AI Influencers: Costs vs Revenue

There's a budding cottage industry of resources on places like Udemy, X and YouTube promoting that you, yes you, can make fast $$$ creating your own AI influencer. Sifting through this material, the titles and descriptions usually emphasize it's quick to do (30 minutes! 15 minutes! 5 minutes! 3 minutes! 2 minutes!), FREE, requires no coding, and will net you $11,000 a month or more.

All of this suggests that (1) a growing number of people believe they can make income through AI influencers; (2) there's real demand for this build-an-influencer content oriented towards monetization, especially since some of it has over 500,000 views; and (3) we're going to see a lot more of these virtual humans on Instagram and TikTok as more brands enter partnerships, further media headlines drive attention to this phenomenon, and AI output quality, consistency, and realism for images, video, and voice continue to improve.

This raises a host of questions for creators, graphic designers, and brands:

• Is it cheaper to build and manage my own AI influencer(s) or tap into this new market of virtual models than paying to collaborate with a human one? That's the raison d'être of the Barcelona-based AI influencer modeling agency The Clueless.
• As a brand, do AI influencers perform well enough for me to consider the investment or partnership? According to an H&M case study, yes they do.
• Given that, how economical is an AI influencer? What's the earnings potential?
• And what are the kinds of costs involved? If it's really so free and easy to do, won't the market quickly oversaturate? Why am I not already doing this?

To get that conversation started, I try to gauge the potential costs and revenue involved in creating a certain type of AI influencer: a static, unvoiced, photorealistic Instagram model like an Aitana Lopez, Maia Lima, or Sarah Jordan. That's because Aitana's face is usually plastered atop media coverage of AI influencers (see The Financial Times, El Pais, New York Magazine), and much of the online resources dedicated to creating your own AI influencer refer to her or emulate her style and look.

I'm not aiming to give a specific dollar figure here. A lot will depend on factors like what you're trying to build, how you try to monetize and market your AI influencer, time commitment, and pre-existing skills and opportunity costs. But it's a discussion worth having, especially as the AI influencer industry continues to grow and the technology moves beyond face swapping between generated images to allowing for training an AI tool with a dataset of images to create a consistent character. As this becomes easier and cheaper to achieve for people with little to no graphic design skill or background, the opportunities are practically limitless for mass content creation for advertising, storytelling, world building, and more.

Expenses

As the old adage goes: you need to spend money to make money. After picking the brains of some graphic designers as well as playing with different platforms, the biggest expenses are likely time and labor:

AI image production tools: Pricing on a monthly subscription or month's worth of credits to produce a decent volume of images through popular AI image generation tools (Midjourney, DALL·E 2, Scenario, Stable Diffusion) usually falls somewhere in the $0-30 range. Stable Diffusion, which seems to be the go-to for creating static Instagram influencers, is open source and free to use. But depending on how you're accessing that platform and the volume of images produced, you may need a graphic processing unit (GPU). You could potentially use an option like Amazon SageMaker for free up to a certain number of hours a day or potentially rent a GPU for as low as $0.20-0.30 a minute through a service like RunPod.

Photo editing: If you want to give your creation a more polished look, you'll need to invest in photo editing/ enhancing software. According to Euronews, Aitana's creators reportedly use Photoshop to help bring her to life. If you're already working as a graphic designer, you probably have a paid subscription as well as the necessary skills and experience to use Adobe Photoshop to touch up AI created images. A monthly subscription costs $22.99. If you don't have the time to devote to Photoshop and don't have a graphic design background, there's quite a few AI-powered photo enhancing tools like KREA, Luminar, Magnific, or Topaz to consider. Some are annual subscriptions only, but the costs generally come to around $10-30 a month.

Time: The consensus from chatting with designers was that the time commitment for building an influencer's visage, persona, and following is the biggest 'expense.' That's the time involved (1) experimenting with and find the right tools to create your influencer; (2) developing the influencer's persona, personality, hobbies, lifestyle; (3) researching and understanding your audience and the value you can provide; (4) creating regular and engaging content for posts and stories; (5) identifying relevant brands and pitching or demonstrating your value for partnerships and endorsements; and (6) managing the channel(s) to keep and build your influencer's following.

Based on my own experimentation with just the tools, at the beginning this is going to be more or less a full-time job's worth of work. As you become more familiar and develop the AI generation process, there's opportunities to scale production. But you'll still need to develop a voice, content plan and social schedule, and be able to react to new trends, audience demands, and products. And none of this is a done-deal. You could spend 40 hours a week learning new tools and developing your influencer to get nowhere on attracting the kind of audience you need for your goals. That raises opportunity costs—instead of fooling around with creating and marketing an AI influencer, could you have been working on other projects that are more likely to generate stable income without the risks?

Labor: Depending on skillsets, time commitment, and number of social media accounts, there could also be labor costs involved. For example, The Clueless appears to have at least three employees (and seemingly more) handling creative and project management for two unique AI models. Graphic designers I spoke to conveyed that as the AI image generation process became streamlined, there could be opportunities to farm some of the photo editing or other laborious tasks out to freelancers on sites like Dribble or Fiverr—potentially outsourcing to markets like India, Poland, or the Philippines where quality is high and costs low. A quick search on Fiverr revealed that for a photo editor permitting commercial use of edited materials, there were some options around $40 per image. There's even an "AI Artist" category, where I saw at least one $25 offer to create up to five edited and upscaled images of an AI influencer.

