What Web3 KOLs charge
A placement costs about the same on a 2,000 follower account as on a 40,000 follower account. Around 750 dollars, either way. That single fact reorganizes most crypto influencer budgets, and it only shows up when you put 861 rate cards in one table.
Rates come from WeKOLnect, the creator database we keep for sourcing campaigns. 390 creators carry both a rate and an audience number. Everything in dollars, collected up to August 2026.
The rate barely moves, the audience does
Creators under 10,000 followers and creators up to 50,000 quote the same median rate, 750 dollars. The audience behind that rate grows by more than ten times. Divide one by the other and the small account costs 128 dollars per thousand followers while the mid tier costs 7.
Small creators can still be worth it. You are buying access to a specific room, and rooms are priced by who is in them. The number only looks wrong when reach was what you were after.
| Audience | Creators | Median | Middle half | Per 1k followers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 10k | 40 | $750 | 300 to 1,100 | 128.10 |
| 10k to 50k | 158 | $750 | 200 to 1,319 | 28.31 |
| 50k to 250k | 150 | $1,000 | 350 to 2,175 | 7.38 |
| 250k to 1M | 34 | $5,058 | 1,100 to 18,000 | 9.64 |
| Above 1M | 8 | too few priced creators to publish a median | ||
Efficiency stops improving before the top. The 50k to 250k tier reaches people more cheaply than the tier above it, so the best value here is not the largest account a budget can reach. It sits in the middle, bought in volume.
Same thousand dollars, seven times the difference
Four of the five niches we can publish cluster around a thousand dollars for a placement. They stop agreeing the moment you account for audience: education and news creators keep their rates on smaller followings, so their reach costs seven times what DeFi reach costs.
| Niche | Creators | Median | Per 1k followers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto education | 133 | $1,000 | 33.24 |
| Crypto news | 46 | $1,100 | 27.46 |
| Crypto trading | 111 | $1,000 | 11.57 |
| Memecoins | 33 | $1,000 | 7.31 |
| DeFi | 36 | $300 | 4.63 |
GameFi, NFTs, infrastructure, DePIN and RWA are in the database and stayed out of this table. After the cleanup described below, each had between 1 and 14 priced creators, and a median over 5 rows is worth nothing.
Telegram is the expensive one
YouTube carries the large cheques, a median of 20,455 dollars for a placement and a top quarter near 39,000. Telegram is the one that surprises buyers: 1,100 dollars looks manageable until you notice the channels are small, which puts it second in cost per person reached. X holds half the priced sample and sits with TikTok in the efficient middle, near 11 dollars per thousand.
| Platform | Creators | Median | Per 1k followers |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | 22 | $20,455 | 61.96 |
| Telegram | 98 | $1,100 | 48.12 |
| X | 196 | $900 | 11.60 |
| TikTok | 23 | $1,600 | 10.28 |
What a placement buys
The rate cards break the work down further, 809 of them across the database. A promotional tweet runs 550 dollars at the median, a single post on other platforms runs double that, and a listing placement runs 160. Monthly packages sit between 4,250 and 10,000, though only six creators quote one, so treat that as a hint rather than a number.
| Deliverable | Quotes | Median | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single post | 119 | $1,100 | 888 to 1,600 |
| Promotional tweet | 141 | $550 | 300 to 1,100 |
| Listing placement | 52 | $160 | 150 to 170 |
How to spend this
Carry the width of the middle half into the negotiation, more than the median itself. Among creators with 50,000 to 250,000 followers, the cheaper quarter quote under 350 dollars and the pricier quarter quote over 2,175. Six times the price, for audiences of the same size in the same market. Whoever knows the distribution sets the anchor, and until now that was almost always the seller.
None of this predicts whether a placement works. Two creators at the same rate, in the same niche, routinely deliver very different signups, and no rate card tells you which one you are talking to. We publish this so buyers stop overpaying at the start, then measure the placement to find out what it was actually worth. That measurement is the part we care about.
How we got the numbers
The source is WeKOLnect, our own creator database, which lists what creators quote rather than what any specific client paid. Of 861 creators, 713 have an audience number and 482 have a rate. After the exclusion below, 390 carry both, and that group is the basis for every per follower figure here.
Everything reported is a median, never an average, because a handful of very large quotes would drag any mean upward. Cost per thousand followers is worked out creator by creator and then aggregated, rather than dividing one median by another, which would flatter the result. No median is published from fewer than 15 creators.
One value had to go. The exact figure 107.69 dollars appeared on 69 records, 14.3 percent of everything priced. All 69 sat on one platform, none carried a rate label, they were spread across eight unrelated niches, and every one shared a single deliverable label. That is an import, not a market. Removing it cut the smallest tier from 102 creators to 40 and moved the overall figure from 25.19 to 17.73 dollars per thousand followers, which is why both numbers appear here instead of only the better one. GameFi and NFTs lost their tables entirely. The 50k to 250k and 250k to 1M tiers did not move at all, which is how we know the default lived among the small accounts.
Rates move, so this page carries its date. No creator, client or campaign is identifiable here, or in the aggregation behind it.
