Boity Thulo and Minnie Dlamini are the highest-earning South African media personalities

Lately, the social media app Instagram is among the most lucrative platforms for the world’s most prominent celebrities as brands seek to utilize their influence to win over clients. How do you ask? Well, brands regularly seek out and pay influential figures (they group them in tiers like nano-influencers, micro-influencers, and macro-influencers) for sponsored posts on the platform in exchange for some hefty loot.

Naturally, the more followers you have, the more you get paid. According to Net Credit, celebs with over a million followers average roughly R280 008 per month.

In their quest to estimate who the top Instagram earner is from every country, NetCredit created an algorithm to help them crunch the numbers. To do so, they assembled a list of the most-followed Instagram stars from every country and used figures from the Instagram rich list to estimate the fee-per-ad for each country’s most-followed stars.

Their findings revealed that Cristiano Ronaldo is the world’s top Instagram earner ($85.22m) with rival Lionel Messi landing in second place with $71.96m. Ellen DeGeneres is the top Instagram earner in the U.S. with $33.73m while Justin Bieber topped the list of Canadian earners with $4.43m.

60-year-old Egyptian musician Amr Diab is Africa’s top Instagram earner with $3.59m. Meanwhile, SA’s cricket star AB De Villiers tops the list of highest-earning South African celebs with $1.42m (roughly R26 million).

Media personalities Boity Thulo and Minnie Dlamini placed second and third respectively with $777 852 (roughly R14 million) and $567,624 (roughly R10 340 270,18).