One of the things they didn't really consider (I don't think) when they put NIL in place is the new advertising / promotion model of most consumer brands. Influencers now command massive amounts of sponsorship $$ for their online presence on various platforms. One of my daughter's friends is a TikTok personality. She's 16 and she made $400k last year. She isn't alone and I think it's fair to say she's pretty far down the pecking order in terms of earnings. If you look at how many followers these athletes have, it makes sense that Nike, Coke, etc would pay them 6 figures to have their brands featured on their social media presence.
I don't like what NIL and the portal have done to college sports, but I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle.
It’s hard to say they put NIL in place. The NCAA lost a court case, badly. That court case said you can’t have free labor, call it “amateur”, and block outside income.
I’m not sure whether to call what they did in response “malicious compliance”, “laziness”, or “incompetence”. It’s unplanned and unorganized and not thought through. The NCAA could have set up salaries, could have implemented a real shared NIL program with EA Sports and athletic wear, but instead they both said “it can’t be pay for play”, and then that’s exactly what they enabled.
It’s as if they thought that, if they implemented NIL badly enough that they could get rescued by Congress or local legislatures. If so, it’s an interesting strategy and we’ll see how it works out.
As far as influencer income, it’s hard to find good stats. You can find comparisons of average TikTok income vs median US income, but that’s not a fair comparison—it’s apples and oranges.
TikTok payments and views are really murky. Instagram is more transparent in their payments and seems to pay more on average. But from what I can find, your 16-year old neighbor is earning way above average, which is somewhere between $50k and $150k for a sponsored influencer, and most aren’t even sponsored.
The income isn’t a nice bell curve—it’s a power distribution where almost all the money goes to a few. That’s why the average income doesn’t tell you much—it’s like the average income with 9 of us and Warren Buffet—you can take 5 people out or add 20 in and the average hardly moves, unless one of the people is Buffet.
Your neighbor worked herself into the right spot.
Also (and I think you would agree), these athletes aren’t actually working as influencers; they’re posing as influencers to get paid for playing ball. In contrast, for the female gymnasts making money as influencers, no one cares how they do in gymnastics—their main gig is selling tight clothes and cosmetics.
Here’s some information about the income distribution of influencers where someone could get data:
The top three percent most popular channels attract 90 percent of total views.
observer.com
If I can dig it up, there’s an article where most of the women on OnlyFans are making very little money (one version is here, but there’s a better article out there:
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/how-much-only-fans-creators-really-make-001225631.html)
TL;DR: the athletes aren’t even really doing NIL; it’s pay for play.
