Olivia Dunne made $500,000 from a single NIL deal. Here’s how she became the highest-paid female college athlete.

• Olivia Dunne is the highest-paid female athlete in the NCAA, according to On3.
• Dunne made upwards of $500,000 from a single paid promotion on social media, she said on a recent podcast.
• The gymnast started a collective at LSU to create more NIL opportunities for female athletes.

Olivia Dunne is the highest-paid female athlete in the NCAA with an estimated valuation of roughly $3.5 million annually, according to On3’s tracker for name, image, and likeness, or NIL. This year alone, the Louisiana State University gymnast worked with ESPN, BodyArmor, Sports Illustrated, and Motorola.

Dunne revealed on a recent episode of the “Full Send” podcast that she made more than $500,000 from a single post, her most profitable deal yet. But she said she prefers long-term partnerships that feel authentic to who she is.

“What I love with certain brands is getting long-term brand deals,” Dunne said on the June 29 podcast. “Those are probably the best because you build a relationship with the brand and they want you year after year.”

For example, Dunne signed in 2021 a multi-year brand partnership with clothing brand Vuori.

Student-athletes have some of the highest engagement rates of all social-media influencers, influencer-marketing firm Captiv8 found in a study published in July 2022. Women athletes, particularly basketball players, performed the best for brands. And Dunne is no exception.

She has nearly 12 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. She has amassed 390 million likes on TikTok alone, where she’s earned more than a million views on almost all of her videos during college.

Read more about why college athletes are the ‘best performing subset of influencers’ for brands

Dunne is an outlier with her multi-million dollar income, however.

Many other college athletes haven’t earned as much from NIL as much as they anticipated.

Read how much a college football player who thought he would ‘strike gold’ with NIL actually made in a year

Dunne said on the podcast that she uses her new funds to travel, and her first big purchase was buying her mom a Canada Goose jacket.

She also founded in July the Livvy Fund at LSU to bring more NIL opportunities to the school’s female athletes. Collectives, which are donor-funded groups that help college athletes build their brands, make up 80% of all NIL deals.

“Most of the collectives, the NIL collectives, they go to the men’s sports, so I’m creating my own collective for the women’s sports,” Dunne told “Full Send.” “Hopefully this fund is part of my legacy.”

Read 3 key takeaways from the first 2 years of NIL, including the growing influence of ‘collectives’ funded by donors and rising freshman athlete earnings