Alexis JarreCMO & Co-founderThe median sponsored LinkedIn post booked on Naano between 14 June and 11 August 2026 cleared at €180 for a creator with 5,000–10,000 followers. The most widely cited 2026 rate-card guides put that same tier at $500–$2,500. Both figures can be real because they come from different buyer populations, deliverables, and transaction contexts.
This is the first edition of the Naano Index: a quarterly read of what B2B LinkedIn creator sponsorship actually costs, computed from the bookings that transact on our own marketplace rather than from the rates people publish. Every figure below comes with its sample size, and the method note at the bottom tells you exactly what was counted and what was thrown out. We publish it because the B2B creator market has a measurement problem that nobody with a rate card has an incentive to fix.
What does a sponsored LinkedIn post actually cost in 2026?
A sponsored LinkedIn post from a B2B micro-creator transacted at a median of €84 to €720 per post in mid-2026, depending on the creator's audience size. Here is the full distribution of what brands paid, per post, exclusive of VAT:
| Creator followers | n | P25 | Median | P75 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 5,000 | 66 | €56 | €84 | €120 |
| 5,000–10,000 | 64 | €88 | €180 | €423 |
| 10,000–25,000 | 118 | €122 | €300 | €360 |
| 25,000–50,000 | 36 | €345 | €588 | €606 |
| 50,000+ | 16 | €499 | €720 | €900 |
[Naano Index, n=300 bookings, 14 June – 11 August 2026]
Two things stand out immediately. First, the curve is much flatter at the top than rate cards suggest: going from 25,000 to 50,000+ followers moves the median by 20%, not by a multiple. Second, the entry point is far below where the published guides start. Nearly half the transacted volume sat under €200 per post.
If you are budgeting a first campaign rather than pricing a single creator, our sponsored LinkedIn post cost guide walks through the budget arithmetic; this page is about where the numbers come from.
Why are published rate cards so much higher than transacted prices?
Rate cards measure asking prices; the Index measures clearing prices — and in a market with no public transaction record, the gap between the two has nowhere to close. Favikon's 2026 pricing guide reports a transacted LinkedIn median of $798 per post from its client collaboration data, and contentgrip's LinkedIn rate survey puts nano creators under 10,000 followers at $200–$800 for general audiences and $500–$2,500 in niche B2B verticals. Naano's median for that same under-10,000 band is €111 [Naano Index, n=130, June–August 2026].
There are three honest reasons for a gap this size, and it is worth separating them:
- Different buyers. Rate-card medians are weighted toward brands that come through agencies and enterprise procurement. Naano's volume skews toward B2B SaaS companies buying directly, often for the first time, at the small end.
- Different deliverables. A $2,500 quote frequently bundles usage rights for paid amplification, exclusivity windows, or multi-format production. The Naano baseline is one organic post in the creator's voice, no usage rights bolted on.
- Different incentives. Every party publishing a rate card — creators, discovery tools, agencies — is better off if the anchor is high. Nobody in that chain observes what the deal actually closes at. A marketplace that processes the payment does.
The third one is the reason this index exists. Favikon's creator database is genuinely deeper than ours and its scoring is better; its published median comes from client collaboration data, while ours comes from bookings processed on Naano. The samples are not interchangeable: our data is first-party and auditable, but it covers our own supply rather than the whole LinkedIn market.
How much does follower count actually explain about a creator's price?
About 29% — which means roughly 71% of the observed variation in a B2B creator's listed price is not explained by follower count in this one-variable model. Fitting listed per-post price against follower count for the 769 creators open for bookings at the snapshot time gives a log-log R² of 0.289 (Pearson r = 0.538) [Naano Index snapshot, n=769, 11 August 2026 at 19:05 UTC]. It read 0.290 on 719 creators eight days earlier — this is the steadiest number in the Index.
This is the single most useful number in this report, and it shows the limit of follower-tier budgeting. The model does not identify what accounts for the remaining variation; niche, geography, engagement, production scope and creator pricing decisions are candidates to test, not conclusions from this regression.
How wide is the spread between creators with the same audience?
