Cristiano Ronaldo has once again beaten the field. The five-time Ballon d’Or winner was named Instagram’s top earner for the third year in a row.
After moving to Saudi Arabia in July, Ronaldo was named the highest-paid player in the world by Forbes for the first time since 2017. He is now at the top of the 2023 Instagram Rich List, a global measure of online impact.
The Instagram schedule tool Hopper HQ put together the list, which is based on both private and public information about how much each user can charge for an Instagram or YouTube share.
Hopper HQ says that the Portugal forward makes a huge $3.23 million per Instagram post. This is because he has close to 600 million fans on the social media site.
Lionel Messi, who won the World Cup with Argentina, is Ronaldo’s closest competitor on the list. Messi gets almost $2.6 million for each post, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
This puts the two football stars ahead of every other sports star and even celebrities like Selena Gomez, Kylie Jenner, and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Only two other players, Virat Kohli of India and Neymar of Brazil, made it into the Top 20.
Neymar makes almost twice as much per post as his teammate Kylian Mbappe at Paris St. Germain.
Mike Bandar, co-founder of Hopper HQ, said, “I’m still shocked that the amount of money made on the platform every year keeps going up.”
“Yet, what I find more interesting are the players who stay at the top. It’s clear that the glitz and glamour of traditional celebrities still have more power than the new ‘influencer’ position.
“Ronaldo and Messi not only rule the field, but also the digital world. It’s clear that they are the best examples of the power of personal branding and how it affects us “normal” people.”
Khaby Lame, a TikTok star, is number 40 on the list. He is the Instagram celebrity who makes the most money. Ronaldo makes nearly 10 times as much as Lame does from his Instagram posts.