On a February afternoon at the University of North Carolina, a group of seven students on the diving team sat barefoot on the floor of the college’s muggy natatorium. They were staring expectantly at a petite blond woman in a black sweater perched on a concrete block.
Vickie Segar was there, with the blessing of the university’s athletic department, to pitch them on turning their TikTok and Instagram accounts into cash cows.
“Let’s talk about the money in the creator economy,” said Ms. Segar, after explaining that she was a graduate of the university who had run a top influencer marketing agency for a dozen years. “Does anybody follow Alix Earle?”
The students said yes, amid several chuckles, because asking a college student that question in 2025 is like asking if a millennial has ever heard of Beyoncé.
How much money, she continued, did they think that Ms. Earle, a TikTok megastar who rose to fame with confessional-style videos about beauty and college life, makes for promoting a brand across several posts on Instagram Stories? “$100,000?” one student guessed. “$70,000,” another tossed out.
Ms. Segar, whose firm has worked with Ms. Earle on brand deals, paused. She drew out her response: “$450,000 per Instagram Story.”
For a moment, there was just the hum of the pool and a single exclamation from one student: “Oh. My. God.”
Ms. Segar smiled and explained, “Our job is to help you guys bring in some of that money.”
U.N.C. doesn’t have a formal contract with Ms. Segar or her firm, Article 41. But the school has encouraged students and coaches to work with them. Later this year, the firm’s pitch will also be a part of orientation for freshman athletes at the school.
Welcome to the budding business of turning college athletes into social media stars. The world of intercollegiate sports has been upended in recent years by the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s rules that allow student-athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness — known as N.I.L. For the most part, it was viewed as a change that would reward stars in college basketball and football.
Now, Chapel Hill is at the forefront of the next stage of the N.I.L. era. The school is supporting Ms. Segar in her effort, which began last fall, to turn all 850 of its student-athletes into influencers.
The school doesn’t get a cut of their earnings. But “they want every athlete at the school to make as much money as possible because it will get better athletes,” Ms. Segar said.
This hoped-for, large-scale conversion of college athletes to influencers shows how N.I.L. deals “have grown exponentially in ways that nobody could have imagined or predicted,” said Michael H. LeRoy, a law professor at the University of Illinois. “This is another milestone in how this is evolving.”
And while many students are eager to make some extra cash, the efforts are alarming to some. “This saddens me,” Mr. LeRoy said. “Their bodies are being monetized on TikTok for the benefit of the school.”
A Gold Rush
The new N.I.L. rules have already minted a few unexpected stars in the last few years. There’s Olivia Dunne, the 22-year-old Louisiana State gymnast, who can now command hundreds of thousands of dollars for an advertorial TikTok post. And Haley and Hanna Cavinder, 24-year-old twins, who made N.I.L. deals valued at more than $1.5 million, according to Forbes, while playing basketball at the University of Miami.
Ms. Segar, 42, who graduated from North Carolina in 2005 and lives in Chapel Hill, believes those players are just the start. Uber, Athleta and State Farm are among companies that have already paid for posts that feature student-athletes showing off their game-day looks or routines. Only a few students will hit big numbers, but Ms. Segar reasons that many could eventually make at least a few thousand dollars per branded TikTok or Instagram post.
Article 41, which Ms. Segar founded in 2024 with her husband, Ben Gildin, a lawyer and former lacrosse player at Kenyon College, will take a 20 percent cut of the deals, which is typical among influencer management firms.
Other companies, including traditional Hollywood agencies and boutique firms, have been pouncing on N.I.L. influencer opportunities, too. Those efforts have largely been focused on top talent in basketball and football who might one day play professionally. Creative Artists Agency, one of Hollywood’s powerhouse firms, says it has worked with nearly 100 athletes on N.I.L. deals since 2021.
ESM, a sports management firm that historically worked with N.F.L. players, now represents a roster of current and former student-athletes, including the Cavinder twins, and is helping Clemson start an in-house agency.
But Ms. Segar’s firm is unique, so far, in its belief that every athlete — benchwarmer or not — can have a following.
‘The Lion’s Share of the Money’
Bubba Cunningham, the U.N.C. athletic director, works out of an office next door to the Dean E. Smith Center, where its famed men’s basketball team plays. From there, he oversees 28 varsity teams, many of them elite, like women’s soccer and field hockey.
Mr. Cunningham, whose given name is Lawrence, has been the college’s athletic director for more than a decade, which means he has watched the full-scale erosion of the long-held bargain between athletes and their universities: a free education in exchange for their on-field prowess. That meant, officially at least, no advertisements, gifts or cuts of merchandise sold by schools, even jerseys with their name on the back.
