Everyone Wants to Be an Influencer
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Now that YouTube and other platforms have become so diluted that ad revenue is minimal, it makes sense that anyone with a large following would seek an agency to help them find advertisers. I get the impression that most moderately successful YouTubers make significantly more money from in-video product advertisements than they do from YouTube's ad revenue sharing.
It's also interesting how radioactive the word "influencer" has become in tech circles like HN. Nobody likes to think of their preferred internet media stars as "influencers", but they liberally apply the influencer label to internet celebrities they dislike. How often to you see Matt Levine (Money Stuff newsletter), Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten), Marques Brownleee (MKBHD), or Patrick McKenzie (patio11) described as influencers? All of them are (or have in the past) used their platforms to sell products or show ads, yet they have enough rapport in the tech community that people almost never describe them as influencers. If you pretend the ads and sales pitches don't exist, or wave them away as a necessary part of their business, it's easy to pretend they aren't actually influencers playing the influencer game.
Instead, the "influencer" label has become synonymous with "fake person I don't like who shills products for money". In reality, a lot of the newsletters, YouTube channels, and blogs that the tech community loves to consume are also engaged in these very same influencer marketing circles. It's how the business works.
I think the distaste for the word influencer is because it assumes influencing is the thing, where it is actually the output.
Marques Brownlee is… a reviewer, who also makes money by doing sponsored spots.
Mr Beast is really a director/producer/videomaker and makes interesting and fun videos, and “influences” by using his name to market burgers to make some extra money, but he does that because he is a video maker not because he is an “influencer”.
While teens say they want to be influencers growing up, I think it would be more healthy for them to think about what they will do to become influential first. It’s like saying you want to be famous without deciding if you want to be a musician, actor or famous scientist - fame is the output not the title and shouldn’t usually be the goal.
Marque Brownlee is undeniably an influencer. Many of his videos include sponsored pitches for products like dbrand skins and he uses his rapport to give their products pseudo-reviews by showing them on his own personal phone. MKBHD is the essence of influencer, yet MKBHD fans quickly reject any such suggestion because they like MKBHD.
That is the influencer game: The closer the influencer hits to home, the less their fans see them as an influencer. We give the obvious influencer behaviors a free pass because we like the content they produce. When people don't like the content someone producers, they wave it all away as influencer content. Yet what's really happening is that the influencer is just targeting a different demographic. Same business, different audience.
In this scenario, the product being sold is access to that following, and the influencer will - like Facebook - sell that product to anyone for any purpose. It's a bit creepy because the influencer can care not at all about the following, happily pushing crappy supplements or other junk with no qualms.
It really comes down to 'do you have any ethical or moral concerns about how your flock of followers (and perhaps a good chunk of their personal data) is being used by your paying clients'?
In contrast, consider the term 'creator' which we think of as someone producing artistic or engineering etc. value, sharing that with the world, and perhaps selling their work online, with limited (and curated) need for the junk advertising / opinion manipulation / political shenanigans cash flows.
Call people models, or actors, or by their actual professions that made them famous - they are all technically influencers but why pick such a generic term?
Otherwise IMO it’s a non-descriptive title that can be applied to pretty much anything in the public sphere.
Let's just go back to calling them celebrities, or wannabe celebrities.
Within tech I do know there are both types. I tend to aschew anyone who is pushing a product on me, versus those who sell ideas. I also have a third category, which is those that push their ideas without much self-skepticism or are too aggressive in their worldview. I tend not to like that category very much.
He was widely known for his debating style, in which he'd first assume anyone who disagreed with him didn't understand his argument, and after further refusal to agree, would then assume that person was a traitor in the pay of the Soviet Union.
You could argue his job is influencing people.
> He’s a salaried columnist for a news organization.
In other words, he gets paid to influence people on behalf of a major news publication.
I posit that "influencer" is the general term for celebrities, politicians, journalists, priests, etc. Matt Levine is a traditional media influencer. The pope is a religious influencer. Biden is a political influencer. So on and so forth. The modern social media influencers are really independent influencers as they don't belong to a corporate, political or religious entity.
It’s not terribly surprising that an agency has a 30% acceptance rate - they probably accept anyone that isn’t outwardly racist and has more than 50 followers.
Eh, this thing seems more hype than anything. There is definitely a role for influencer marketing, but inevitably the majority of the pie will be swallowed by a few participants in each product category.
We've had celebrities since before electricity. The reach and scale of print was greater than word of mouth, the reach and scale of radio was greater than print, the reach and scale of TV was greater than radio. The internet is just another expansion of scope, but it's the same culture underneath. Never before have we felt the need to come up with a new word for celebrity.
