Selling Influence

Startup LTK helps creators find sponsorships and set up e-commerce operations

- Joshua Brustein and Sarah Frier

On a good day, Jen Adams posts more than a dozen photos to social media, displaying a wide range of new outfits. The neutral colors she loves—beige, gray, and black—contrast with her bubbly personality, which comes through in the hundreds of warm comments and heart-eyes emojis she sends to her 823,000 Instagram followers.

To the casual scroller, Adams—who goes by @interiordesignerella—appears to spend her days shopping and showing off. But behind the scenes is a sophisticated marketing business, an always-on operation with strict daily sales goals and about a dozen active partnerships with brands at any time. Adams has nine staffers, three of them working full time. “I am a shopping platform,” she says.

Of the 4.2 billion people who use social media, about 500 million try to make money from it, according to social media marketing and analytics company Linktree, which estimates that only 60,000 of them earn more than $50,000 a year.

While social media influencers make money from taking a cut of the advertising on platforms including Instagram and YouTube, many of them dismiss these earnings, sometimes saying they amount to little more than coffee money. The bigger opportunities are in brand partnerships, where companies either pay influencers a flat fee to promote their products or give them a cut of any online sale their posts generate. Research firm Statista estimates the amount paid to influencers globally reached about $16 billion last year, more than nine times its size just six years ago.