I made $25,000 from Instagram
Since February
I made $25,000 from Instagram. Some of it felt awful
A couple of months ago, if you had told me that my Instagram income would quietly become comparable to my software engineering salary, I probably would’ve smiled politely and continued debugging something.
And yet, since February, I’ve made around $25,000 from collaborations.
Not from millions of followers. Not from viral dances. Not from pretending I wake up at 5AM to meditate while sunlight gently hits my expensive kitchen.
Just from making videos.
Now, before everyone dramatically quits their jobs, there’s an important detail people don’t talk about enough: making money from content is not the same thing as enjoying the process of monetizing it.
Because collaborations are… complicated. Especially agency collaborations.
Brands are usually fine. Agencies, however, often behave as if paying for a video also gives them partial ownership over your personality, creative instincts, and occasionally basic human dignity. Suddenly everyone has opinions.
“Can we make it more dynamic?”
“Can you mention the product earlier?”
“Can we make it feel more native?”
“Can we show more features?”
“Can we make it less cinematic and more relatable but still premium?”
And before you realize it, you’re editing a video you don’t even like anymore.
Some of the worst videos I’ve ever posted were sponsored. Not because the products were bad, but because too many people were involved in “improving” them.
And honestly, that’s one of the ugliest little details of creator income nobody mentions. Sometimes the money is great, but the content feels dead by the time it gets published.
Which is exactly why this month I reduced the number of collaborations and started being more selective. I found one brand that genuinely likes the way I see their product instead of trying to reconstruct me into a completely different creator. The videos perform better, the process feels lighter, and most importantly — the content still feels like mine. Which, surprisingly, matters more than I expected.
The internet has created a fascinating generation of people who are perfectly comfortable posting themselves online every day, but become deeply uncomfortable the moment money enters the conversation.
And honestly, I understand why.
The moment you ask for money, everything suddenly feels more serious. You stop feeling like “someone who makes videos for fun” and start feeling like someone who has to justify their value.
But brands care much less about your existential crisis than you think they do.
Here are some negotiation techniques that my marketing manager applies to get me better deals.
Usually we intentionally start with a higher rate because both sides understand there’s room for negotiation. Then comes the predictable answer:
“That’s way beyond our budget.”
And now the theatre begins.
My manager “talks to me.”
I apparently “make a generous discount.”
The brand “checks internally.”
Everyone performs their role correctly.
And surprisingly often, it works. This is called anchoring. You establish a higher psychological reference point first, so the final number feels much more reasonable by comparison.
Now, to be clear, we’re not starting at something insane like $10,000 per reel and trying to emotionally terrorize people into bankruptcy. The rates are still reasonable. Usually you can use influencer marketing platforms or calculators to roughly understand your market value and then simply test whether brands reaching out to you are comfortable with those numbers.
Because pricing is not mathematics. It’s positioning.
Brands do exactly the same thing, by the way.
Recently, one very famous tool wanted to collaborate with me. We gave them our fixed rate, and in response they sent a detailed breakdown explaining that according to my recent statistics, they would prefer a CPM + CPE compensation structure instead. In other words: “We’ll pay you depending on performance.”
Which sounds perfectly logical until you remember that social media performance is not physics.
Nobody fully controls it.
Not creators.
Not brands.
Not even the algorithm itself, despite its God complex.
So we declined. Because fixed pricing pays not only for views, but also for scripting, filming, editing, production quality, audience trust, and the years it took to build all of that in the first place.
And honestly, I think this is where many creators fail during negotiations. They try to justify themselves with numbers alone, while forgetting that brands are also paying for taste, trust, positioning, and the ability to make an ad not feel like an ad.
Which is much harder than people think.
Next time I’ll show you how I actually read my Instagram analytics and how I slowly reverse-engineered the formula behind my best-performing videos.
Not in a “guru with arrows on thumbnails” kind of way.
I’ll show you:
what metrics I actually pay attention to,
which numbers matter less than people think,
how I realized some videos fail before they even start,
and the patterns I noticed after staring at analytics for an unhealthy amount of time.
With screenshots, examples, and a few painful realizations.
Consider this your warning.
Warmly,
AL.
