Paige Spiranac and the guys who make up Good Good are raking in the dough with millions of followers. Sure, they had a first-mover advantage as golf influencers. But that’s no different than any other nascent industry, where someone has outsized success before others decide to take a chance on a career that follows a less established but potentially thrilling and lucrative path.
“There’s no one way to do it,” says Nathan Moore, host of the Content Clubhouse podcast and an associate at the golf public relations firm Buffalo Groupe.
Spiranac was a college golfer who tried to play professionally. The Good Good guys were friends who filmed themselves playing golf. Erik Anders Lang, the founder of Random Golf Club, was a filmmaker who never played golf until he took a golf trip with his brother and got hooked.
Because of them, those getting into the influencer biz today have a model. The difference is they’re trying to pursue it in the full glare of the internet’s unforgiving spotlight.
Take Emma Carpenter, who played Division I golf at Minnesota and won the prestigious Lisa Byington Award for the best student female broadcaster in the Big Ten Conference. That award helped her break into sports broadcasting jobs after school, including covering college volleyball, contributing to Gary Williams’ 5 Clubs podcast and being part of PGA Tour Live.
Carpenter aspires to be a full-time sports broadcaster but the economic reality is harsh for now. She is living and working in Los Angeles not on her broadcasting earnings but from the business she’s built as a golf influencer with nearly 90,000 followers on Instagram.
“I’m working really hard pursuing a career in traditional sports broadcasting,” Carpenter says, “but the work I do as a content creator blows entry-level broadcasting out of the water. There is just so much money on social media.”
Carpenter’s two jobs are very different. Sports broadcasting requires extensive preparation, while creating golf content is more about short and pithy takes to feed the algorithm. How she balances them to make ends meet is a common story among golf content creators as they start out. They hope one day to choose just one career, but to get started, they’re juggling many.
GOING FOR THE GREEN: Until a creator has 100,000 followers on Instagram, he or she probably keeps his or her day job.
MORE: How Paige Spiranac took a life she never wanted and turned it into golf’s largest social media empire
Moore says creators with fewer than 100,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok or fewer than 50,000 on YouTube likely still have another job to support what they’re building. Michael Rodriquez, the influencer known as Homie Golf, has 49,000 followers on Instagram. He also works as a property photographer, which allows him time to play a lot of golf.
Achieving full-time-creator status requires getting past the exchange phase, where brands pay with free trips or merch in exchange for promotional content. After all, you can’t pay your rent with a new wedge.
The need to post daily is crucial to get paid but is time-consuming. EJ Hill, who has 123,000 followers on Instagram and 8,600 on YouTube, may play nine holes in two hours but then spends another six hours editing that content. Some weeks he could spend 40 hours alone on editing.
When the money starts to come in, it’s likely to be lumpy. Noah Schwartz, founder and chief executive of Touch Grass Sports, an agency for up-and-coming influencers, says creators need to think about how their paid posts “stack” to make a living.
“If you do a lot of small deals, it’s inventory,” Schwartz says. “If you have two spots for branded posts this week and none of them sell, then taking $1,000 is good because you wouldn’t have had that money anyway. If you do 20 of those over the year, and 20 more at double that, then you have a good living wage.”
Schwartz gives the example of two creators, who he anonymized to discuss their incomes. The first has 400,000 followers across all platforms with twice as many followers on TikTok as on Instagram. He’s in his early 30s and lives in Arizona, with a specialty in creating gamified content. He’s an engaging content creator but not an expert golfer. He has a primary partner that pays $2,500 a month, but he is also willing to take any deal that comes his way, from $800 to $5,000 a post. He pumps out an insane amount of content and earns about $120,000 a year.
Achieving full-time-creator status requires getting past the exchange phase, where brands pay with free trips or merch in exchange for promotional content. After all, you can’t pay your rent with a new wedge.
The second person is a plus-handicap who creates coaching content from Virginia. Also in his early 30s, he was a college golfer and enjoys creating tips and tricks to help people get better and be a funnel for his coaching business. He has 500,000 followers with a focus on Instagram. For a one-off post, this person gets $3,000 to $4,000. Additionally, the creator has four long-term deals that are locked in for six to 12 months and pay between $2,500 and $4,000 a month. He makes $225,000 to $250,000 annually, but that doesn’t include the AdSense revenue each platform pays for their reach and engagement. When that’s factored in, this person is making closer to $300,000.
Agents typically receive commissions of 15 to 20 percent on the deals they broker, but not on the AdSense revenue.
“I have some people you would consider to be on the smaller side in terms of following and reach, but they punch above their weight for brand dollars because of their willingness to do more,” Schwartz says.
@emmacarpenter Meg and I play a 1-hole match but for each shot you hit two balls and then hit from the worse ball… thoughts?? #golf #college #athlete #minnesota ♬ original sound – Emma Carpenter
The challenge to get to the next level is attracting non-golf brands, since golf equipment marketing budgets are not unlimited. A fruitful area is adjacent brands, like alcohol, gambling and cars, which have bigger budgets.
Nick Dimengo is a golf creator who came from a traditional magazine background before launching Rainmakers Golf Club. His niche is how the everyday golfer can improve. After going all in as a creator in January 2025, he now has 34,000 followers on Instagram and 12,000 on YouTube.
The first six months were solid but when that initial sponsor rolled off, it became more of a slog. “My wife’s been the most supportive throughout all of this,” he says. “She’s helped cover the costs since June. It’s been a grind. We’ve had a few small clients, mostly golf teachers who we’ve helped. The hardest part is these deals take a long time.”
He’s leaned on his experience to sell marketing support for golf resorts and travel companies.
Given how new the golf influencer space is, it’s hard to predict how it evolves and who will be part of it in five years.
“Who will still want to do this when they’re 40?” Moore asks. “The burnout rate is incredibly high. There are thousands you never hear from because they can’t get past 100 posts. They can’t get on the hamster wheel of posting once or twice a day.”
But those who do have the opportunity to win big—or at least big enough to not have a desk job.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com