I made $320k on Instagram last year

Disclaimer: Not here to sell or promote anything i promise.

Just want to share my experience maybe it can be motivating for some people.

Some background info on myself:

I’ve been running Instagram theme pages for a living for the last nine years.

A theme page is an Instagram page based on a certain niche that curates content (reposts).

Because you’re curating content, it’s easier to post multiple times a day which makes it easier to grow pretty quickly.

For example ive grown pages 0-100k followers in a few days posting 20 viral videos a day. Ive even grown pages 0-1m followers in just a few months on multiple occasions, etc. And I’ve done this in almost any niche you can imagine. Tech, science, memes, pets, food, luxury, etc.

So how i made $320k:

In 2025 i owned 2 large pages:

A 2m follower science page

A 3m follower luxury page

The luxury page is one I’ve had for many many years and have slowly been growing it

The science page i started in march 2024 and grew it to 2m followers in just 12 months.

I also owned a few smaller pages (300-700k followers) but those made up for an insignificant amount of the money i made.

The three ways I made the most income was through advertisements, bonuses (instagram pays you for views), and selling a page.

Advertisements: $120,156

Bonuses: $110,569

Page sale: $90,000

Total: $320,725

Breakdown:

Advertisements: the idea of selling ads on pages maybe seems very vague but once you’re in the world, you quickly see how much opportunity there is for this. There’s a lot of brands and companies that are buying ads on pages with very big budgets.

Kalshi / Polymarket / ai companies / Stake were spending millions of dollars advertising on theme pages in 2025 and even 2026. I definitely profited a lot from them.

A 2m page depending on niche and audience (more usa followers = more valuable) can sell a post for about $500-$600.

Once you develop a relationship with an ad buyer, there’s a high chance they will come back to you pretty often so the money just keeps coming in.

I had many offers to promote onlyf\*ns models and they pay INSANE money because theyre so profitable ($2k-$5k a post) but your page literally tanks if you promote them so many people stay away from it, but I knew a couple people with big meme pages who were making like $20k to $40k a month off of them.

On the luxury page, I had a high end jewelry client who I signed a 12 month deal with where they paid me $4500 every month for 5 posts / 5 stories. They also sponsored almost any other luxury page over 300k followers.

Bonuses: so bonuses are a program Instagram rolls out to randomly selected pages where they pay you for the views you get on reels and carousels. It pays anywhere from $30-$100 per 1m views. I had it on one of my pages which was getting about 200 million views a month so thats how i made that money. Unfortunately, I lost the bonus feature at one point because I got a copyright strike on my account so that’s what eventually led me to deciding to sell the page.

Sell page: I sold that 2 million follower page for $90k. Over the last nine years I’ve sold multiple pages, have made maybe around $280k doing that. There’s a lot of people who just flip pages it’s lucrative if you know the right people.

Some final thoughts:

this is a really weird way to make money because you’re just on your phone for like 12 hours a day but it’s kind of fun. But I’m literally on my phone almost every waking second editing and posting content but I enjoy it so it doesn’t really feel like work sometimes

There are a lot of people making money doing this and there’s people making way more money than this.

Once you understand what type of content goes viral and you figure out how to grow that skill transfers to any other social media platform. I’ve done the exact same thing on Twitter / TikTok / Yt.

there’s a lot of other ways to monetize large pages as well (selling merch/products, real life perks)

Maybe this was a bit sporadic, but feel free to ask any questions. I will try to answer/clarify everything.**

Once again, I am not going to try to sell you anything or promote anything. Just genuinely want to help. if some parts of this sounded guruish I’m sorry

Thanks!