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How much time should an athlete spend building their brand? Less than they’re being told.

It’s a real question with a real cost, because the hours come out of somewhere. The advice industry answers “a lot.” But the largest check an athlete at this level receives comes from their school — and across 112 athletes with published contract values, we can’t detect any effect of audience on what the school pays once on‑field production is accounted for.

Build the audience, and the money follows

An entire advice industry now tells college athletes that their earning power runs through their phone. Grow the following, work the engagement rate, build the personal brand.

“Many brand deals are only available to athletes who meet certain follower counts or engagement benchmarks, so growing your audience can open doors that were not there before.”

NIL Club, How to Grow Your Social Media as a College Athlete

That advice is correct — and note what it is careful to say. It is about brand deals. Brands are buying attention, follower thresholds are often literal gates on those deals, and nothing in this study disputes any of it.

The problem is what happens to that advice as it travels. It gets repeated as a general claim about NIL earnings, and the athlete hears it as: build your following and you’ll be paid more. Which raises the question nobody seems to have checked.

The biggest check stopped coming from brands

An athlete’s earnings now come from two very different places. Commercial money is what brands pay for endorsements. Roster pay is what the school and its collective pay to have the athlete on the team, and since revenue sharing began it has become the dominant number for football and basketball athletes at this level.

The scale is not close. Our roster‑pay benchmarks come from ESPN’s survey of more than 20 college general managers and agents (College football 2025: How much does each position cost?). They run from $200K–$400K for a tight end to $1M–$2M for a quarterback. The athletes in this study carry school and collective contracts between $500K and $6.5M. The commercial side is a different kind of number and a smaller one: in the three years before revenue sharing existed, a top‑25 football earner did roughly 22 paid activities a year (Opendorse, NIL at 3, covering July 2021 to June 2024). That figure is cited only for the market it describes — the one that existed before schools began writing checks directly.

Our own research on college sports money puts the institutional side in context (NIL Collectives Are 5.5% of the Money): across 54 programs whose funders we could verify, 51 booster foundations raised $1.69B against 12 NIL collectives’ $98.6M — a 17‑to‑1 gap, with a single athletic association out‑raising every identified collective combined. Those filings show what organizations raised, never what any athlete was paid, so they set the scale rather than the split.

That gap is why the question is worth asking at all. When brand deals were the whole market, the advice to build an audience was simply correct. Now the largest check is written by someone else, and it is worth knowing what that buyer is looking at.

These are separate markets with separate buyers, and they can reward completely different things. A brand is buying attention. A school is buying a left tackle.

So the question is narrow and practical: if you already know an athlete’s position, how they perform on the field, and the scale of the program paying them, does also knowing their follower count tell you anything more about what they’ll be paid?

What actually moves the number

Everything below is on one scale: how much more an athlete is paid for a solid step up in each factor — roughly, moving from the middle of the pack to clearly above it. Production is worth about three times what following is, and unlike following, it is a figure that can be told apart from zero.

So how much time? Less than you’re being told.

Not zero — a following is a real asset that does a real job. But for an athlete deciding where the next hour goes, the evidence points at the film room, and the case for the phone is weaker than the advice around it suggests.

For athletes and their advisers: a following is worth building for what it actually does, which is open brand deals. It does not appear to be what your school is paying you for, and the school is writing the larger check.

For anyone valuing an athlete: position, production and program scale carry the signal for roster pay. A valuation leaning heavily on follower counts for that half of the market is pricing something we can’t find evidence the buyer is buying.

The error worth avoiding is not believing that audience matters. It’s carrying an intuition that is correct in one market straight into a market where nobody has checked it.

The data

112 athletes, each contributing four measurements.

What they’re paid

On3’s published NIL valuations. In July 2026 On3 changed these from estimating an athlete’s marketing potential to tracking what schools and collectives actually pay, which is what makes the figure usable here. Values run from $500K to $6.5M, median $2.0M.

Their audience

Instagram follower count, plus an engagement rate across roughly 30 recent posts. Engagement is a median, not an average: one post announcing a transfer can outperform an athlete’s normal output tenfold, and an average lets that single moment set their whole figure. Followers run from 78 to 750,336, median 26,126.

Their production

Where an athlete ranks against everyone else playing their position, from ESPN’s published season statistics. A quarterback is ranked against quarterbacks, a receiver against receivers.

Their program’s scale

How much money the school’s athletics department brings in, as a percentile against other programs, from the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act survey.

The model

We ask whether audience still explains anything about pay once position, production and program scale are held constant. Comparing a quarterback at a blue‑blood program to a long snapper at a mid‑major would tell you only that quarterbacks and blue‑bloods are expensive, so we hold that still and look at what audience adds on top.

Pay is log‑transformed, so every result reads directly as a percentage change in pay. The four factors are put on a common scale so their sizes can be compared, and each is reported with the range the data cannot rule out.

What this study cannot tell you

Stated up front, because a finding is only as good as the boundary around it.

Top of the market

Every athlete here has a publicly reported contract value, and those are published only for athletes the market is already talking about. Nothing here describes the majority of scholarship athletes, who now receive revenue‑share money without a published figure attached.

Some positions only

A comparable production statistic exists for quarterbacks, running backs, receivers, tight ends and basketball players. Linemen and most defensive positions have no equivalent, so the fully controlled model runs on 66 of the 112.

One platform

Audience here means Instagram audience. Other platforms were not measured, and an athlete whose following is concentrated elsewhere is understated.

No position-level numbers

Only quarterback carries enough athletes in this sample to support a figure of its own. Every other position would be noise, so none are reported.

Association, not causation

This measures what pay and audience do together in observed data. It does not establish that changing an athlete’s following would change their pay.

Sample size

112 athletes is enough to rule out a large effect and not enough to rule out a modest one. A study several times this size could plausibly detect something we cannot. What it would be unlikely to change is that production is the far larger factor.

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