Coffee Data Science
Coffee Influencers by Followers
A Selected Review
For fun, I collected some high level statistics on coffee influencers, and I thought it was interesting enough to share.
In a discussion with Samo, we talked about the differences of how our accounts got views. Most of his views came from followers, and most of my views came from people who didn’t follow me. We talked about the maximum potential of coffee people, like what is the maximum number of followers one can gain before they are extending beyond coffee folk?
This data was collected on June 21, 2023, and I looked at a same of people that I thought represented a few tiers of influencer level. This is not an exhaustive list, and it definitely is dominated by English speakers.
First, I looked at followers in the thousands (k) for Instagram (IG) and YouTube. This is sorted by IG followers. The share of followers resides with just a few.
We can look at this same graph logarithmically, and there I am!
I isolated just IG followers, and there seem to be a few groups:
- Top level influencers (>100k)
- Mid-level influencers (>10k)
- Everyone else (<10k)
YouTube is really where the money is at because of their pay program. Tiers are very much apparent.
One more area I looked at was Patreon followers as a proxi for how much one could earn from being an “influencer” full time.
James dominates this yearly income, but of course, this does not include the cost of film crews that James uses. Lance also has other people helping, so it’s quite possible a percentage of this money goes to paying them or just buying equipment.
I didn’t include people who didn’t report their monthly earnings (a feature to opt into by a creator on Patreon).
I really enjoy collecting and analyzing data. It is easy to think influencers won the lottery when most of these people work quite a bit to produce videos and content. Often, even getting to a point of high visibility and profitability takes years of basically “doing it for free or fun.”
I’m not suggesting people do that because there is no guarantee there will be a payoff. Hopefully if you do like making videos and posts, it is because you enjoy the process.
If you like, follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram where I post videos of espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You can also follow me on Medium and Subscribe.
