Anna Pogribnyak has almost 70,000 subscribers on Instagram and such popularity pays off.
By running a blog from Ukraine, Pogribnyak promotes brands like Loreal Paris, Huawei, Chanel, Adidas, Puma and Lacoste, earning $2,000-3,000 a month, while the average monthly salary in the country is $400.
Pogribnyak is one of hundreds of Ukrainians who earns a living or just makes extra money by running an Instagram account.
With an upsurge in the number of Instagram users — there are 13 million in Ukraine alone — the platform has become the birthplace for a new advertising tool: employing an influencer like Pogribnyak, a person popular with a particular group of people or communities, to endorse a brand online.
And the advertisers are ready to pay. Over 70% of marketers claim the quality of customers and traffic is better from influencer marketing products compared to other sources, according to a study by marketing analyst Smart Insights.
Influence marketing works like a recommendation from a trusted person, which according to Natalia Petryshyn, social media head at creative agency Grape, is more likely to bring new customers to an advertised brand.
According to various estimates, 1,000 followers on Instagram cost $5-10 globally. Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, charged about $1 million per post on Instagram in 2019, when he had 177 million followers. This means the attention of his 1,000 followers cost $6. Today Ronaldo has the most popular Instagram account with 241 million followers.
Influence marketing in foreign countries is developing faster than in Ukraine, mainly because online stars here tend to remain local. The biggest Instagram fan base in Ukraine belongs to Sofia Stuzhuk, a controversial beauty blogger with three kids. She has 5.3 million followers.
“The Ukrainian influence marketing is developing slower than the global one,” says Petryshyn. “But even at its current level of development, it can be effective for brands and their advertising goals.”
However, before bloggers start attracting attention from advertisers and can endorse someone’s brand, they have to first become popular in their own communities. On average, bloggers start to reap the fruits of their labor and earn money when they generate 10,000 subscribers.
Pogribnyak started to run her lifestyle blog on the fashion Lookbook platform as a hobby back in 2014. She posted photos of her outfits. On Instagram, she kept doing the same, adding some brief texts in Russian. It took her two years to start earning her first money.
Today, when brands approach her, Pogribnyak has several options to offer them: Instagram stories — photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours — or simple photo-and-text publications.
The blogger works both with Ukrainian and international brands. Pogribnyak would not disclose her advertising rate, but said that prices for international brands are about 3-4 times higher than for Ukrainian brands.
Olena Perebeinos, influencer marketing manager at the creative agency Havas Digital Kyiv, says that, usually, Ukrainian bloggers don’t have exact prices for their services.
“Fees depend more on how much a blogger evaluates his work and the quality of content, as well as personal relationships with a particular customer. It often happens that creators with the same number of subscribers differ significantly in the formation of prices,” Perebeinos says.
“Some influencers also increase the price for the selection of a specific date of publication, the request to not delete or archive an ad, fixing stories in highlights and many other nuances.”
Perebeinos adds that bloggers can raise prices for advertising some specific goods or services, such as alcohol, tobacco products, sports betting and intimate goods.
Pogribnyak has worked with Chinese electronics maker Huawei. She participated in an advertising campaign by talking and posting pictures with a Huawei phone.
Another possible option is to make partner publications, when a blogger gets paid only if customers come to the brand’s webpage from her Instagram.
Pogribnyak also takes part in image-building projects for free when she’s interested in working with a particular brand.
“I take (those brands for promotion) that I want to work with, those that I won’t be ashamed of,” Pogribnyak says. “I don’t consider my blog to be my main source of income, so I have no need to settle for everything.”
Despite getting good remunerations for running an Instagram account, blogging remains a hobby for Pogribnyak, who also keeps her full-time job as a senior engineer at tech company Kuna.
She has registered herself as an individual entrepreneur and pays taxes, and she signs formal contracts with the brands she works with — a serious degree of professionalism for a “hobby.”
By contrast, Maksym Sadovskiy is a more modest blogger. He has roughly half the followers on Instagram, where he blogs in Russian about restaurants and cafes in his hometown of Chernihiv, a city 140 kilometers north of Kyiv.
He started a year and a half ago and keeps his blog local. For his account, Sadovskiy also interviews professionals working in Chernihiv in different professions. Initially, he was talking to restaurant and cafe staff, but now he also interviews professionals like firefighters and marketers.
Maksym Sadovskiy is a blogger from Chernihiv who reviews local cafes and restaurants. He has almost 40,000 followers on his Instagram page and earns about $170 each month on it.
Sadovskiy approaches it as a full-time job and claims he spends 8-10 hours a day on negotiating with brands, responding to comments and messages and making the content for his blog. But since this doesn’t bring him enough money — the blogger makes only about $170 a month — he combines it with other jobs: making handmade soap and working as a social media manager for other businesses.
On his Instagram, Sadovskiy often advertises local brands of clothes, sweets, flowers and other small businesses from Chernihiv. Prices for ads are rather affordable: $9 for a screenshot, a layout or a share and about $35 for a post.
An ad made as an Instagram story where he speaks about the advertiser costs $17.50, while a set of posts and stories will cost $42. He reinvests the money he earns in the blog, developing and promoting it.
The more followers a blogger has, the better their chances of attracting famous brands. In 2018, for example, creative agency Grape engaged 33 Instagram influencers along with eight YouTube influencers who had over 100,000 followers to promote the launch of Apple Pay in Ukraine. Representatives of the agency declined to disclose whether this collaboration was paid or not.
The influencers posted photos and stories showing how they used the service. In addition, they tagged the accounts of Mastercard and PrivatBank, first adopters of the Apple technology. Over 8 million Instagram users saw the ads and 500,000 users liked or commented on the posts.
Some brands practice other ways of cooperation with influencers. For instance, Nescafe wanted to promote its new product, Nescafe 3in1 XL, without spending big money.
Creative agency Havas Digital Kyiv offered the brand to send influencers boxes with personalized pop-up books and small gifts. This cooperation was unpaid, so bloggers decided on their own whether they would publish reviews on these boxes or not.
Altogether, 22 out of 28 Instagram influencers published 83 stories on Instagram with reactions to the gifts. Some bloggers even went beyond the limits and published videos on TikTok. Within this campaign, over 2.4 million people watched the influencers’ videos.
Among those influencers who received a box was Lena Mandziuk.
She is an influencer with 1.2 million followers who started to run her blog in 2016. She says she didn’t aim to become a professional a blogger and just wanted to share her fitness experience with others.
“I ran a social media page, shared my experience and knowledge with girls, made home workouts popular, and taught hundreds of thousands of girls to love and respect their bodies,” Mandziuk told the Kyiv Post in a message through her PR director.
“My experience turned out to be very important for others and made me a blogger.”
Blogger Lena Mandziuk and her husband walk through a field wearing vyshyvankas, Ukrainian national embroidered clothing. Mandziuk has over 1.2 million followers on her Instagram and earns from $280 to $5,000 for an advertisement.
She didn’t earn money on her blog for a long time, until she started to receive worthwhile offers from advertisers. It happened when she had 100,000 followers.
Usually, Mandziuk advertises Ukrainian brands in Instagram stories and posts or sets up giveaways, when a brand presents a gift to a random person for a share or a like.
As of now, Mandziuk earns from $280 to $5,000 for an ad or endorsement.
“As a bonus, I can receive various gifts such as diamonds, branded items, luxury skin care products or a trip to the most beautiful places on the planet for my family,” Mandziuk says.
Mandziuk says that her blog “is a hobby that has become a job.”
