I just read something that the monetization factor for social media followings is about 80 cents per follower. Using that guideline, Trey Knox’s 12,700 followers on Instagram and 13,800 on Twitter each would be worth about $10000 a year. Not life changing but it will be a nice boost in the bank account. Hopefully his Petsmart deal is worth more than that.
But then you look at other college athletes, especially women. Paige Bueckers, the UConn basketball star, has more than 800,000 followers on Instagram. Do the math. Chelsea Dungee has 58,000; she left a year too soon. And those twins at Fresno State are going to make some serious bank.
One more thing I thought of. You think Scotty Thurman couldn’t have made some serious cash with T-shirts and autographs and appearances after Thurman’s Three? Sheesh.
getting real numbers is an interesting dilemma, like the value of a Super Bowl to a city. So many multipliers that have to cross into overlap, but then that is the same as valuing a stock like Taboola. That 80 cents cannot in my mind be an absolute number. 8 year olds with Tik Tok are a big part of the twins social media following, and I don’t think you can monetize an 8 year old. Gotta start somewhere and in the near future the monetizing value will be established and debated for NIL negotiations.
An 8 year old can’t monetize herself but her parents sure can. If someone wants to reach that demographic, why not? We all know that Saturday morning cartoons were full of ads aimed at getting kids to ask their parents for toys or breakfast cereal or whatever.
Hmm, I rarely follow players… with my social media. Now I guess as a fan we should all go follow them to help them make more bank.
Hmm nother thought just popped into my head. Just take twitter for example. I have several different twitter accounts for different things I do, politics, sports, friends, etc. Somethings all those things don’t mix well. My point is that it is extremely easy to make many twitter accounts. I can see that a group of people or a group of athletes or both could make a bunch of different accounts to generate a bunch of followers and do that across multiple social media platforms and it could add up.
Would that be abuse, gaming the system, or just smart use of social media?
NIL will open more cans of worms than MR. T had bling on his neck (and if I remember right it was 6 or 7 pounds… thats a lot of bling)
It does add up. Knox could have a TikTok account I haven’t seen, or other social platforms. Some of the people who follow him may do so on multiple platforms, but others don’t; if you do Twitter but don’t do IG, you don’t have that opportunity. But a company is paying for the raw numbers, even if some of them are duplicates, because there’s no way to track how many places I follow Trey Knox.
Now imagine if your someone like a Kardashian who has millions of followers. Now imagine she had a favorite college team. Now I wonder how hard would it be for her to drop a mention on her social media to all her followers something like, “do me a favor and go follow a friend of mine named Joe Athlete.”
That could get out of hand in a big way.
Imagine if some college got some social media type mogul like that and told their recruits, come to here, we will get you big bucks from our social media mogul thats a friend of the program.
Lol. The mental gymnastics of people who don’t like this idea are of stunning complexity – this could lead to A and then B and then C and then D, all the time ignoring that A itself is unlikely to happen. You think Kim Kardashian really cares about anything but Kim Kardashian? There are absolutely social media influencers who give shout-outs to promote other people, but they’re paid for the shoutout. And you’d have to pay Kim a whole lot for the privilege.
People can get bent all out of shape about the what-ifs, but all their objections aren’t going to change it. The federal courts, the state legislatures and the NCAA have all acknowledged that the old system had to change. Is the new system perfect? Of course not. So figure out what’s wrong after a year or two and tweak it, keeping in mind that the antitrust laws are still there and aren’t going to change.
Dewayne “The Rock” Johnson who is an ex Miami Hurricane football player and big time friend of their program. He happened to have around 345 million followers on just one platform not counting others. Lets say he drops a message to his follower to follow players of the Hurricanes. Even if only 10% of his followers do it that’s 34.5 Million people. Swine I think you mentions 80 cents a follower… lets drop it to 50 cents and its still 17.25 Million dollars.
Now you gonna stand there and tell me something like that won’t be used in recruiting. Then you are delusional.
There are some big heavy hitters, with a massive social media following, that are Razorback fans too. Bobby Bones comes to mind. I truly think this might take “lil ol Arkansas” up a few pegs in the hierarchy.