Statistics · Lorenne Calder · 11 November 2026
Nano or macro: which engagement rate are you buying?
Three public reports print three different ratios. I will not average them into a fee.
Nano versus macro is the search that wants a winner. The fee and the percent are not the same contest. The Cirqle’s 2024 Instagram rate cards, from 502,000 creators entering a number, rise with the room: $504 nano, $1,245 micro, $2,100 mid-tier, $3,820 macro, $7,400 at a million followers and up. That is a price ladder. It is not an engagement ladder. If you pay the macro fee because you believe the percent will be macro-shaped, you have changed the subject.
HypeAuditor’s State of Influencer report, in the 2025 PDF, calculates Instagram engagement as likes plus comments, divided by followers. They say nano accounts, 1,000 to 10,000 followers, sit at 1.73%, and that this is higher than the other tiers. The average across tiers is 1.91% in 2022, 1.85% in 2023, and 1.59% in 2024. They also say nano accounts are 75.9% of influencers. Most of the profession, on their cut, is the small room. The Cirqle’s own table prints a 2024 nano engagement rate of 14.2% beside the $504 fee. I will not average 14.2 and 1.73. HypeAuditor tells me the denominator. The Cirqle prints the percent next to a rate card and does not, on the page I read, show me the same formula. Those are not two measurements of one ratio until somebody shows the arithmetic. A brand that pays a premium for “14% engagement” without asking likes-over-what is buying a word.
Captiv8’s 2024 Organic Benchmark is a third method. They divide engagements by impressions, on more than 5,000 organic posts collected from 1 January 2022 through 31 December 2023. On Instagram their nano rate, under 10,000 followers, is 6.23%, and micro, 10,000 to 49,999, is 3.90%. On TikTok the same report has nano at 0.70% and micro at 0.85%, while an “All Star” account at 1.5 million and up is 4.95%. HypeAuditor’s TikTok math is different again: likes, comments, and shares divided by views. They say nano is 10.3%, and that mid-tier, macro, and mega sit around 7% each. “Around 7%” is their wording. I will not invent the three missing decimals. A 10.3% views-ratio and a 0.70% impressions-ratio are not a quarrel about whether nano TikTok is good. They are different fractions. If you put them on one chart you have built a lie with honest ingredients. I will not.
So what should you do with the ladder? If you are buying reach, The Cirqle’s dollar ladder tells you what creators in each shelf typed as a rate in 2024. It does not tell you the ratio on the card in this directory. If you are buying attention per person who could have seen the post, you need the denominator in writing before the percent is allowed to move the fee. On my pages the order is the engagement figure printed on the card, then average views, then followers. That is a fourth ratio: whatever the source card called engagement. It is not HypeAuditor’s, not Captiv8’s, and not The Cirqle’s. A high number on a profile can be a ceiling, a scrape, or a real room. I say so on the methodology page. I do not import 10.3% into a row that does not have it.
A creator in the nano shelf should not apologise for a small follower count, and should not invoice a macro rate because a blog said small accounts “win engagement.” Sometimes the percent is higher because the room is small. Sometimes the studies disagree because they are not counting the same thing. A brand should not demand macro scale at a nano price and call the 1.73% a discount. You are allowed to want a small, loud room or a large, quieter one. You are not allowed to pretend they were the same product with a typo in the percent. Agree the work, name the ratio you mean, and leave the other percents in the margin where they belong.