That model has all but imploded in recent years amid a series of antitrust cases. Based on the preliminary terms of a landmark settlement, schools like U.N.C. will offer student-athletes two potential forms of compensation beyond scholarships in the 2025-26 school year. The school is likely to have $20.5 million — calculated by taking 22 percent of the most recent annual revenue from four major college sports divisions generated from media and sponsorship rights and ticket sales — to pay athletes directly, through a revenue-sharing agreement. The settlement would resolve several antitrust lawsuits filed against the N.C.A.A. and the biggest conferences by former college athletes.
At U.N.C., that $20.5 million will go to men’s and women’s basketball, football and baseball, according to Mr. Cunningham. Many other schools are doing similar splits.
“Since this is about the commercial value of the sport, we’re going to attribute the money to the sport that earned it,” he said.
Making an arrangement with a firm like Ms. Segar’s offers him a solution for everyone else — especially female athletes.
“The most popular player on the most popular team is what I’ve always said will get the lion’s share of the money,” Mr. Cunningham said. “But the most entrepreneurial student that understands social media and understands how to create a social media presence can become an influencer.”
Bella Miller, a 22-year-old gymnast at U.N.C. with more than 27,000 followers on TikTok, said she wasn’t sure sports like hers would ever benefit from N.I.L., with so few athletes eventually competing professionally. Despite the success of someone like Ms. Dunne, most brands and agents “don’t want to focus their time and energy on sports like gymnastics, volleyball, swimming because they didn’t really see that potential,” she added.
The ‘Cringe-y’ Hump
Article 41’s pitch about becoming an influencer — complete with a 50-page training guide with tips like “no, you don’t have to dance” and “treat each TikTok as a bite-sized lesson” — is aimed at members of a cohort who have, in some cases, been using social media since before they were teenagers.
For many, the notion of becoming a creator is appealing. In a 2023 Morning Consult survey, three in five members of Generation Z said they would become influencers if given the opportunity. (And many of them might have the opportunity. There are 27 million paid creators in the United States, and 44 percent of them are doing it full time, according to a 2023 survey from the Keller Advisory Group, a consultancy.)
Alyssa Ustby, 23, a star player on the women’s basketball team, who is bespectacled and earnest off the court, is among the highest-paid U.N.C. student-athletes when it comes to N.I.L. deals.
She said she had around 1,000 Instagram followers before college: She’d post photos of friends, or senior prom. But when she entered U.N.C. in 2020, TikTok was ubiquitous.
“I was like, ‘OK, what’s the worst that could happen — that I stay where I am?’” Ms. Ustby said. She quickly became a hit with a TikTok series that showed her training with other U.N.C. athletes, poking fun at her form as she tried to do laps with the swim team and trying to catch a ball with the women’s lacrosse team.
Now, she has 132,000 followers on TikTok and 54,000 on Instagram and commands between $10,000 and $15,000 for branded posts. Sponsors have included Papa John’s (“Where’s the best place to eat an epic stuffed crust pizza?” she asks, eating one as a study snack and in the gym in a TikTok ad) and American Eagle Outfitters.
Ms. Ustby, who majored in advertising and public relations (and just signed a free-agent contract with the W.N.B.A.’s Los Angeles Sparks), said she saw her experience building a TikTok audience as akin to an internship. She earned more than $100,000 through brand deals last year and tracked them on a spreadsheet that is also monitored by her father, a wealth manager.
Jake Dailey, a 19-year-old freshman wrestler from Scranton, Pa., with moppy hair and a big smile, said that he was probably 10 years old when he started using social media. He started posting silly jokes and wrestling videos to TikTok as a high school freshman in 2021, which his mother encouraged, even though it earned some derision from his peers.
“I would say, yeah, it’s cringe-y,” but “it’s definitely going to pay off in the long run for me,” he said. Mr. Dailey said he had scored free products and a recent paid deal with an apparel company called the Mutt Dog.
Many of Mr. Dailey’s posts depict him shirtless, pointing his phone camera at himself in the mirror or flexing. In his view, physique is part of why student-athletes play well on social media. “Young, fit, attractive people definitely come from athletics,” he said.
Mr. Dailey, who has 90,000 TikTok followers and 32,000 on Instagram, said he would be thrilled to become a full-time influencer. Otherwise, he plans to become a dentist.
The Thirst Trap Strategy
Bodies are, inevitably, part of what’s on display. When Ms. Segar and Mr. Gildin spoke to U.N.C.’s divers, they urged them to highlight their physical abilities. “I put diving at the top with gymnastics” with tricks that regular people can’t do, Ms. Segar told the group, using an expletive for emphasis. (She said she intentionally peppers her talks with curse words to put the students at ease.)
