An industry rule of thumb, verified by USA TODAY through interviews with nearly a dozen influencers, marketing professionals and influencer platform founders, is a baseline rate of about 1 percent of follower counts per sponsored Instagram post, or $100 for every 10,000 followers. That means someone with 100,000 followers might start around $1,000 per sponsored post, while an influencer with 1 million followers could charge $10,000. And some experts called that conservative. Along with pricing structures based on follower counts, CPEs (cost per engagement) have emerged as another way to calculate marketing rates. Engagement is typically defined by interactions with content such as likes, comments, clicks or shares. Engagement rates can be found by adding up all engagements on a post, dividing it by follower counts and multiplying by 100.