Paid marketing: The financial success of any influencer on Instagram or TikTok—human or virtual—is going to depend on the quantity and quality of views and followers. Your earned content (posts, media attention, responding to comments and messages, etc.) should be creating interest and building a community. As a complement to that, you might be able to boost your standing in social media platforms' algorithms with ads or promoted content, but the costs can quickly balloon.

All in all, the price tag for building an AI Instagram influencer like Aitana could be fairly low. If you're willing to do all the work yourself in terms of design and marketing, rely on free or the most basic AI and GPU subscriptions, and sign up for a relatively cheap photo editing/ enhancing service, the annual costs could be as low as a few hundred dollars.

Show Me the Money

Popular AI influencers on Instagram appear to be utilizing four main approaches to generate revenue:

1. Getting brands to pay for product or brand mentions in posts
2. Be featured in ads or campaigns
3. Selling something like products or music
4. Offer a subscription service, which is often but not exclusively to sexually explicit content through a Fanvue or OnlyFans account

That isn't particularly dissimilar from flesh and blood influencers, and all these methods depend on building and maintaining a following—one that is large, but more importantly active and engaged.

So what do we know about AI influencer incomes? In delving into different the sub-groupings below, AI influencers can more or less expect the same rate per post as a human influencer:

The Millionaire Mega-Influencers: There are only a few AI influencers who fall into this category, specifically Lu Do Magalu, Lil Miquela, and CB of Casas Bahia. Each of these three has millions of followers on Instagram and are allegedly raking in millions of dollars annually.

Since most of the attention has been on Miquela, I'll focus on her for the sake of brevity. Launched in 2016, she has been featured in ad campaigns for BMW, Calvin Klein, Prada, and Samsung. As of February 2024, Miquela has 2.6 million Instagram followers and allegedly made around $11 million in 2022 and $10 million in 2023. Her creators Brud apparently ask for $10,000 or more per sponsored post, which is on par with the industry expectation for a "mega-influencer" account with over 1 million Instagram followers.

Miquela is not photorealistic and not static, appearing in Reels and putting out music videos, so she's presumably more expensive and requires more technical skill and ability to operate than a static AI influencer.

Mid-Tier Echelon: Based on figures from this August 2023 WIRED piece, AI influencers Noonoouri, Leya Love, Imma, Qai Qai, and Superplastic's Guggimon—all with between 300,000 to 1,000,000 followers—are allegedly generating $100,000-$200,000 annually. The average revenue per follower for these five comes to $0.34.

This grouping is something of a middle-tier, made up of influencers that are a little bigger, more complex, and more established than an Aitana, but not yet the mega-AI influencers pulling in millions of dollars. None of them are photorealistic, most involve video, and at least one is affiliated with a well-known figure (Serena Williams with Qai Qai). Moreover, they all take slightly different approaches to monetization with evidence of ad campaigns (for example, Imma with IKEA), paid brand mentions, as well as income from sales of products including clothing, music, books, dolls, collectibles, and even non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Indian Outliers?: Kyra and Naina are two of India's largest AI influencers, with over 230,000 and 180,000 followers respectively. According to India Today reporting, Kyra is making 18.65 lakh to 25.28 lakh Indian Rupees per post, which would come to $22,380 and $30,336. The same reporting claims that Naina, who the Times of Indira reports is the first AI influencer to ever become the face of an Indian brand, makes between $15,480 and $21,084 per post. These estimates are based on performance metrics, but still seem quite high compared to other AI creations with much larger followings. The costs are also likely higher in this case than a static, unvoiced AI model. For example, Naina uses a body stand-in for video and Reels content, some of which involve interacting with paparazzi.

Aitana: She promotes a Fanvue of explicit content now charging $7.50 a month, but the bulk of her income seems to come from paid promotional opportunities with brands. In December 2023, The Financial Times reported brands paid her creators "about $1,000 a post." That is apparently on par for an influencer with roughly 100,000 followers on Instagram. Media coverage since last fall has given a bit of a range on Aitana's monthly income, with some highlighting a figure of roughly $3,000 on average or $11,000 as either an all-time monthly high or monthly total. That lower-end figure comes from a piece originally published in November, and since then Aitana's Instagram following has nearly tripled to over 277,000. With a steady number of paid promotions, her creators could be generating near or low six-figure income a year.

Nano-influencer: Given the trend that the bigger AI influencers are generally demanding the market expected rate based on their follower size, if you're just starting out as a static, unvoiced AI influencer you'll need to work towards a following of somewhere between 500 to 10,000 to be considered a nano-influencer, the lowest pay band. The suggestion online is that brands may just offer nano-influencers store credit or freebies or more likely to enter into a "performance-based payment structure." The going rate for a sponsored content with a nano-influencer is apparently $10-$100 per post.

The Verdict

Based on all these data points, I'd conclude:

• AI influencers are making comparable rates for paid promo as human influencers with similar follower counts. Given how low-cost it could be to make this kind of virtual model, even with some added labor costs and touchup work for a more polished look, they can presumably achieve those rates more cheaply or with less hassle than a human influencer.
• AI influencers don't have to be photorealistic to make money, as Qai Qai and Lil Miquela demonstrate. They just need a coherent voice, persona and content that is valued and connects with audiences. That's all easier said than done.
• Followers are central to monetizing any influencer, virtual or human. Success in this space is not guaranteed, so maybe take the hype from the X threads and YouTube video resources with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even becoming a nano-influencer will take a considerable amount of time and effort as well as strategy, consistency, and community building.
• Global brands, celebrities, and established human influencers presumably have an added advantage in setting up AI influencers given their existing followings and resources. But there still seems to be room for small scale operations, social media agencies, and artists to innovate, create, compete and make income in this space.