How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube?

The figures come from the providers’ own help pages, policies and terms. Where a page gives its own date, it appears in the last column; otherwise it is the day we read the page.

A threshold is what you need to apply, not a promise. YouTube reviews the channel as a whole, LTK decides on your application and Amazon reviews the pages you listed. For the Amazon Influencer Program, the extension of Associates that gives you your own page on Amazon, the two help pages we read give no fixed number, only a qualification process.

Reaching a threshold says little about how much you earn. For gifts on Reels, Instagram pays US$0.01 per star you receive, according to its help page. To earn US$10, fans would have to send you 1,000 stars.

• Age: TikTok Creator Rewards, TikTok Shop, Instagram subscriptions, Instagram gifts and Stylink all require you to be at least 18. Stylink also requires full legal capacity.
• Country: TikTok Shop counts followers in the EU country you apply for, and you have to use your account from the country where it is registered. Creator Rewards, Instagram subscriptions, Instagram gifts and the expanded YouTube Partner Program list Germany among their countries. According to its blog, YouTube has been rolling out the Shopping affiliate program, which lets you tag products in videos and earn on purchases at the shop, in Germany since 3 September 2026. Its help page, however, still listed only 14 countries on 22 October 2026, and Germany was not yet one of them.
• Account type: Creator Rewards is for personal accounts only, business accounts are excluded. Instagram, on the other hand, requires a professional account for subscriptions and gifts.
• Public, original content: YouTube only counts watch time from public videos, not private, unlisted or deleted ones. Amazon wants public pages with strong original content, as a rule of thumb at least 10 posts. TikTok only rewards original videos longer than one minute.
• No open violations: on YouTube, your channel must have no active Community Guidelines strikes, and for TikTok Creator Rewards your account must have no violations.
• Accounts and setup: YouTube requires 2-Step Verification, access to advanced features and an AdSense for YouTube account. For Instagram gifts, you need a payout account set up.
• Trial period: in Germany, new TikTok Shop creators with no official or promotional link to a shop on TikTok Shop can, according to the policy, be placed automatically in a 30-day pilot programme after verification. During it, they can post at most 21 shopping videos a week.

Say your channel has 1,200 subscribers. In the last 90 days you have published 6 public videos. Your long-form videos have 2,500 watch hours over 12 months, and your Shorts have 4 million views in the Shorts Feed over 90 days. Under the rules in YouTube Help, this is where you stand:

• Ad revenue: not yet. You have the 1,000 subscribers, but neither 4,000 hours nor 10 million Shorts views. Watch time from your Shorts in the Shorts Feed does not count towards the 4,000 hours.
• Expanded Partner Program: thresholds met. You are above 500 subscribers, 3 public uploads in 90 days and 3 million Shorts views. You apply in YouTube Studio under “Earn”, then YouTube reviews the channel, according to its help page typically in about a month.
• Rejected: after a first rejection, YouTube Help says you can apply again after 30 days, and after a further rejection only after 90 days. The general Partner Program help page also mentions an appeal within 21 days; the page on the expanded programme does not.
• From 1 February 2027, new channels: according to YouTube, nothing changes for the 500-subscriber tier. A new channel would then only get ad revenue with 8,000 hours in 365 days or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days.
• From 1 February 2027, channels in the programme: they keep their status but have to accept the updated terms in YouTube Studio by 31 January 2027, or they stop earning from the features concerned. From the Shorts Creator Pool, a channel then only earns in months with 10 million Shorts views over the last 90 days.
• From 1 February 2027, active channels: a channel in the programme counts as active with 1,000 hours in 365 days, 1 million Shorts views in 90 days, or 2 long-form videos or 5 Shorts every 90 days. If it meets none of these, it has 90 days to reach the hours or the views. The example channel, with 4 million Shorts views, is above that.

Paid brand deals are negotiated with the brand, directly or through its agency or your management. The brand, not the platform, decides what reach it expects and what it pays.

With affiliate links, each programme has its own rules, and the check does not always happen at sign-up. According to its help pages, Amazon only looks at your pages once three qualifying sales have come through your links in the first 180 days, and your own orders do not count. It does not accept pages where your posts or follower count are hidden from non-followers, and it does not reconsider a rejected application.

If a creator storefront or link service requires a number, its terms, programme conditions or help pages say so. Stylink sets the 1,000 followers in § 2(3) of its terms, LTK gives its 5,000 in its FAQ. Read that passage before you put time into signing up.

You don’t have to give up any of the programmes in the table for wyrld, as the creator terms require no exclusivity. In your wyrld storefront you show the products you use yourself. You paste the product link, wyrld recognises the brand, name and variant, looks for the same item across more than 90,000 partner shops, including Amazon, and creates an affiliate link for each offer it finds. You never have to join a network yourself.

Your community sees the offers it finds side by side with their prices and buys wherever they like, directly from the shop and at no extra cost. For 65% of online shoppers in Germany, the lowest price is a decisive factor when choosing a shop, according to a 2022 Bitkom survey. Depending on the shop, you earn per click, per sale or both, and at the start of the following month you receive a Gutschrift (self-billing credit note). Through wyrld Boost, brands also pay for campaigns that run across many creators, paid out according to KPIs they set in advance. That is no promise of a campaign for you, and you decide for yourself if you take part.

If you work with an agency, it gets its own dashboard on wyrld, works on your storefront with you and sees the same figures. wyrld deducts an agreed commission share of between 0 and 100% from your earnings, and you each get a separate credit note. wyrld is free for creators. You can put the storefront link in your bio straight after signing up; it only appears in the creator overview after a review by the wyrld team, and there is no entitlement to a listing. What the creator terms require is that you act as a business (Unternehmer under § 14 BGB), under the Kleinunternehmer scheme (small business scheme) as well as through a GmbH, not a particular follower count.