Women are often the audience that brands are trying to reach on TikTok and Instagram, and they’re more likely to post as creators on the platforms, Ms. Segar said. The success of athletes like Ms. Dunne and the Cavinder twins sometimes attracts a line of criticism about how much their looks matter.
Ms. Segar admitted that athlete-influencers in the very top tier are more likely to be conventionally attractive, but pushed back on the idea that the student-athletes she is pitching need to adopt what she called Mr. Dailey’s “thirst trap strategy.”
A breakout star probably has “something really special about them — they are either a top athlete or they are really beautiful or they are incredibly funny,” she said. “But we don’t need people to get eight million followers. We need them to get to 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 followers — that is where we start seeing revenue.”
Ms. Segar acknowledged that race can play a role in determining which athletes gain bigger social media followings, outside of sports like basketball and football. But she said she believed that was changing with the younger generation. And, she added, “there is more money going to diverse creators in the N.I.L. space than there is in the traditional influencer space that I’ve worked in for over a decade.”
Mr. LeRoy, the Illinois law professor, said he was concerned about the mental health ramifications as more athletes pushed to have big presences on social media.
Ms. Ustby, the basketball player, said a friend on the team who started building up her TikTok presence at the same time as her didn’t enjoy the same success.
“She was constantly putting in all this effort, making videos, and they would just never go viral,” she said. “She said it literally just felt like a popularity contest she was losing, and it sucks, and that was a really strenuous thing on our friendship because my stuff was kind of taking off.”
Mr. LeRoy said that it was worth remembering that “these are undergrads, many of whom are teenagers.”
“If part of your N.I.L. strategy as a school is to increase your student-athlete exposure to the social media ecosystem that is filled with irrationality and hate, you’re not helping the mental health of the athletes,” Mr. LeRoy said. “This is not a good atmosphere for them to be competing at a high level and then also competing in the social media sphere.”
Mark Gangloff, U.N.C.’s head coach of swimming and diving, said he was keeping an eye on how influencing fit into athletes’ “very full plates.”
“That is my only caution — how much is too many things for any one person to try and take on at one time?” he said.
(Article 41 and U.N.C.’s coaches have emphasized that the effort is entirely voluntary and that many student-athletes have opted to keep their social media profiles private.)
Top of the Algorithm
Ms. Segar and Mr. Gildin are self-funding Article 41, which has 13 full-time employees and 24 paid interns. (She sold her influencer agency, Village Marketing, to the ad giant WPP in 2022.) The couple are prepared to invest several million dollars into the firm, which they say has helped launch social profiles for more than 70 students and coaches who have signed agreements with the firm.
Article 41 is fielding requests for similar work from other colleges like the University of Michigan. It plans to seek compensation for its services from other institutions, though it is not asking for money from U.N.C., where Ms. Segar and Mr. Gildin are donors and Ms. Segar sits on a board for its athletic booster club.
The firm is intervening when brands send free products to athletes and insisting that they are paid for posting about them. It’s also trying to sweeten existing equipment deals between brands and teams by adding promises of social media posts to their deals to help teams earn revenue.
Athleta is among the brands that have already struck paid deals with Ryleigh Heck, a field hockey player, and Ms. Miller, the gymnast, but it does not officially outfit U.N.C. athletes otherwise. Michelle Goad, Athleta’s chief digital officer, said it was testing ads with the students in part to help “build a bridge to our next generation of consumers,” and to see if the exposure could eventually exceed that of traditional college sponsorships.
Anna Frey, a 17-year-old tennis star from Farmington, Utah, will be one of the biggest athlete-influencers on campus when she starts her freshman year at U.N.C. this fall, with 2.1 million TikTok followers who watch posts of her serving tennis balls, performing dances to popular TikTok sounds and going to school dances.
Her father, Tanner Frey, said there were some serious cons to that sort of presence.
“I feel like 90 percent of people are so nice in the comments and 5 percent are mean and 5 percent are perverts,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Frey said he had made a block list of “about probably 30 words” that Instagram and TikTok could use to censor offensive comments on his daughter’s posts. He said the “meanest, nastiest” comments came from gamblers who would berate his daughter in the comments if she lost a match.
Still, he said it was “the best time ever in the history of the world to be a female athlete,” in part because of the opportunities tied to brand deals and the new N.C.A.A. rules for payments.
“Four years ago, none of this was even possible,” he said. “If Anna wanted to go play college tennis, she’d have to make a really hard decision between that and accepting half a million dollars a year from these brands and going pro.”
He added, “It’s nice they can go and do both now.”
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
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