Mega-influencer Alix Earle makes a staggering $450,000 for every sponsored Instagram Story she posts.

Article 41 co-founder Vickie Segar — who has worked with the TikTok star on previous brand deals — made the claim while speaking with University of North Carolina athletes, the New York Times reported Sunday.

“Let’s talk about the money in the creator economy. Does anybody follow Alix Earle?” Segar asked the college students before having them guess how much she makes per Instagram Story.

While someone guessed $100,000 and another estimated $70,000, Segar threw out an even bigger number.

“$450,000 per Instagram Story,” she said to her audience’s shock.

It’s unclear how much money the influencer makes on permanent grid posts but it’s highly likely that it’s significantly more than a Story post — which only lasts 24 hours before disappearing from the social media app.

Earle, 24, has more than four million Instagram followers and boasts more than seven million followers on TikTok.

The content creator rose to fame by posting “Get Ready With Me” videos on TikTok when she was a college student at the University of Miami.

Her career took off in the summer of 2022 when she posted about her struggle with acne. In doing so, she became relatable to millions of netizens and her follower count quickly skyrocketed.

Due to her popularity, products that she promotes online often end up selling out — a phenomenon dubbed the “Alix Earle effect.”

It’s no surprise that, due to her influence, she can charge six-figure fees for even her short-term social media posts.

Earle’s career has expanded beyond the scope of TikTok and Instagram over the years.

She launched her “Hot Mess” podcast in 2023 — though the show was dropped by Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network amid feud rumors in February.

Earle appeared in The Kid Laroi’s “Girls” music video in June 2024 and starred in three Super Bowl commercials this past February.

She also entered into the beverage space by investing in SipMargs, a canned cocktail margarita brand, earlier this year.

Earle — who has been dating Houston Texans wide receiver Braxton Berrios since 2023 — is estimated to have a net worth of $8 million, according to Forbes.

Thanks to her flourishing career, she was able to move into a luxury two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles last November.

Privacy Manager

For Wisdom Kaye, his passion for fashion has made him a millionaire.

His bold fashion choices have frequently garnered chatter online over the years, and his TikTok account alone has drawn 13.5 million followers and 443.7 million likes. Kaye even made an appearance at the 2024 Met Gala, a feat that he believed was out of reach for him in 2022.

Wisdom Kaye’s life has forever changed as a result of his online presence stemming from his creative videos, which he primarily edits himself. However, his bread and butter is not coming directly from his social media impressions.

“I’ll spend 12 hours, 12 days on a f-cking video, and it won’t really make anything. I’m in the Creator Fund, but, that doesn’t really pay,” the model and creator said in a TikTok video. “I mean, it does pay. I’m grateful for the amount that it does pay, but, I can make a video right now and it gets 20 million views, which is a very likely number for me with my engagement. And, that’s not gonna pay my rent. It won’t even pay literally one month of my rent.”

@wisdm8

Who wins

♬ original sound – Wisdom Kaye

Instead, he is making the majority of his wealth through brand deals. Some of his partnerships over the years include:

• Spotify
• Valentina Beauty
• Apple Cash
• Ray Ban Meta
• T-Mobile

@wisdm8

The cat is out of the bag @Valentino.Beauty #ValentinoBeauty #ValentinoBeautyPartner #BorninRomaExtradose #Fragrance

♬ original sound – Wisdom Kaye

At 24, Kaye states he is currently averaging at least $100,000 in earnings from each brand deal. By 19 years old, he had crossed a minimum of $900,000 in revenue from brands, and in 2024 that number reached over $4 million. In 2025 he has already signed on to earn $1 million through such deals.

“I don’t ever talk about money or anything like that in order to flex,” Kaye said. “I did not always have money. I did not grow up with it… So flexing doesn’t do anything for me… I’m simply wanting to answer this question because for the longest, I’ve never understood how nobody understands how much money I make on the internet.”

He later added, “Basically, since I’ve been doing this, I’ve been making more money each year, which first of all, thank God. I’m making more money every year. That’s an insane blessing. I wanna say this year around January, mid March, I’d already made a million dollars. Just to put into perspective, I think last year, I made maybe $4 point something million dollars… and that’s just, that’s solely brand deals.”

@wisdm8.1

Replying to @Yannick Reid

♬ original sound – Wisdom Kaye

Paying It Forward

As for how Kaye is managing those earnings, he admits he is not fond of spending money, but of course he splurges on clothing. He also suggests he will consider investing for his long-term future aspirations of having a family.

For now, he is grateful to be in a position to help his friends and family.

“I’m not a guy who’s on private jets, I’m not a guy who’s in luxury cars or on yachts, I could be… I’m really simple and so it’s just about my friends and family,” he said in a separate TikTok.

