How Performance-Based Marketing Benefits Nano and Micro Influencers

Many articles highlight how gaming content creators can earn $5,000 a month by playing games and entertaining others. However, these articles often overlook a significant detail: it's estimated that over 70% of content creators make less than $50 a month.

But there are other ways to make money through content creation that don't involve becoming a traditional influencer. In this article, we will cover the different tiers of being an influencer, how influencers can monetize their presence on various platforms (YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch), and how performance-based marketing can boost their earnings.

Influencer Rankings

Your ranking as an influencer typically depends on your follower count. Influencers are categorized into the following tiers based on their number of followers:

• Nano Influencers: Fewer than 10,000 followers
• Micro Influencers: 10,000 to 50,000 followers
• Mid-Level Influencers: 50,000 to 500,000 followers
• Macro Influencers: 500,000 to 1 million followers
• Mega Influencers: More than 1 million followers

Interestingly, the majority of influencers – about 60% – are micro influencers or smaller. However, there's a silver lining: micro and nano influencers tend to have the highest engagement rates. For instance, using Instagram's engagement rates as an example:

• Nano Influencers: 5% engagement rate
• Micro Influencers: 3.5% engagement rate
• Macro Influencers: 2% engagement rate
• Mega Influencers: 1% engagement rate

Below, we will discuss how micro and nano influencers generate income on various social media platforms. Your ranking as an influencer affects the opportunities available to you and your potential earnings.

YouTube Revenue Opportunities for Nano and Micro Influencers

Becoming a YouTube influencer requires accumulating more than 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of public watch time in the previous 12 months. YouTube compensates creators for sharing content and uses a metric called Revenue Per Mille (RPM), which means you get paid for every 1,000 views your video receives. The RPM varies based on the length of your videos. For example:

• Under 30 Seconds: $0.50 RPM
• 1 to 2 Minutes: $1 RPM
• 2 to 8 Minutes with Mid-Roll Ads: $3 to $4 RPM
• Hour-Long Video: $10 to $15 RPM, depending on viewer retention

As a nano or micro influencer with under 50,000 followers, if 15% of your followers watch your video, that's about 7,500 views. Your potential earnings might be:

• Under 30 Seconds: $3.75
• 1 to 2 Minutes: $7.50
• 2 to 8 Minutes with Mid-Roll Ads: $22.50 to $30
• Hour-Long Video: $75 to $112.50

On average, if a creator posts one long video per week and two shorts under a minute, with consistent viewership, monthly earnings could be around $100.

Twitch

Twitch offers two programs: Twitch Affiliate and Twitch Partner. To become an affiliate, you must have 50 followers, stream for eight hours across seven different days over a 30-day period, and average three viewers. To become a partner, you must stream for 25 hours across 12 different days over a 30-day period and average 75 viewers. Additionally, you need to broadcast eight individual streams with an average of 75 viewers in a 30-day period for two consecutive months prior to submitting your partner application.

This article focuses on the Affiliate program for nano and micro influencers. Once approved, affiliates can earn money through advertisements shown during streams, subscriptions to their content, and bits. However, Twitch is challenging for smaller influencers. It's estimated that 76% of streams do not earn any money monthly, and 15.6% make $1 to $25. Only less than 9% of Twitch influencers make significant earnings, and they are usually above the micro and nano influencer levels. A leak of Twitch’s financial data from 2019-2021 revealed that only 81 influencers earned over a million dollars, in contrast to the 7.5 million active Twitch streamers each month.

TikTok

TikTok, the fastest-growing social platform in recent years, offers a Creator Fund. To qualify, an account must have at least 10,000 authentic followers, and their videos must have received at least 100,000 authentic views in the past 30 days. Once part of the fund, the payout is between $0.20–$0.40 for every 1,000 views.

Another revenue source on TikTok involves earning diamonds during live streams. Viewers can give diamonds as tokens of appreciation, with 1,000 diamonds equating to $5.

TikTok also offers opportunities for sponsored posts with brands, but this might be more challenging for nano and micro influencers. Focusing on views and diamonds is often more viable.

For a micro influencer with 50,000 followers, considering TikTok's engagement rates of 18% for nano influencers and 12% for micro influencers, you might expect 6,000 views per video. If you create 20 quality videos a month, that’s 120,000 views, potentially earning around $48 per month at a rate of $0.40 per 1,000 views.

Performance-Based Marketing

As a nano or micro-influencer, generating a substantial income often requires producing a lot of content across multiple platforms. Consistent efforts on all these platforms may yield monthly revenue between $100 and $300. This is where performance-based marketing, available on platforms like Glitch, can potentially double or triple that revenue.

Performance-based marketing on platforms such as Glitch involves creating content for a game as a form of promotion. When brands collaborate with an influencer, they usually base the compensation on the influencer’s follower count. Unfortunately, micro influencers and those with fewer followers don't have a large enough audience to dictate their rates. However, with a performance-based approach, payment is based on the results produced.

This approach isn’t limited to TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube; it also includes platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and sometimes even Twitter. Compensation can vary for different types of engagement, such as views, shares, comments, and clicks. Gaming publishers provide a rate card that defines the price paid for each metric. Consider the following hypothetical rate card example:

What’s beneficial is that payment is based on actual results. Sometimes, micro-influencers create content that goes viral. For instance, take this TikTok user with only 4,000 followers might create a post that receives 2.4 million views.

If a rate card sets the price at $0.01 per TikTok view, this could result in earnings of $24,000. Similarly, consider a Reddit post below.

The post with 190,000 views and 75 comments; at $0.001 per view and $0.30 per comment, the total earning would be $212.50. This can exceed what one might typically earn on YouTube. The potential returns from creating impactful content can surpass one's follower count.

Strategize Your Approach and Workflow

For nano and micro influencers, it’s crucial to strategize an approach that maximizes exposure, engagement, and ultimately, revenue. This might include:

• Multicasting to Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube simultaneously for maximum streaming reach.
• Creating highlights from your content.
• Formatting these clips according to the best practices for different platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, Facebook, etc.
• Growing your audiences on these platforms and encouraging them to subscribe to your streams, thereby completing your own content ecosystem.

Tools like Glitch simplify this process. Glitch offers a streaming application that enables simultaneous broadcasting to multiple platforms.

It also provides built-in editing tools for creating highlight clips with text, voiceovers, images, and recording features, making the process straightforward.

After streaming, these clips can be posted directly to social media, and their performance metrics can be linked to campaigns where gaming publishers pay creators to promote their games. Creators can get started with the streaming application here: https://www.glitch.fun/creators