You could have argued at one point that the internet gives everyone an equal chance to become famous and influential. But even that is less true every day as agencies are increasingly required to stand out in an increasingly saturated market.
I strongly dispute that celebrities need talent to get noticed too. That's never been true.
Most people here probably follow and respect some influencers, but we don't like to admit that our own personal favorites are influencers. We only see them as respected authorities on certain topics while we pretend to ignore the ads and product pitches.
Matt Levine of the Money Stuff newsletter is a great example. His articles are widely shared across the internet and here on HN. He also places advertisements in his newsletters, using his reach and influence to promote products. He almost certainly engages with one of these marketing firms that finds and negotiates these influencer deals. Yet few people here would likely consider him an influencer at first brush simply because we like and respect him.
It's easy to be dismissive of influencer when you're only looking for them in distant topics that you don't personally enjoy or understand. But most of us are blind to the presence of influencers that hit close to home. Nobody likes to think that they're engaged with influencers or capable of being influenced. It's viewed as a negative trait, so we only project it on others and make up excuses as to why our influencers aren't actually influencers.
Count me out. I do not follow a single person. When I need info I search.
So, no. Matt Levine is not an influencer.
I'm sure if you really probe influencers, most of them would rather be engaged in creative pursuits. But those don't pay anything, so they have to go to where the dollars are if they want things like a house and food.
Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging for the ego, and curating your world for Instagram or TikTok likes is choosing to live in a simulacra.
No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me ~ just Hacker News. Upvote me here so I know you agree and we can influence others not to be influencers.
It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.
That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.
I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.
A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.
I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.
The 24 hour news cycle has been a thing since at least 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN#Gulf_War which incidentally are some of my first memories.
In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.
At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.
In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.
What social trends will influence your decision? Will the future be better (correction) or even worse (exacerbation)?
This seems like a generic complaint that's not specific to this particular thread's article. This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
And then there's this:
>I for one don't want to be an influencer.
But you're the CEO of:
>Gastrograph AI is an artificial intelligence platform [...] to predict consumer preference of food and beverage products.
>We helps food and beverage companies [...] optimize existing brands.
With your business background, you're actually one of the folks that can add substantive commentary to this. You want to help brands reach consumers. So do internet celebrities.
I found the articles thesis more general, that many more individuals want to become paid influencers, and the lower acceptance rate of middleman agencies as proof that the supply of want-to-be influencers has increased.
>You want to help brands reach consumers.
I am the CEO of AFS, but my company works on flavor profile development of new and existing products - deep R&D of flavor, aroma, and texture optimization. This is far upstream of marketing and branding which we are uninvolved with.
It's expected that the manager will begin to daydream about golfing during the bullet point slides, so the info there isn't as important :)
To me people like MHKBD seem reviewer more than an influencers , but if you remove people like him basically all you are left is girls showing their goods on instagram hoping to get picked up by some MLM beauty company.
It's not really chasing fame as such, since fame is the default on the web now. The barrier to entry of being 'known' is so low now, that the oldskool notion of fame doesn't apply anymore. Hence Everyone in the title. Buy the latest iPhone, setup a few accounts and then you can start selling stuff really easily. You're also selling your personality too though, not just some product. The best influencers have insane charisma.
They’re people with no obvious skills, talent or work ethic attempting to get stuff for free.
Youtube recommendation algorithm is so good at rewarding continuous creators. The difficulty is that the effort in making videos is surprisingly high and scaling is hard.
It's the same thing with celebrities a lot of normies look up to. They think these celebs are nicer or better people than ordinary people, when in fact there is nothing.
One of the best parts of covid for me was how all these celebrities faded out and disappeared from view for a while. Thank you!
More seriously, it seems to be an indicator of people being desperate enough to try anything to make a few bucks.
Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
Previously you had to be really lucky to bump into the right producers, casting agents, etc. Even if you were incredibly talented. Now you can find an audience from home.
People didn't change. Technology did.
This is only going to increase as the tools for creation get stronger and better. We'll have so much more art. Some of it will be great, and a lot more diverse interests (the long tail) will be catered to.
TikTok is a stepping stone.
Less Disney, more indie.
That seems to be a dramatic over-generalization.
> Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
If it is so democratizing then why are all these people trying to become shills for the same sets of products from the same set of companies?
The only thing that seems to be democratized is that now corporations are being more inclusive about the types of people that they will let advertise their products for them.
That hardly seems like a win for anyone
Do they really?