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Want to get rich quickly? Amass millions of followers on Instagram and sit back as brands pay you the immodest amounts of money to showcase their wares.
You’ve seen it before, Cristiano Ronaldo pops up on your feed telling you about the benefits of Herbalife Formula 1 and how it offers a balanced mix of protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
Later in the same Instagram viewing session, singer and actress Selena Gomez recommends Rare Beauty’s ‘Find Comfort’ body collection.
These and many other major brands have spent a fortune getting these popular celebrity figures to prescribe their product, confident that a percentage of their follower base which runs into the hundreds of millions will buy into the commodity in question.
Instagram as a source of revenue
Making money via a social media account is not strictly restricted to the high-profile rich and famous as micro-influencers, those accounts with a follower base of anything from 2,000 to 50,000 can also make money on the platform but given their reach, can only command a fraction of bigger account holders but as one's follower count grows, so does the potential to earn more.
Top Instagram accounts of 2024
According to finance-focused site Go Banking Rates, these are the top ten Instagram accounts of 2024 and how much each account commands for a promoted post.
Cristiano Ronaldo | @cristiano | $3.23M per post | 632M followers
Lionel Messi | @leomessi | $2.59M per post | 500M followers
Selena Gomez | @selenagomez | $2.55M per post | 429M followers
Kylie Jenner | @kyliejenner | $2.38M per post | 400M followers
Dwayne Johnson | @therock | $2.32M per post | 397M followers
Ariana Grande | @arianagrande | $2.26M per post | 380M followers
Kim Kardashian | @kimkardashian | $2.17M per post | 394M followers
Beyoncé | @beyonce | $1.89M per post | 320M followers
Khloe Kardashian | @khloekardashian | $1.87M per post | 310 followers
Justin Bieber | @justinbieber | $1.76M Per Post | 293M Followers
Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult. A U.S. federal court has unambiguously supported the government's assertion that the short-form video app's relationship with Chinese parent ByteDance raises national security concerns. European allies are on guard, too. A looming January deadline is a decisive test.
A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as next month, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company’s challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though it's unclear whether the court will take up the case.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.
“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed, and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.”
Though the case is squarely in the court system, it’s also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action.
“He wants to save TikTok,” Rep. Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said Friday during an interview on Fox Business.
The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.
The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect. The European Union on Friday expressed similar concerns as it investigates intelligence that suggests Russia possibly abused the platform to influence the elections in Romania.
“Today’s decision is an important step in blocking the Chinese government from weaponizing TikTok,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement Friday.
TikTok, which sued the government over the law in May, has long denied it could be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S. They have also argued the law is predicated on future risks, which the Department of Justice has emphasized pointing in part to unspecified action it claims the two companies have taken in the past due to demands from the Chinese government.
Friday’s ruling came after the appeals court panel, composed of two Republicans and one Democrat-appointed judge, heard oral arguments in September.
In the hearing, which lasted more than two hours, the panel appeared to grapple with how TikTok’s foreign ownership affects its rights under the Constitution and how far the government could go to curtail potential influence from abroad on a foreign-owned platform. On Friday, all three denied TikTok’s petition.
In the court’s ruling, Ginsburg, a Republican appointee, rejected TikTok’s main legal arguments against the law, including that the statute was an unlawful bill of attainder, or a taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He also said the law did not violate the First Amendment because the government is not looking to “suppress content or require a certain mix of content” on TikTok.
“Content on the platform could in principle remain unchanged after divestiture, and people in the United States would remain free to read and share as much PRC propaganda (or any other content) as they desire on TikTok or any other platform of their choosing,” Ginsburg wrote, using the abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China.
Judge Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the court, issued a concurring opinion.
TikTok’s lawsuit was consolidated with a second legal challenge brought by several content creators — for which the company is covering legal costs — as well as a third one filed on behalf of conservative creators who work with a nonprofit called BASED Politics Inc. Other organizations, including the Knight First Amendment Institute, had also filed amicus briefs supporting TikTok.
“This is a deeply misguided ruling that reads important First Amendment precedents too narrowly and gives the government sweeping power to restrict Americans’ access to information, ideas, and media from abroad,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the organization. “We hope that the appeals court’s ruling won’t be the last word.”
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, lawmakers who had pushed for the legislation celebrated the court’s ruling.
“I am optimistic that President Trump will facilitate an American takeover of TikTok to allow its continued use in the United States and I look forward to welcoming the app in America under new ownership,” said Republican Rep. John Moolenaar of Michigan, chairman of the House Select Committee on China.
Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who co-authored the law, said “It’s time for ByteDance to accept” the law.
To assuage concerns about the company’s owners, TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.
The company has also argued the government’s broader concerns could have been resolved in a draft agreement it provided the Biden administration more than two years ago during talks between the two sides. It has blamed the government for walking away from further negotiations on the agreement, which the Justice Department argues is insufficient.
Attorneys for the two companies have claimed it’s impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically. They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm — the platform’s secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan — would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content.
Still, some investors, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire Frank McCourt, have expressed interest in purchasing the platform. Both men said earlier this year that they were launching a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business.
This week, a spokesperson for McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative, which aims to protect online privacy, said unnamed participants in their bid have made informal commitments of more than $20 billion in capital.