Within the same broad follower tier, the top decile of listed prices is 10 to 26.5 times the bottom decile. Here is the dispersion among creators accepting bookings at the snapshot time:
| Creator followers | n | P10 | Median | P90 | P90 ÷ P10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 5,000 | 225 | €10 | €70 | €250 | 25.0× |
| 5,000–10,000 | 201 | €50 | €100 | €500 | 10.0× |
| 10,000–25,000 | 205 | €27 | €170 | €612 | 22.7× |
| 25,000–50,000 | 74 | €74 | €375 | €1,408 | 19.0× |
| 50,000+ | 64 | €207 | €750 | €2,000 | 9.7× |
[Naano Index snapshot, n=769 creators, 11 August 2026 at 19:05 UTC]
A 22.7× spread inside a single follower tier is not a market with one price. It is a market where neither side has a precise follower-based reference point: at 10,000–25,000 followers, the P10 listed price is €27 and the P90 is €612 in the same snapshot.
This is also why "cheap" is an incomplete heuristic. A €27 quote in that tier can be compared with the creator's scope, audience fit and delivery history, but the snapshot does not reveal why that creator chose the price.
Which B2B niches carry a real price premium?
Listed prices vary materially by niche. Reading the table below, keep the median follower column in view: most rows cluster around 7,000–11,000 followers, but this descriptive table does not isolate niche from other factors:
| Niche | n | P25 | Median | P75 | Median followers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Media / Content | 41 | €90 | €250 | €500 | 9,384 |
| Fintech | 46 | €81 | €190 | €450 | 9,213 |
| Outreach | 29 | €70 | €170 | €400 | 10,794 |
| HealthTech | 18 | €55 | €170 | €390 | 11,573 |
| Marketing | 270 | €70 | €150 | €500 | 8,421 |
| Growth / GTM | 260 | €70 | €130 | €400 | 9,514 |
| Sales | 175 | €70 | €105 | €500 | 8,600 |
| AI | 430 | €70 | €100 | €358 | 8,569 |
| SaaS | 237 | €65 | €100 | €370 | 9,520 |
| Developer Tools | 21 | €40 | €100 | €250 | 6,176 |
| Cybersecurity | 13 | €20 | €50 | €100 | 10,094 |
[Naano Index snapshot, n=769 creators, 11 August 2026 at 19:05 UTC; niches with fewer than 10 creators omitted; creators declaring several niches appear in several rows]
Media/Content creators price at 2.5x what AI and SaaS creators price, at broadly comparable audience sizes. One plausible contributor is supply: 430 creators in the snapshot declare AI as a niche and 41 declare Media/Content. The table establishes an association, not its cause.
One movement worth flagging against the previous edition: Outreach fell from a €250 median to €170 as the cell grew from 27 to 29 creators. A two-creator change should not move a median that far, which tells you how thin these niche cells still are. Cybersecurity remains the thinnest published cell at 13 creators, a €50 median and a €20 P25. Treat all of these as directions for further validation, not evidence of an arbitrage.
What happens to the cheapest bookings?
The observed delivery rate is much higher in the top price band. Of the sponsored-post bookings that reached a final state, 64.6% of those priced at €600+ per post ended in a published post, against 30.4% of those priced under €200:
| Price per post | Bookings created | Published | Still in flight | Delivery rate (settled) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under €200 | 142 | 34 | 30 | 30.4% |
| €200–€399 | 70 | 15 | 12 | 25.9% |
| €400–€599 | 36 | 9 | 10 | 34.6% |
| €600+ | 52 | 31 | 4 | 64.6% |
[Naano Index, n=300 bookings, 14 June – 11 August 2026. "Delivery rate (settled)" excludes bookings still in flight from the denominator.]
Before drawing the obvious conclusion, three caveats. The €400–€599 band rests on only nine distinct buying brands, so treat that row as directional. This is a correlation across a young dataset, not a controlled experiment — a brand that pays €600 is also a brand with a real budget, a real brief, and a real reason to follow up.
And the size of the effect is genuinely unstable. The previous edition of this table, cut eight days earlier on 239 bookings, put the €600+ band at 80.6% and the €200–€399 band at 19.0%. Adding 61 bookings moved those to 64.6% and 25.9%. The ordering has survived every cut so far; the magnitude has not, and we would rather you knew that than quoted a single figure as settled.
