Welcoming more and more content creators on their pages, social networks have definitively understood the power of KOLs and audiences on their platforms. In 2021, some of them met a significant turning point in their relationships with influencers by creating innovative monetization models.
Indeed, during the last months, social networks committed to providing creators with tools to help them monetize and manage their personal activities. And for good reason, if in 2020 we were witnessing a genuine professionalization impulse among KOLs, it is now official in people’s minds. And it is likely to continue thanks to the monetization models set up by social platforms in 2022. To prompt content creators to keep being active on their social media, they set up attractive payment and remuneration systems – or at least which truly meet the reach of KOLs’ content.
For example, Facebook intends to pay more than a billion dollars to the influencers on its platform until 2022. For its part, TikTok started a 200 million dollar fund to support its creators financially. In that respect, TikTok’s Chief Executive Vanessa Pappas published in a press release last July: « In a relatively small amount of time, TikTok became a source of income and opportunities for the creators and their families – and we couln’t be be more encouraged by their success. As our community keeps on blossoming, we make the commitment to provide creators with even more means to make a living by inspiring joy and creativity».
Like on Twitch, it is now possible for followers to remunerate their favourite content creators on the platform. How? By subscribing to one of the three subscription levels – respectively 4,99 dollars, 9,99 dollars and 24,99 dollars – to follow their favorite streamers. Twitch then redistributes 50% of this amount to the streamers and can even go up to 70% when the content creator’s community exceeds 10K followers.
Twitter is also testing out a similar feature in the United Stated and in Canada to allow content creators to become paid influencers on its platform. The concept? Allowing strongly followed profiles on the social network to offer the possibility to their audiences to become « super followers». In this context, they will be able to receive exclusive content from their favorite content creators through account subscriptions for 3, 5 or 10 dollars a month. Twitter will only take 3% of the benefits when launching these subscriptions. The platform then plans on taking 20% of the income when a creator earns more than 50k dollars. Stay tuned about Twitter then.
On January 19th 2022, Instagram announced that it was also testing paid subscriptions with a limited group of content creators in the US. KOLs will be able to choose to offer exclusive content to their followers in the form of Lives or stories, and will be able to easily identify paying subscribers thanks to a badge associated with them when they post a comment or send a message.
Here are the KOLs concerned by this test: @alanchikinchow, @sedona._, @alizakelly, @kelseylynncook, @elliottnorris, @jordanchiles, @jackjerry, @bunnymichael, @donalleniii and @lonnieiiv.
In a dynamic where KOLs’ (Key Opinion Leaders) potential to boost commercial activity on social media will continue to increase, the appearance of more sustainable and stable payment and monetization models to remunerate content creators will naturally follow.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.
