Picture this: Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo revealed as Instagram's biggest earner

Cristiano Ronaldo earns a staggering $47.8 million per year via sponsored posts on social media platform Instagram, a figure which eclipses his annual salary with Juventus and makes him the highest-paid 'influencer' in the world.

The 34-year-old superstar makes around $975,000 for each advertisement he posts for his audience of 187 million followers, per a Hopper HQ study published on BuzzBingo. That sum tops the per-post rate for the likes of Kim Kardashian, The Rock and several others of the platform's most-followed accounts. 

The figure will no doubt be a satisfying one for the Portuguese as it is more than double the annual figure that chief rival Lionel Messi rakes in, with the Argentine making around $23.3 million annually. 

Most interestingly, perhaps, is that Ronaldo makes $14.7 million more per annum by posting to Instagram than he does on the football field, per online reports of his contract in Turin. 

"Ronaldo is the most followed human on Instagram so companies are paying almost $1 million for posts to access his insane reach," says Hopper HQ's Nicola Cronin. 

"Due to his status as a celebrity and football star, his earnings from Instagram break away from typical influencer partnerships, as many of his promotional posts will be part of wider sponsorship deals, such as Nike," Cronin added.

"You only need to go on his Instagram to see how many paid partnerships he does outside of the sports market."

The most recent advertisement posted to Ronaldo's account has just shy of 4,800,000 'likes' at the time of writing - an engagement rate which most top brands can only dream of, so it is perhaps easy to see why so many companies are falling over themselves for access to his audience demographic.