TikTok influencer: My video went viral online. Instagram paid me just $140.

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Social media has created new opportunities for influencers and entrepreneurs alike. Despite its tenuous legal position in the US, TikTok generated $24.2 billion for the US economy in 2023.

For Mary Esposito, who runs the online brand Money with Mary, content creation has been a particularly lucrative source of income. On Yahoo Finance’s Stocks in Translation podcast, Esposito broke down how she makes money from social media — and revealed that having a post go viral doesn’t necessarily result in a big payday.

In one instance, a popular video Esposito made earned over 100 million views and received 10 million likes across her platforms.

“Instagram paid me $140” for that video, Esposito shared on a recent episode of Stocks in Translation (see video above or listen below). “So that’s less than $10 per million views.”

She explained sponsorships and brand deals are where she gets most of her income as a content creator.

“You really can’t make a lot of money in my experience in [Instagram] just from, like, AdSense,” she said.

Esposito has been making content for the internet since she was 14. She initially started growing a following online by posting videos of her crochet and knitting projects. But today, her content is focused on educating and “empowering Gen Z to pursue more financial literacy.”

“I was able to generate an income from [my crochet account], especially during the pandemic, when all my classes were asynchronous in high school,” she said. “I was able to learn [about] investing. … I had all this extra money — what was I going to do with it?”

After catering to the crochet audience for seven years, Esposito noticed a “really big gap in our educational curriculum” about finance, so she created a financial literacy platform for Gen Z.

Though she built her platform primarily on TikTok, Esposito said she knew she had to pivot once it became clear that the app could be banned in the US.

“As soon as I saw that, I thought, OK, I need to go with a company that is not TikTok as my primary platform because I want to build a sustainable business,” she said.

Esposito now considers Instagram her “primary platform,” though TikTok is still a tool she uses “as a software” for creating content. She said that making Instagram her primary platform gives her a “more accurate media kit” to pitch to brands and companies.

“On TikTok, the whole [allure] is that there’s a lot of potential to go viral,” she said. “But for me, the problem I had with TikTok was that you could either get 200 likes or 200,000, whereas if you go over to Instagram, it has a more consistent engagement rate.”