A related response pattern is measurable: lower price bands have a larger share of offers that expire without a creator response.
| Price per post | Settled offers | Never answered | Declined |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under €200 | 125 | 52 (41.6%) | 15 |
| €200–€399 | 66 | 27 (40.9%) | 4 |
| €400–€599 | 36 | 9 (25.0%) | 4 |
| €600+ | 52 | 10 (19.2%) | 4 |
[Naano Index snapshot, n=279 settled offers, 11 August 2026 at 19:05 UTC]
More than four offers in ten below €400 expire without the creator responding, against 19.2% above €600. The snapshot records the outcome, not why the creator did not answer or how long the brand waited in each case.
The practical read for a buyer: price bands carry different historical delivery and response rates, but those rates are not causal probabilities for an individual campaign. Use the creator's listed rate and agreed scope as anchors, then consult the delivery odds estimator for the observed band with its caveats.
How long does a booking take from brief to published post?
The median booking went live 8.0 days after it was created, and 90% were live within 14.1 days [Naano Index snapshot, n=89 completed bookings, 11 August 2026 at 19:05 UTC]. The stages inside that window are instructive — these are independent medians, not an additive split:
- Offer to acceptance: 35 minutes (median). Creators decide almost immediately. If an offer is going to be accepted, it is usually accepted the same hour.
- Acceptance to published post: 7.7 days (median). Writing, brand review, and scheduling into the creator's own content calendar.
The full stage-by-stage breakdown, including what the schedule risk actually is, is in how long a B2B creator campaign takes.
The operational consequence: the variable you can compress is not creator responsiveness, it is your own review loop. A brand that turns drafts around in a day publishes in five; a brand that takes four days to approve copy publishes in ten. If you need a post live for a launch date, count backwards two weeks, not two days.
Method
Source. Naano's production marketplace database, queried read-only and frozen at 19:05 UTC on 11 August 2026. The previous edition, frozen on 3 August, is preserved at docs/seo-agent/naano-index/2026-W32.json so the movement between the two is auditable. Every figure in this report is a direct aggregate; nothing is estimated or extrapolated.
Two populations. Transacted prices cover every sponsored-post booking created on Naano between 14 June and 11 August 2026, in every lifecycle state, normalised to price per post (n=300). Listed prices are the public per-post rates of creators eligible and open for bookings at the snapshot timestamp (n=769).
Exclusions. Bookings where Naano itself is the buyer are excluded from every figure (37 bookings). No cell with fewer than 10 observations is published. No individual creator, brand, profile, URL or amount appears anywhere in this report.
Definitions. Prices are in euros, exclusive of VAT, and are what the brand pays — not what the creator nets. "Settled" excludes offers still awaiting a decision. "Never answered" means the offer window closed without the creator responding.
What we did not publish and why. We have no defensible per-post impression or reach figure: LinkedIn does not expose impressions to us for third-party posts, and any reach number we quoted would be an engagement-derived estimate rather than a measurement. We also withheld clicks-per-post again: 62 of 89 completed bookings now carry a tracked-link event (up from 39 of 61), but not one of the 2,690 recorded events has the stored dwell time the old 30-second definition required, so any distribution would measure link-tracking adoption rather than post performance.
What we can publish for the first time: a country split. The previous edition withheld one because several country cells fell below n=10. Country coverage has since been validated at 768 of 769 eligible creators (99.9%), and the cells now clear the threshold: French creators list a median of €250 per post, German creators €200, and British creators €100 — though the German creators in this snapshot carry a median of 13,615 followers against 8,224 in France, so per unit of audience the ranking reverses. Austria still falls below n=10 and is not published. The full table and its caveats are in B2B creator campaigns in Europe.
Citing this. The Naano Index is free to quote with attribution to Naano and a link to this page. Each figure carries its own sample size in brackets; please keep them attached.
Naano is a B2B creator marketplace: brands book LinkedIn micro-creators at a flat fee per sponsored post set by each creator, with contracts, payment and per-post tracking handled in one place. There is no per-click billing and no monthly platform fee to browse. Book a creator, or get a free hand-picked shortlist for your vertical. Creators: publish your rate.
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