re not making enough, why are you giving 15 to 20 percent away to someone else? A manager is a tool to help you strengthen your business. My deals are a healthy mix of incoming and my manager finding things for me. My manger might say for example, “You have very good skincare, but you don’t post enough about skincare. If you go to your profile and your top three rows don’t have something that we’re pitching you for, the brand’s not going to keep scrolling.”

When I started influencing, I think the first deal that felt was notable was $1,200. The last deal I got that I was like, I should probably consider leaving my job, was $12,000, and that was over the course of three years.

I’ve grown it to a low seven-figure business some years.