Two hundred small, or twenty large? · Part 1 of 3
Small creators cost three times more per engagement. Unless you pick them right.
An engagement is one like, one comment or one repost. On a normal post, a big creator gives you one for $0.31 and a small one charges $0.92. Pick a small creator whose posts already do well, count their big posts, and it drops to $0.14.
September 2026 · 8 min read
One engagement from a big creator
More than 20k followers (k means thousand). The cheapest engagement we buy, at prices they really agreed to.
One engagement from a small creator
Under 5k followers. Three times the big-creator price. The post is cheap. Each like is not.
One engagement from the middle
5k to 20k followers. The most expensive on our roster. They charge like big names and get small-name numbers.
One engagement from a picked small creator
A 5k to 10k account whose normal post already gets 30 or more, counting posts from 2025 on. Count its big posts and it becomes the cheapest we have.
01 · The price
Big creators are three times cheaper per engagement
Here is a popular idea. Instead of paying twenty big creators $500 to $1,000 each, pay two hundred small ones $10 to $50 each, and you buy more attention. We keep a record of every price a creator has agreed with us, so we checked. On a normal post, the idea is wrong.
A few words first. A follower is someone who chose to see a creator’s posts. Our roster is the list of creators we work with. We sort them into three groups, called tiers, by how many followers they have. Micro is under 5k. Mid is 5k to 20k. Macro is more than 20k. Every price here is one a creator really agreed to, not one they advertise.
Cost per engagement is simple. Take what a creator was paid for a post. Divide it by the likes, comments and reposts that post got. We do that for every creator on their own posts. Then we line up the creators in each tier and take the one in the middle. That middle one is called the median. One lucky creator with one huge post cannot throw it off.
What one engagement costs, by tier
median across creators with a price and a post history · our deal book
Macro is cheapest at $0.31. Micro is $0.92, three times as much. The middle is the most expensive at $1.30. Middle creators have grown enough to charge like a big name. Their posts do not yet get big-name numbers.
Here it is as two receipts, at the prices each creator really took.
- Price of the post
- $15
- Engagements on a normal post
- few
- Per engagement
- $0.92
- Price of the post
- $117
- Engagements on a normal post
- many
- Per engagement
- $0.31
The small creator’s post is cheaper. Each engagement it buys costs more. That is the catch. You pay for the post. What you get back is the engagements.
02 · One post each
Twenty-five big creators deliver more than all 109 small ones
Price is half the story. The other half is how much you get. So we asked a simple question. If everyone on our roster posted once, at the price they accept, how many engagements would each tier bring in?
Engagements, every creator posting once
109 micro, 59 mid, 25 macro · our roster, 2 Sep 2026
What that costs, at accepted rates
the same one post each, in dollars
Twenty-five macro creators deliver 8,306 engagements for about $2,925. All 109 micro creators deliver 3,165 for about $1,635. The mid tier is the one to watch. 59 creators, 3,887 engagements, roughly $4,900, and that is more money than either of the other tiers for less than half of what macro delivers.
engagements from 25 big creators
Against 3,165 from all 109 small ones. Nearly triple, for under twice the money.
average post, 5k to 10k followers
The normal post at that size gets 6. The average counts the rare big posts too, so it is four times higher. Section 04 explains that gap.
of roster followers sit with 25 people
They have 2.25 million followers between them. The 109 micro creators have 216,529.
03 · The audience
Three quarters of the followers sit with twenty-five people
Count heads and the roster is mostly small creators. Count followers and it is mostly big ones. Here are all 3,030,454 followers the roster can reach, in one strip.
Micro · 109 people. Most of the roster, a tiny slice of the audience.
Mid · The middle of the strip, and the most expensive engagement on the roster.
Macro · 25 people hold 74% of every follower the roster has.
Most of the people are at the bottom. Most of the audience is at the top. The price per engagement is worst in the middle and best at the top. Each of those facts is a reason not to buy creators by the hundred.
The post is cheaper. Each like costs more.
On a normal post, micro loses on price and on amount at the same time. The macro tier delivers more than double the total for under twice the money.
04 · The big posts
Count the big posts, and a picked small creator wins
Everything so far prices the normal post, the median. The median leaves out the rare big post on purpose. But nobody hires a small creator for their normal post. They hire for the big one. So we priced it again using the mean.
The mean is the average: all the engagement added up, then divided by the number of posts, so every big post counts. We used every post these accounts ever made, 4,125,900 posts by 11,115 accounts. We priced them at the agreed rates: $15 for a small creator, $117 for a big one.
The gap is huge.
5,000 to 10,000 followers
The normal post, then the mean post.
1,000 to 5,000 followers
The normal post, then the mean post.
Above 50,000 followers
The normal post, then the mean post.
Macro creators on our roster
The normal post, then the mean post.
Now, two ways to buy. Bought blind means you choose by follower count and nothing else. Picked means you look at the account first. Its normal post already gets 30 or more, counting its posts from 2025 on. Here is what one engagement costs each way.
Bought blind, a small creator costs $0.63 or $0.87 per engagement. That already lands between the two macro prices. Macro is $0.49 on our roster and $1.07 in the open index. The open index is the wider pool of accounts beyond our roster. Picked, the small creator drops to $0.14 and $0.18. A picked macro creator costs $0.25 and $0.27.
On the normal post, macro is three times cheaper. Count the big posts, and a picked small creator is the cheapest engagement on the book. Picking makes an engagement four to five times cheaper for small creators. That is where picking helps most.
Price on the mean, not the median. Then pick on past posts, not on follower count.
The receipts and the ladder come from posts we paid for. The picks come from posts we did not pay for, priced at the agreed rates. Compare the two. Do not add them.
05 · What to do
Four simple rules
- 1
Pick small creators on their past posts, then price them on the mean.
A 5,000 to 10,000 follower account whose normal post already gets 30 or more, counting posts from 2025 on, costs $0.14 per engagement. The cheapest we have.
- 2
Pay less for the 5k to 20k tier, or pause it.
At $1.30 per engagement it is the most expensive we have, more than the tier below and the tier above.
- 3
Use micro for what it is good at.
Getting a message out early, testing which one works, showing up in many feeds. That is worth $15 a post. A big audience is not what that money buys.
- 4
Never buy by follower count alone.
Two creators in the same tier can be further apart than two tiers. Part 2 shows how far.
Sources · show
- our production database, 54 payout lines across 33 creators and 11,729 posts by 189 creators, queried 2 September 2026. Prices are amounts agreed rather than amounts delivered. Tier medians rest on 8 micro, 16 mid and 7 macro creators with both a price and a post history. Two internal test accounts excluded from every cost figure.
- our roster tier counts, 193 creators with a follower count and a post history, queried 2 September 2026. Group posts excluded. Impressions, the count of times a post was shown to someone, are a number LinkedIn does not release to outside tools, so followers are the audience measure available.
- our corpus tail pass, September 2026: 4,125,900 posts by 11,115 cleaned accounts, no per-author cap. Mean and median engagement per post by band, bought blind and for accounts with a lifetime median post of 30 or more posting in 2025 or later. Cost per engagement is the agreed median price, $15 small and $117 macro, divided by the mean post.
- Full report: Two hundred small, or twenty large?, linklabs.wiki, September 2026.
- Photographs: Pexels, free licence.