TLL Editor in Chief
Savvy college athletes are generating huge returns from social media, now that the NCAA allows them to earn money from Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals.
The social video company Curastory has unearthed data that shows college athletes are earning as much as $80,000 for a single social media posts. As well, the top earning athletes are not just the athletes in high-earning college sports like football and basketball. Many are female athletes in sports that otherwise would not earn them anywhere the same income as male football or basketball stars typically get in NIL advertising deals.
The diffference, according to the Curastory report is that “Women and video wins the content creation war, (as the) top four NIL earners include Oregon’s Sedona Prince, Texas’ Sam Hurley, Auburn’s Sunisa Lee, and California’s Camryn Rogers.
Oregon hoops star Sedona Prince has over 3 million followers on TikTok and another 242,000 on Instagram. Her short videos get an average of 2,850,000 views on TikTok, allowing her to earn an impressive average of $90,000 for each post.
Men’s cross-country track star Sam Hurley placed second in the Curastory data dump, as he earned an average of https://www.thelicensingletter.com/licensing-trends-nil-changes-see-athletes-earning-big-bucks-on-tiktok/$39,000 per post from his 3.6 million TikTok followers and 1 million Instagram followers. The difference between the two top athletes is that Prince gets more views per post with 2.85 million, compared to Hurley’s 1 million.
Curastory is a content creation company that allows creators and brands to automate the video marketing process, and is making the point that video in social media is critical to anyone trying to either earn money or to get mass attention on the internet.
In putting the report together, Curastory analyzed data from over 75,000 students from 166 schools to highlight the content creators with the highest earning potential per video.
“Video is the most important indicator of earning potential in the creator economy,” Curastory argues. “According to past predictions, 82% of the internet would be video traffic by 2022. Meanwhile, Gartner recently stated that content influences every stage of the customer journey, yet only 42% of B2C and 41% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.
“For brands seeking to stay relevant, Curastory’s report provides unique insights to help power and drive upcoming content marketing campaigns.”
Curastory does say that, on average, the top sports for earning views, clicks and dollars is still football and basketball, but content, not the sport, is the single greatest driver of views. For example, two of the top five earners come from women’s gymnastics, those being Sunisa Lee and Elena Arenas, placing third and fifth, who respectively earn approximately $23,000 and $15,000 per post.
The California women’s cross-country track star Camryn Rogers places fourth, earning just short of $16,000 per post.
Curastory also says, at this point, female athletes are out-competing the men in the social media arena. Out of the top 10 athletes, only three are men, and two of them – football players Evan Stewart of Texas A&M and Dorian Thompson of UCLA – placed ninth and tenth.
Curastory also detailed which schools topped the social media rankings, but found many of them were primarily driven by one or two top athletes:
- Oregon, $108K – driven by Sedona Prince
- UCLA, $57K – driven by Dorian Thompson-Robinson
- Texas, $49K – driven by Sam Hurley
- Auburn, $35K – driven by Sunisa Lee
- Florida, $31K – driven by Riley McCusker
As noted above, Curastory also noted that the sports dominating the social media earning charts were not what they expected. While both women’s and men’s basketball placed well, sports that were at or near the top included track and field, softball, and gymnastics.
The same was true in seeing primarily women topping the rankings. On social media in general, according to the The Information, 84% of creators and influencers are women, and that trend continues in sports, despite the face male athletes are generally paid far more than female athletes.
Curastory found that 85% of student athlete creators are women, and 70% of student athlete creators are women in the top 10.
“It’s exciting to see women dominating our list,” says Curastory CEO Tiffany Kelly. “Coming from ESPN, if it wasn’t men’s basketball or football being discussed in the programming, it was put on the backburner.
“With the boom of the creator economy empowering individual voices, that has since changed because women are dominating social media. The creator economy has forced sports media to take a serious look at where the money is going, in turn making the coverage more equitable.”
“Media conglomerates are now forced to pay attention,” Kelly adds. “There is buying power, there are financials to back growth, and these athletes are a driving force of revenue for brands.”