Influencer Marketing Grows Up

What's to blame for the rise in influencer rates? Agencies, middle layers… and YOUR budget

Influencer Marketing Grows Up

There was a time when influencer marketing was relatively inexpensive. The industry was new, creators didn’t have a lot of experience, and brands didn’t commit much budget to the experimentation.

A lot has changed in the last couple of years, and Digiday today has a great piece up on their site documenting the rise in rates.

Smaller influencers are asking for rates often double or triple what they charged in 2021. Specifically: two or three years ago, TikTok micro-influencers with 5,000 to 20,000 followers earned $1,000 to $3,000 per post. Today, one industry expert quoted in the piece say they charge $3,000 to $5,000.

Why the rise?

Part of the rise is that advertisers now demand content usage rights and exclusivity. Influencers have learned they can charge a premium for this. Campaign tracking tools have gotten more reliable, and influencer agencies have sprung up to provide a middle layer — a layer which extracts a slice of the revenue.

Some good news

Costs for influencers with 100,000 to one million followers remained relatively stable.

Apple Launches Maps on the Web

Almost all of Google’s enormous success in offering local advertising is their Maps product. Certainly, the mobile app helps, but don’t discount the traffic that comes from the desktop version. It’s substantial.

Perhaps that’s why Apple has finally launched its Maps product on the web — a full 12 years after offering it on their mobile devices.

You can find it at beta.maps.apple.com, though it’s not available in all regions.

What it means for marketers

This means, of course, that it’s even more important that you update your business profile with Apple. Just like Google’s business profile, Apple has one; its program is called Apple Business Connect and you can find it at businessconnect.apple.com

TikTok to Let You Upload Custom Thumbnails

It may be a small thing, but it’s a big thing — TikTok is finally letting users upload custom thumbnail images for their videos.

Until now, this was only available on desktop, but now it’s coming to the mobile app.

You’ll find it on the same screen as where you drag your video to pick an existing thumbnail — once this update gets to you, you’ll see a new Upload button on the right to use.

Reels already lets you do this, and YouTube just added the ability to add text and filters screenshots from your video to use as thumbnails (they say custom thumbnail uploads are on the way).

That said, thumbnails aren’t as important on vertical short video platforms than, say, YouTube’s main service. This is because videos are fed one after another, without seeing the thumbnails. It only matters if people pick a video to watch from your account’s profile page — which does happen, especially if people first find you through a video of yours that goes viral.

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