UK’s highest paid fitness influencers earn up to £10k per Instagram post during Covid pandemic
The nation’s favourite online PT Joe Wicks has topped the list of Britain’s most highly-paid fit-fluencers cashing in on their huge social media presence.
Joe Wicks – also known as The Body Coach – earns over £10,000 per Instagram post alone, while the monetisation of popular videos through ad-clicks sees him rake in £7,500 per YouTube clip, according to data from online marketplace OnBuy and Influencer Marketing Hub.
Wicks first rose to prominence during the 2010s as a fitness coach and nutritionist, when he began posting training videos online before releasing his first cookbook, ‘Lean in 15: 15-minute meals’ which became a best-seller in 2015.
But in March 2020, Wicks embarked on his ‘PE with Joe’ campaign to help kids remain active from home during lockdown – an initiative which quickly saw him become the country’s most famous online fitness coach and earned him an MBE.
Wicks’ current number of Instagram followers stands at 4.2 million – more than double the number he had pre-pandemic – setting the benchmark for fitness influencers.
But the pandemic has also seen a torrent of celebrities and sportspeople rapidly develop their online presence to benefit from the online health and wellness boom.
The nation’s favourite online PT Joe Wicks has topped the list of Britain’s most highly-paid fit-fluencers cashing in on their huge social media presence (pictured on ITV ‘This Morning’ in October 2021)
Wicks embarked on his ‘PE with Joe’ campaign to help kids remain active from home during lockdown – an initiative which quickly saw him become the country’s most famous online fitness coach and earned him an MBE (Wicks pictured filming workouts at the Natural History Museum in August 2021)
The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns supercharged an already thriving industry for social media influencers, whose work promoting various products and brands to their millions of followers via the Internet can result in huge paydays.
But influencers whose content is centred around fitness – otherwise known as fit-fluencers – arguably experienced the biggest boost of all as the nation was confined to their homes for months on end and people began searching for inspiration on how to remain fit in lockdown.
Influencers are people paid by companies to endorse their product on their social media accounts, and those with the most notoriety can charge thousands of pounds to endorse a single product.
This means posting one photo to Instagram with an endorsement can constitute a day’s work.
Sportspeople also reinforced their social media presence over lockdown to dramatically boost their fanbase and earn healthy paychecks on their posts. Olympian Tom Daley, who has 3.5 million Instagram followers, is thought to make over £8,000 per post
Television personalities are also getting in on the action – TV presenter-turned fitness fanatic Davina McCall is believed to rake in over £3,500 for each sponsored post to her 1.4 million Instagram followers.
It’s not just social media personalities who’ve managed to cash in on the trend, though.
Sportspeople and television personalities have also reinforced their social media presence over lockdown to dramatically boost their fanbase and earn healthy paychecks on their posts.
Olympian Tom Daley, who has 3.5 million Instagram followers, is thought to make over £8,000 per post, while long-time television presenter-turned fitness fanatic Davina McCall is believed to rake in over £3,500 for each sponsored post to her 1.4 million Instagram followers.
For those wondering just how many followers and views a user’s online content needs to court for cash, an online tool launched this year can help calculate the payout associated with accounts of varying popularity across different platforms.
The ‘social salary calculator’, created by music licensing platform Lickd.co, works out a level of social media engagement that would earn you your ideal salary.
For example, if your desired yearly salary is £50,000, you’ll need a minimum of 1,000 YouTube subscribers and 16.6 million yearly views on your videos.
Alternatively, on Instagram, you’ll need a minimum of 5,000 followers and 214 sponsored posts a year on the platform to earn the desired £50,000.
It’s estimated that you need at least 5,000 followers before you can start to actually make any money from Instagram (Stock image)
Or you could earn £50,000 a year from having at least 10,000 TikTok subscribers and 187.6 million TikTok video views a year.
‘Influencers are a rapidly growing breed and the top ones are making some serious money, so it’s no wonder that more and more people are looking to give up the day job,’ Lickd.co says.
‘So when it comes to the cold, hard numbers, how many followers, views, and posts would you need to make the wage that you’re currently earning?
‘Using various industry estimates, we’ve created the following calculators so you can work out just that.’