Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

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The article is about a marketing agency that represents people with significant social media followings.

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.

> Instead, the "influencer" label has become synonymous with "fake person I don't like who shills products for money"

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.

> Marques Brownlee is… a reviewer, who also makes money by doing sponsored spots.

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.

The distaste for the term 'influencer' arises because the job description is basically 'gain a social media following and then influence that following to buy products, adopt political views, or do other things that your actual clients want you to do.'

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.

Well yes, he is an ‘influencer’, but the term ‘tech reviewer’ is more useful. Most people wouldn’t call Roger Ebert an influencer, even though he also had influence over people’s buying power, but it would be more useful to call him a movie critic imo.

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.

Agreed. The problem is the word 'influencer', it also connotes that their followers and mindless drones that need influencing, because they can't think for themselves.

Let's just go back to calling them celebrities, or wannabe celebrities.

People going for fame as the goal, seldom get it. Unless they go radical and shoot John Lennon, just for getting some fame. (so lets never speak the name of that person)

I half agree, people with no talent that seek fame, rarely get it - yet some do. But I can't imagine there's many famous people that didn't actively seek fame.

Seeking fame is normal, but fame as the goal was probably not the main goal for most celebs. A good actor wants to make good movies. If he is just in for the fame, he likely never can put the effort behind it, if he does not love acting in the first place.

There is a more modern demarcation between people who are discussing ideas and those trying to push products on you. Joe Rogan, on the other hand, discusses ideas but also makes fairly clear when he's trying to sell you a product to make him money. Would we regard scientists and philosophers as influencers?

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.

Re #3, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking your worldview is the only right one. There's a fairly well-known historical case, this guy named Lewis Strauss, a major early US Cold War figure who pushed the hydrogen bomb and famously claimed nuclear power would be 'too cheap to meter'.

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.

In what way is Matt Levine an influencer? He’s a salaried columnist for a news organization. Newspapers having adverts doesn’t suddenly make every journalist an influencer

> In what way is Matt Levine an influencer?

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.

But he isn’t paid to influence people to do anything. He’s paid to bring in eyeballs . If he’s an influencer, then anyone working in an ad-supported business is an influencer. In which case of what use is the term? Ok great, anyone supported by ads is “influencing”. What now?

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