That Instagram post you just liked? The blogger got paid $15,000 to post it.

Inside the over-priced world of social media sponsorship.

There’s a new breed of fashion bloggers, but many of them don’t run a blog. Instead of hits, they count followers. Instead of posting content, they post photos. And instead of ads? They get paid for their selfies.

Most of the Instagram accounts you follow utilise sponsored content – where companies pick them based on their influence and amount of followers, and pay them to post a photo of themselves wearing/holding/promoting a product.

Related: This 2-year-old gets paid $200 every time she posts a photo to Instagram.  

Mamamia is one of them. Posting advertising on social media, just as we do on our websites, is how we keep the publication free for our readers. But critical for us, is always declaring when something has been paid for. It’s important to us that our audience don’t feel duped or tricked by sponsored posts.

Danielle Bernstein is one of these people who makes a living off what she posts on social media. With 998,000 followers on her Instagram, We Wore What, she told Harper’s Bazaar that she nets anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 a post.

Click through the gallery below for some Instagram bloggers who get paid to post. Post continues after gallery.

“On average, if you have hundreds of thousands of followers you can make anywhere from $500 to $5,000 a post, but if you have upwards of 6 million followers, your fee can be $20,000 to $100,000 a shot,” Harper’s Bazaar’s Kayleen Schaefer said.

Sponsored Instagram posts aren’t a new thing, but it’s becoming harder to tell what content is being paid for and how much of it is something the blogger genuinely likes.

Bernstein is 22 years old, supports herself and lives (very) comfortably within the six-figure range, she says.

“Last year was definitely my most profitable,” she told Cosmopolitan.

“I hate talking about money, but let’s just say it’s more than I could have ever imagined as a 22-year-old. I fully support myself, and it’s in the mid-six figures. I save, I invest, I’m trying to be smart about it all and learn as I go.”

But it’s not just bloggers who are being paid to post a fancy filtered image. Actresses, former reality stars, models – basically anyone with ‘influence’ – are jumping on the bandwagon.

And why wouldn’t they?

Even three-year-old Pixie Curtis, daughter of PR guru Roxy Jacenko, gets paid to post on Instagram (although given she’s only three, let’s assume her mum does it for her).

Last year, The Australian Women’s Weekly published a rate card of Pixie’s, showing that the toddler charges a cool $200 for each sponsored post. It doesn’t seem like much, but considering she posts a few times a day, it’s a lot more than most of us make in a week.

Roxy is open about her daughter’s sponsored work, and says Pixie’s Instagram is completely transparent.

“Pixie does work with various brands and some of which pay her for her services, of these its transparent and stated ‘Sponsored by X’ on the post,” she told Mamamia last year.

But some posters are sneakier. With a shy ‘Necklace by X’ or ‘Starting my day with breakfast and a green smoothie from X’. Those ones keep the posters reputation in tact, while also enticing the reader to check out the tagged account or the attached link – because it doesn’t seem like they got paid to say that, but they did.

Thomas Rankin, CEO and co-founder of a company called Dash Hudson that lets users shop the products they see on Instagram, told Cosmopolitan the photo-sharing app is a huge money maker.

“There’s a rapidly developing economy on Instagram,” he said.

And it’s true. Brands are supposedly spending over $1 billion each year on sponsored Instagram posts, according to Harper’s Bazaar, which is an absolutely ridiculous figure to fathom. We’d much rather they spent the cash on education or domestic violence services than on a former Australia’s Next Top Model contestant, but what do we know?

When you’re scrolling, check out the caption. If they’ve got over 100,000 followers and they tag a product? Chances are they got paid thousands for it.

For more posts on Instagram… 

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The insanely happy Instagram feed you didn’t know you needed.

Were you surprised by just how much these bloggers get paid?