I’ve priced influencer campaigns for crypto clients for years, and the budget conversation opens the same way: how much for a tweet? It’s the wrong first question, but it has a real answer, and that answer is more public than the industry pretends.
A shill tweet has a price
In April 2022 the on-chain investigator ZachXBT published a rate sheet a crypto marketing firm had circulated to prospective clients. The numbers were specific: retweets from a few hundred dollars, dedicated promo tweets priced by follower count, Lindsay Lohan listed at $25,000 for a single post and $35,000 for a package of two tweets plus a retweet. There was also a bundle: $80,000 and every account on the list, roughly 19 million combined followers, posts your project once. Vice’s Motherboard contacted 60 promoters named on the sheet. A few disputed their rates. Several admitted they take money to tweet about tokens either way.
Rate cards in 2026 keep the same shape. Agency roundups put nano-tier crypto accounts (1,000 to 10,000 followers) at $50 to $500 per post, mid-tier accounts (100,000 to 500,000) at $2,000 to $10,000, and top-tier placements at $70,000 and up. Follower count sets the quote. Impressions set the real cost. A $25,000 post that draws 2 million impressions runs $12.50 per thousand, several times what standard display inventory costs, and that’s before anyone has bought anything.
Payment structure tells you more than the headline fee. Promoters often take part of their compensation in the project’s own tokens, with a no-sell window of 30 to 90 days. That aligns them with the price chart for exactly as long as the window lasts.
The disclosure gap is structural
US law is specific about this. The anti-touting provision of the Securities Act requires anyone promoting a security to disclose the amount, source, and nature of their compensation, and the SEC’s October 2022 order against Kim Kardashian shows what enforcement costs. She was paid $250,000 for one June 2021 Instagram post about EMAX tokens, disclosed none of it, and settled for $1.26 million: roughly $260,000 in disgorgement plus a $1 million penalty, plus a three-year ban on promoting crypto asset securities.
The FTC side is simpler and older. A paid post needs a disclosure that’s hard to miss, and the agency’s guide for social media influencers says to put it at the top of the post or inside the video itself. In practice the #ad lands on the fourth line of a thread, under a wall of emojis, or in a quote-tweet the audience scrolling the original will never open.
March 2023 added a bigger data point. The SEC charged Justin Sun and eight celebrities (Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Ne-Yo, Akon, Lil Yachty, Kendra Lust, Austin Mahone) with touting TRX and BTT without disclosing payment, and alleged that Sun’s team directed them to stay quiet about it. Six settled for just over $400,000 combined. Set a $25,000 post fee against a five-figure penalty and the fine reads as a line item. That’s how the disclosure gap survives enforcement.
What the promotion actually buys
Save the Kids is the cleanest case study I know. The charity token launched on June 5, 2021 at about $0.02, promoted by four FaZe Clan members (Kay, Jarvis, Nikan, Teeqo) along with RiceGum and Sommer Ray. It fell below half a cent almost immediately and sat near $0.00138 a month later. Coffeezilla’s wallet tracing showed promoters selling into their own audience: Jarvis dumped two-thirds of his holdings, Nikan about a third, Kay nearly everything, roughly $80,000 worth. FaZe removed Kay and suspended three other members.
Read a promoter’s feed the way an auditor would. Look for a disclosure above the fold. Check the wallet for a token grant with a vesting cliff, or a buy timed just before the post. Search the promoter’s history for projects that quietly died after the campaign. When the fee stays hidden, the audience is the inventory being sold.
A paid promotion buys reach, and a buried disclosure buys borrowed trust on top of it. Price the reach, verify the disclosure, watch the wallet. Three checks, one afternoon, and the budget question that opened this conversation answers itself.