How Many Social Media Followers Do You Need to Quit Your Job? Here's Where You Can Find Out

Do you live for social media with hopes of becoming a big enough social media influencer or creator that one day you can quit your day job and spend your time building an audience on TikTok, YouTube or some other platform?  If the answer is yes, do you know how many followers would you need to earn enough money to walk away from your job?

A new calculator from music licensing platform Lickd.co lets you do the math instantly. The “social income calculator” lets users determine how many followers, views and sponsorship deals they would need to earn enough income to become full-time influencers and still pay their bills.

For example, the Lickd.co website shows that to earn the average full-time U.S. salary of $34,103 per year, you would need the following:

• TikTok: A minimum of 10,000 subscribers and 93.2 million yearly views
• YouTube: A minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 8.2 million yearly views
• Instagram: A minimum of 5,000 followers and 105 sponsored posts a year

So, if you’d want to earn, say, $200,000 annually through social media, you’d need 615 sponsored Instagram posts, 47.8 million views on YouTube, and 540 million views on TikTok.  Even to earn just $100 for a quick getaway, you’d need at least 10,000 followers on TikTok. 

With Influencer Marketing Hub’s YouTube Money Calculator you would find out that an average advertiser pays $7.60 for every 1,000 impressions on their ad, but Google keeps 45 percent of this ad revenue. This means that you can expect to make $4.18 for every 1,000 views. Similarly Instagram pays $250 to $350 per post for a minimum of 5,000 followers which can go up depending on the number of followers and audience engagement. Bigger accounts can earn over $4,000 per sponsored post.

Do you still think you have what it takes to quit that day job?