Richard E. Grant lasted one episode of The Celebrity Traitors. Instagram can’t get enough of him

Being the first contestant banished from The Celebrity Traitors is usually not good for a career. For Richard E. Grant it seems to have been the opposite.

According to the influencer marketing firm Kolsquare, the 69-year-old actor gained almost 277,000 Instagram followers in the month around the BBC show’s launch, taking him to 1.29 million. His activity peaked on 2 October, the day his announcement “I am a traitor!” made the headlines. Over the period, his posts drew 20.35 million views and more than 557,000 likes, comments and shares.

Kolsquare estimates the value of that attention at £1.4 million, the highest of the ten contestants it looked at. The figure needs some caution. “Earned media value” is a marketing industry estimate of what the exposure would have cost to buy as advertising. Grant has not been paid £1.4 million, and Kolsquare says so itself in the small print. It’s a measure of how much attention he got, not money he’s earned.

It still says something. Ross Kemp came second, with an estimated £997,000 from a following of only 243,000. Joanne McNally, Joe Lycett and Miranda Hart followed, each between £650,000 and £780,000. Maya Jama has 3.39 million followers, the largest audience in the group, but came in at about £545,000, well behind Grant despite having more than twice as many followers. Per follower, Lycett and Hart actually had the most engaged audiences.

TikTok, on the other hand, has hardly noticed. James Blunt topped the contestants there with an estimated £3,640, which in influencer terms is next to nothing. The figures only count the stars’ own accounts, not the wider stream of fan clips and reaction videos the show generates.

Kolsquare’s real message is for advertisers. Grant has done just one sponsored collaboration in six months, with the British fashion label Holland Cooper in September. To the firm’s way of thinking, that makes him something of a rarity. Alicia Van Der Meer, its UK marketing manager, says brands “shouldn’t overlook established celebrities” and points to his “cross-generational appeal”.

Put simply, a well-known actor with a real career and few paid posts comes across as more trustworthy online than people who post sponsored content for a living. The money men may now try to change that.