u/Striking-Duck8391

A doctor conducting an X-ray found that a child in Saudi Arabia swallowed a SpongeBob SquarePants toy.

The child, a 16-month-old boy, was brought in to the hospital because he was believed to have swallowed ‘something.’

Sure enough, he had swallowed a toy pendant that belongs to his older sister.

Thankfully the toy was safely removed and the little boy is okay.

I always assumed that once someone got to 100k followers they were probably making really good money from social media.

Then I started looking at influencer rates for work and realized follower count is probably one of the worst ways to guess how much someone is making.

You can have two creators with basically the same audience size and one can charge 5-10x more than the other.

From what I've seen, these are the things that actually seem to matter:

1. Niche:

100k followers posting memes and 100k followers talking about finance or tech are completely different audiences from a brand's perspective.

Some niches simply have more expensive products, higher customer values or people who are more likely to buy something, so brands can justify paying way more to reach them.

The rate differences by niche are actually pretty crazy. I found estimates ranging from around $5k-$20k for finance sponsored content to $2k-$5k for gaming/tech, while other categories sit somewhere in between.

2. Engagement:

This is where follower count starts becoming almost meaningless on its own.

An account with 100k followers and 0.5% engagement might be less valuable than a 10k account where 6% of the audience consistently engages with the content.

Brands are buying attention of the audience

3. Real performances:

Views, reach and how your content performs matter a lot.

If you have 100k followers but your videos normally get 3k views, that's a very different proposition from a 30k creator consistently pulling 100k+ views.

And if a creator has previous campaigns showing they can actually drive clicks, installs or sales, they have a much stronger argument for charging more.

4. Platform:

A sponsored TikTok from a micro influencer can be around $50-$500, while a sponsored YouTube video from a creator in the same follower tier can be around $500- $2,000.

Makes sense when you think about it because watching someone explain a product for several minutes on YouTube is completely different from seeing it for 15 seconds while scrolling TikTok.

5. What the brand can do with the content:

This becomes especially important with UGC.

A creator might make a video that never even gets posted to their own audience. The brand is paying for the asset itself and might want to run it as an ad, put it on a product page or reuse it across different channels.

In that case follower count basically doesn't matter at all, while the number of deliverables, complexity and usage rights do.

This is a detailed breakdown of influencer rates by follower count, platform and niche here:

https://sideshift.app/blog/how-much-influencers-make

So, 100k followers can obviously be extremely valuable, but apparently it can also mean surprisingly little financially.

The audience behind those 100k and what you can actually do with their attention seems to matter way more than the number itself.

I spent about 3 years working as a mystery shopper, and honestly it was one of the strangest jobs I've ever had.

My job was basically to visit businesses and pretend I was a normal customer while secretly checking how everything was done. Restaurants, clothing stores, banks, hotels, car dealerships and all kinds of places.

The funny part was that I had to act completely normal while remembering a stupid amount of details.

Was the receptionist friendly? Did someone greet me? Was the bathroom clean? How long did my food take? Did the employee actually follow the company rules?

Hotels were probably my favorite. I could get a nice room and eat room service, but at the same time I was sitting there with a list in my head thinking, "Okay, the food arrived 28 minutes after I ordered it."

I also had to sit through some very long car sales pitches for cars I had absolutely no intention of buying.

Once I even ran into another mystery shopper while doing a shop. We both recognized each other and just decided to pretend we didn't.

The job wasn't always fun though. Sometimes I had to spend more time writing the report than actually doing the shop.

Still, after 3 years, I had visited more businesses than I probably would have in my entire life otherwise.

The weirdest part is that even now, when I go somewhere as a normal customer, I automatically notice things I probably shouldn't.

I guess once you're a mystery shopper, you never really stop being one.

i won't consider this as something weird but rather an unexpected side hustle. my friend and i created an account to stalk her ex and the girl he cheated with. at first, we thought on making a home service nail artist however it's already too common. instead, we made a business account selling fuzzy wire or pipe cleaner flower handicraft, just for a front to stalk their social media accounts.

however... a few days passed and we started receiving dms for commissions looool so we had no choice but to grab the opportunity and started learning how to create these flowers, and honestly it wasn't that hard to learn, you just need to have the patience and dedication and love for the art.

so now, my friend and i are starting to earn from our commissions from the account we made that was made to stalk her ex. it wasn't that much but we sell a lot especially on special occasions or random commissions.

idk if should that be considered as a blessing or disguise or just our luck lol what do u guys think?

ps. photo is just for reference for fuzzy wire flowers

we all know AI doesn't have human emotions nor empathy but it's actually both scary and amazing how these AI models are designed to make us feel like they understand what we feel.