Sorry, Selena. Catch Ya Later, Kylie. The Golden Age of the Red-Carpet Influencer Is Over.

According to personal finance site GOBankingRates, the six highest-earning influencers on Instagram as of April of this year commanded a combined following of over 2 billion people and, on average, earned north of $1.8 million per post. Who, you might ask, made that kind of money? Well, you can probably guess. First was Cristiano Ronaldo, forward for Portugal’s national football team, who had 442 million followers and commanded an eye-watering $2.4 million a post. A bit further down was Kylie Jenner with 338 million followers. A post from Kylie set a brand back a bit over $1.8 million. Selena Gomez was just behind her, commanding an average of $1.7 million per post and, earning just slightly less than Gomez was Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. With the sky-high price of entry, it’s a logical assumption that small to midsize brands looking to land an influencer with significant sway don't have much of a shot. Except that they do—and more so now than ever. BeReal Is Searching for ‘The Realest Person on Earth’ This is one of the findings of a new Morning Consult study. The business information giant surveyed 2,204 adults and 1,000 Gen-Zers (age 13 and up) to determine who they follow on social, how much they trust them, and the degree to which those figures influence purchasing decisions. The most salient finding: Consumers—especially younger consumers—have a far more inclusive understanding of what constitutes an influencer. They're not only happy to pay attention to online personalities with modest followings (nano and micro influencers in marketing parlance), but also prefer to follow a bunch of them. Put another way: the age when mega influencers like Kylie, Selena and The Rock dominated online culture—and all endorsement deals that went with it—has passed. Just make good content, dude While influencers predate the internet by decades, the contemporary understanding of the term dates to the appearance of YouTube (2005) and Instagram (2010). As brands awakened to the idea that popular content creators could also be conduits to shoppers, they naturally sought out the biggest names: authorities in a field (gamer PewDiePie, for example) or, more commonly, celebrities with zillions of followers like Kim Kardashian. (The celebs were happy to oblige, too. Speaking to New York Magazine in 2019, Kardashian recalled her early endorsement days this way: “I’d say 2010, 2011 was like, ‘I’ll do anything—cupcakes, milkshakes…’”) But that winner-take-all archetype has been replaced by a more inclusive one, according to Morning Consult’s industry analyst team lead Amy He. “An influencer, as the average American thinks of them, could be anyone who's just making good content,” He told Adweek, adding it no longer has to be someone like Kardashian with tens of millions of followers. In Morning Consult’s study, 71% of respondents said that an influencer is someone who “makes entertaining content,” 70% said an influencer will “share ideas or inspiration,” and 61% said an influencer should “share advice.” Nowhere in the 10 most common responses did respondents say that an influencer had to be rich, gorgeous or famous. The upshot for brands is evident. Marketers should “look beyond vanity metrics,” the study's authors suggest, in favor of considering how well an influencer’s following lines up with the profile of the brand to be promoted. “You still need to look at [high volume] metrics—you can't be tapping into someone who's [only] got a couple of hundred followers,” He said, explaining micro-influencers enter the strategy conversation because someone with a few thousand followers can move significant amounts of product if they're pitching something that matches their engaged audience. Trust in your influencer The influencer with a modest but devoted following is all the more attractive to brand sponsors now owing to another of the study’s findings: Trust in influencers is growing. In 2019, millennial and Gen-Z consumers who said they trusted what influencers said stood at 51%. This year, per Morning Consult’s data, that population had grown to 61%. That’s a remarkable development, considering that trust in web content overall is down sharply. According to an international poll conducted by Ipsos at the end of last year, 63% of people now say they trust what they see online—but that’s an 11-point fall from 2019’s slice, which was 74%. (In the U.S., the high figure had been 75%, marking a 12-point decline.)`1 So what can explain our consumers’ increasing willingness to listen to influencers even as they cast a jaundiced eye on everything else? He suggested that the proliferation of web content overall has required those who go online to develop, in her words, a sniff test. “We, as consumers, know that there's so much out there that's questionable,” He said. “We have really fine-tuned the ability to sniff out that stuff that doesn't make sense, that is B.S., the stuff that just does not resonate.” Whatever accounts for the boost in influencer trust, it’s good news for brands looking to ink deals with them. Better still, while some social and demographic groups are more easily influenced than others, it’s the holy grail of consumers—the young, well-educated and affluent ones—whom influencers influence the most. No playing favorites But this study's findings also points up another evolving trends that marketers should know about before looking to seal an endorsement. Concomitant with the fading dominance of the mega celebrity influencer is the finding that many consumers now like to follow more than one influencer. Households earning $100,000 or more are likely to follow influencers in many categories, for example. In participating with the survey, only a third of respondents even named a favorite influencer, making it clear that many consumers simply don’t have one. While a bigger and more diffuse array of viable influencers does leave the brand marketer in search of the right fit with a tougher job, He said, it also democratizes the process. Since fewer consumers have a single favorite influencer, a brand should consider working with a range of smaller ones, which in theory will reach a larger and more diverse pool of would-be customers. Better still, “you’re not just fighting in a pool of 5,000 celebrities that you’re competing with all the other brands [to sign.]” Odds are that Cristiano Ronaldo’s not terribly worried about micro influencers eating his lunch, however. A quick trip to his Instagram account shows no shortage of brands willing to pay the football star for a post. Among the recent takers is the gaming app Kickoff by Zuju, for whom Ronaldo has signed a shirt. “Sign up now to win my signed shirt now,” Ronaldo says, wearing a grin wider than a goal net. He must be thinking of $2,397,000 he just made for saying it.