@wisdm8.1

♬ original sound – Wisdom Kaye

ESPN spent the entire NFL Draft weekend talking about him. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about him, and the White House is still talking about him days later. He was the subject of what instantly became the most famous prank phone call of recent times. And now, he will attempt to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, who selected him two days after he—and his father—thought he’d be taken.

Shedeur Sanders is the most talked-about athlete in American sports this week, a stirring feat for a young man who waited as long as he did to come off the draft board. So what is going on here? Long story!

Who is Shedeur Sanders?

The quarterback for the University of Colorado the past two seasons, and Jackson State for a year before that, Shedeur is Deion Sanders’ son and went with his dad when he took the head coaching job at Boulder before the 2023 season. Sanders was a well above-average college QB, and in 2024, he won the Big 12’s Offensive Player of the Year honor. Because he’s the son of one of the greatest multisport athletes ever, who’s also a major media personality in addition to his coaching work, Shedeur himself is a celebrity. He has more than 2 million Instagram followers and a bunch of brand deals.

Who picked him in the draft, and when?

To many people’s great surprise, the Cleveland Browns, in the fifth round on Saturday, 144^th overall.

What’s so scandalous about that?

The industry consensus on Sanders was that he was something like the 20^th or 40^th best player in the draft, depending on one’s evaluation of him. One popular prediction was that the New Orleans Saints, who held the ninth pick and don’t have a long-term quarterback, would take Sanders. If that failed, the Pittsburgh Steelers at No. 21 have the same quarterback vacuum, and ESPN insider Adam Schefter, among others, had reported that Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin liked Sanders. There was no guarantee that Sanders would hear his name called in the first round on Thursday, but if it didn’t happen then, it would surely happen sometime in the second round.

Then every team passed on Sanders in the first round … and the second … and the third … and the fourth. Sanders was often predicted to be the second quarterback taken, after No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward by the Tennessee Titans. Instead, he was the sixth. He wasn’t even the Browns’ first QB pick, as they spent their third-rounder on Oregon’s Dillon Gabriel, in a real shocker.

So why did so many teams shun Sanders?

As always when a player “falls” in the draft, there are two possibilities: One, teams soured on him. Two, teams were never high on him in the first place. The smokescreen-heavy world of the NFL Draft makes it hard to delineate between those two, but the volume of reportage on Sanders suggests that both things played a part in him waiting so long for the Browns to finally pick him up.

For one thing, Sanders was a polarizing quarterback to evaluate, and plenty of media analysts who scout quarterbacks have been skeptical of him. ESPN’s Matt Miller, for example, didn’t give Sanders a “first-round” grade, the label for a player who should go in the first 32 picks in a normal draft year. But Miller, as recently as early April, thought it was a “safe bet” that Sanders would be a top-five pick.

That’s a long way from falling to the fifth round, though. The rest of Sanders’ long wait is attributable to a pair of factors: his own reputation and a limited market for quarterbacks. Sanders is more talented than a fifth-round pick, but clearly, no NFL team thought it’s likely that he becomes a strong NFL starter. Any other quarterback will join a team as a backup trying to work his way up, and Sanders did not distinguish himself in the pre-draft process. He reportedly came off disinterested in interviews with teams. He passed up numerous chances to work out in front of scouts. His celebrity father used his megaphone to promise Shedeur would be a top-five pick and to threaten to manipulate the draft process so that Shedeur would only go to a team the Sanders family wanted him to go to, à la Eli Manning in 2004.

In other words: Sanders is good enough to be at least a second-round pick, but teams don’t want the pain in the ass of a development quarterback with the capacity to create drama.

That sounds like Colin Kaepernick’s situation a few years ago.

Well, sort of, but be careful. Stephen A. Smith has ensured that this comparison attracted mainstream attention, and on some surface level, it makes sense: Kaepernick’s advocacy for racial justice, which included kneeling during the national anthem, made him a lightning rod and led to his unambiguous exclusion from the NFL. It wasn’t that Kaepernick couldn’t play, but that he couldn’t play at a high enough level to outweigh the off-field inconvenience. Sanders wasn’t boxed out of the league at all, and to the extent the microscope on him did hurt his stock, it wasn’t because he’d taken any brave political stances.

I can assure you that if Sanders took the public stands that Kaepernick has taken, he would not have received a ringing endorsement from a certain famous sports fan after the first round.

Oh boy. What did Donald Trump have to do with this?

After the draft’s first 32 picks went by, the big man posted: “What is wrong with NFL owners, are they STUPID? Deion Sanders was a great college football player, and was even greater in the NFL. He’s also a very good coach, streetwise and smart! Therefore, Shedeur, his quarterback son, has PHENOMENAL GENES, and is all set for Greatness. He should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN. Good luck Shedeur, and say hello to your wonderful father!”

Why is Trump talking about Shedeur?

Trump appears to be friends with Deion Sanders, or at least to be such a great admirer of him that he wants to weigh in for his son. Trump also enjoys his chances to antagonize NFL owners, one corner of elite society that has shunned him during his long business career.

Did Trump have anything to do with the Browns finally picking Sanders?

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, says so. Maybe she’s got her tongue in her cheek, or maybe not. I’ve lost the ability to distinguish that:

But no. This is just a lack of ball-knowing on display. NFL teams are way too neurotic about quarterbacks to evaluate them based on what a president thinks of them.

I heard something about a prank phone call. What happened?

Some obnoxious kids got ahold of a special phone number that Sanders was using so that NFL teams could reach him during the draft. This number would be where the drafting team called him. (Sanders did not watch from the backstage greenroom but instead from his family home.) The kids called Sanders during the second round on Friday and pretended to be the general manager of the New Orleans Saints. They walked right up to telling Sanders they were about to pick him before telling him he’d have to wait longer and hanging up. Amazingly, both sides of this exchange are on publicly available video.

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Have the perps behind the prank been identified?

One of them has been, at least. It turns out it was the son of the Atlanta Falcons’ defensive coordinator, who left the phone number visible on an iPad. The NFL is still investigating, and so far the team, coordinator Jeff Ulbrich, and his 21-year-old failson, Jax Ulbrich, have profusely apologized.

What about the larger question here: Is Sanders a good NFL quarterback prospect?

I think Sanders is a solid prospect who could develop into an OK starting QB, with a remote chance of becoming a very good one. Sanders is an accurate passer, and he managed good numbers at Colorado despite playing behind a porous offensive line that may as well have constituted an OSHA violation. On the other hand, Sanders isn’t big, doesn’t have a rocket arm or sublime athleticism, and did have the benefit of playing in an offense that had Heisman Trophy–winner Travis Hunter at receiver and was designed to elevate Shedeur. The most likely outcome is that Shedeur hangs around as a backup for a few years and then washes out of football, but that’s the most likely outcome for every drafted quarterback. I wouldn’t rule out that the Browns made out like bandits.

Is he going to play for the Browns?

Don’t rule that out either, even though fifth-round picks don’t usually get a lot of snaps. The Browns are currently following the strategy of a bad baseball team, employing five different potential starters to throw the ball, all of whom are probably bad. Deshaun Watson, many times accused of sexual misconduct and the worst quarterback in the league, remains on the roster for now. Forty-year-old Joe Flacco is here, as is Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles castoff Kenny Pickett. Then there are Gabriel and Sanders, the two rookies. That’s a lot of competition, but none of it is daunting.

So there’s a substantial chance that we’ve now had five days of our national news cycle in both sports and politics largely dominated by a player who will never see consistent NFL action?

We sure have. American exceptionalism is alive and well.

LA CROSSE (WKBT) — The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) voted Friday to allow NIL deals for high school student-athletes.

“We’re like the 40th state now that has accepted this and so it’s one of those things that it’s a matter of time before it was going to happen,” said Tony Servais, La Crosse Logan High School’s activities director.

WIAA membership schools approved the change by a vote of 293-108 after rejecting a similar proposal last year.

“I think all of us kind of felt we wanted to have some say of what the law looked like rather than waiting for it to maybe potentially get passed through the legislature,” Servais said.

Under the rule change, students can sign endorsement deals, promote products and make money from working athletic clinics that use their name as a selling point. 

Influential Athlete CEO Stephanie Grady said the WIAA change will allow students to take advantage of the same opportunities their peers have.

“If you have a kid who plays in the school band and he’s really amazing at the drums nothing stops him from going to his local music store and if he uses a specific brand of drumsticks, promoting those drumsticks for pay,” she said.

“[The old rule] was really a handcuffing of these student-athletes, where it wasn’t a level playing field for them and these rules stood in their way from being able to make money off of themselves.”  

At the college level, there’s a wide range on how much student-athletes can make from NIL deals, with some estimates saying annual NIL value per student-athlete can reach $10,000.

However, those college deals and the culture created around them have caused controversy, which is why Wisconsin’s high school policy has strict rules.

“They can’t take part in any NIL during the school day or miss any practices or activities because of that,” Servais said. “Also, the people that can donate or sponsor an athlete can’t be a booster or associated with the school.”

Students are also not allowed to wear their uniforms or make any mention of their school, conference or the WIAA in their deals.

The WIAA’s eligibility rules make it so students can’t transfer for better NIL opportunities.  

Plus, students are prohibited from hiring agents and their schools can’t help them facilitate deals. 

While Servais believes only a few students will be impacted, he said it’s important for schools to inform families of the change.

“It’s going to be all about educating people and I think that’s the next step for us as activities directors, to get the word out to our families so that everyone’s aware of what they can do and what they can’t do.”

The new rule will go into effect at the end of May. 

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