An influencer is someone with a strong social media presence, who has a large number of real human followers and the ability to "influence" the purchasing decisions of those followers.
If Linus from Linus Tech Tips says not to buy the latest AMD Radeon X921gtstx, a large number of people won't buy it. That's an influencer.
My understanding is that the metrics used to calculate ROI differ from client to client. It's more an art (or scam) than a science, with a ton of grey area. Whatever metric the client's boss is really into at the moment can be marketed hard and inflated using unverifiable data if needed. A lot of people are incentivised to tell the story that influencers provide value to brands. I believe that this is less and less true every day.
My wife and I are considered local "influencers" in our city by virtue of a local lifestyle blog we run and our social media presence. We're part of a local bloggers group, we get invited to tons of exclusive social events, we attend branded events, brands reach out to us directly for help with marketing. People and companies we interact with tend to assume we're making great money doing this. Brands tell us the dollar value of the event they're inviting us to as a way of apologizing for not paying us for it, and our followers sometimes seem to expect we're owned by a major brand or at least under contract.
In reality, in the three years we've been doing this we've made a grand total of $38.50 in cash. Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks. We've tried to collect cash for obvious advertisements we're asked to make, and nothing shuts a brand up faster than asking for payment. The reason for that, I'm speculating, is that when we ask to be paid, there are a dozen more "influencers" in the area willing to do it for a free sample of the product.
We've since pretty much determined that we're doing this for fun and for the local influence/access and perks we get, and not for cash. We started as a hobby without the intent to make money, so it's not like we're losing anything. As an added benefit to this approach, we can afford to be super picky and only advertise the brands we actually enjoy using and the places we actually enjoy visiting. If a place/brand we hate asks us to promote them, well... we take cash or card. And 99% of the time, that's the end of the conversation.
Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money.
Buy a few thousand followers from a click farm and see if the responses start to change. That’s honestly the best way to establish yourself if you’re serious; everyone is defrauding everyone and nobody cares because they’re all getting rich.
I've thought about it. It's a risk/reward thing, though. I like doing this, and I'd hate to be exposed as a fraud because then my passion project comes crashing down and what do I have left?
I guess that's the downside to trying to make money from a hobby. Either it stays a hobby that you don't make money from, or it becomes a second job and stops being a hobby.
Aren't fake followers easy to uncover? Pretty sure there are analysis tools that look at follower engagement, growth patterns, etc. to determine legitimacy. You risk blowing your reputation as soon as anyone does a modicum of due diligence. Seems better to just grow organically.
It's easy to deny. If it was a clear bad mark against an account to have fake followers, anyone could buy fake followers to discredit their competition.
It seems the trend is to dismiss these discoveries by saying it was somebody trying to push negative reputation on their brand or get back at them. How do you go about directly proving the individual bought clicks and not just inferring based on the patterns of their followers?
So I think the circle is you buy followers to look popular, and fake real people into following you. Then you delete the fake followers and then have real followers to sell.
Yup; but like anything, you gotta fake it till you make it. Fake followers aren’t considered so much of a black mark in the industry but a sign you haven’t quite made it big yet, but you’re hustling.
Won’t this really hurt for anyone who looks beyond just follower count? The ratio of your followers with your engagement (likes, comments, shares) will be pretty bad.
For those that look at that, they’ll be more turned off than a smaller following count but good engagement ratio.
It can, but you can also find some that sell the accounts themselves, allowing you to falsify a network. Think taking accounts and re-purposing them from being a modern, pop-culture following network to one that is tech-oriented, or more obscure. If you're planning on inserting yourself in this method, you really need to be in control of it all yourself. Follow the major people in your industry, with added randomness to remove following some, while adding randomness to extend the network further.
Keeping the network healthy is one of the more interesting topics. Simulating a real network is the biggest thing. It's very easy to embed yourself, unless it is that closed of a network.
It’s all about the engagement rate so buying followers doesn’t really help. Platforms will usually cutoff anyone with low engagement for their followers count.
Do this and risk getting buried deep in Instagram trending and popular accounts. A quick rule of thumb is say you have 1M users but you are only getting likes in few hundreds per post than that means you bought most of your users from a click farm. Marketers have evolved as well.
Do you have Ad Sense installed on your blog? Seems like you should have made much more than that from your own views independent of what "Brands" are paying you.
Or have you promoted any Amazon products with an affiliate link?
I guess I should have clarified, that $38 is how much brands have paid us directly. Advertising income is a separate line item, although Internet advertising pays just as well as you would expect it to. Most months we're lucky just to cover hosting and expenses.
Another thing to consider is that sponsored/branded posts don't get as many clicks as you might think. Brands want social media presence and they want links to their site, not yours. Going through the funnel of "clicking from Facebook to my site, then clicking from my site to the brand's site" is the same funnel as any other web interaction. 10% CTR from Facebook, the same or less inside the article. And Instagram is worse, since there are no links allowed in an Insta post.
>Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money.
Shilling for money is not much better... On my social profiles and chatrooms, I evaluate products solely for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, rather than for financial gain.
The idea here is that we should all be receiving value because we are finding the best products for our needs, not because some company is paying us to shill.
First step is to just start blogging/vlogging. Lots of people try to just do social media and personally I think it's harder that way. Do social media but link it all back to your blog/vlog. Make sure Google can find your content (which is hard when you're pure FB/Insta).
Do that for a while. A few months at least, with a few dozen quality posts. Also look in your area for a local bloggers group. One blogger doesn't have a lot of power, but the groups tend to get a group invite to big social/branded events.
You're probably not going to get anywhere unless you pay Facebook. $1/day is enough to get them to show your page to a wider audience. FB ads can work on Instagram too if you pick the right settings.
What we do most of the time is go out to a local restaurant, somewhere we were planning on going anywhere, but write an article about it afterwards. Shop local stores, and write about them. Look for upcoming events and write about them. Share all your posts on social media. Tag businesses in them. This is all stuff we would be doing anyway, the only difference is when we get home we write about it on our blog. That makes it an easy habit to keep up.
After a few months and a few dozen quality posts, start making sure people know who you are. If you want to talk to a business owner, email them directly, introduce yourself, see if you can get an interview. Now they know who you are. Keep doing that. Keep attending blogger events around you. Congratulations, you're now reaping the social status that you're looking for.
This all works best if you have no significant competition. If there are other high profile blogs doing exactly what you're doing, you're going to need a niche. And just like in startups, don't be afraid to pivot or re-launch a few times. We're in the middle of a small pivot right now, we grew a big audience over the years and now we're going to try to flex some muscle to see if our audience can pitch in and help with community projects.
Natural growth is slow. Keep plugging away, and keep paying Zuckerberg his pound of flesh, and you'll get there. But the day it stops being fun without any additional cash in your pocket, that's the day you might want to rethink it.
Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time to write an in depth answer.
Any tips on how to blog? Or be better at it?
I'm always doing things with my gf but never think to write about it, or think that id have some unique perspective or opinion to offer. How do I find my voice? How do I get better at writing? Before I even start? Meaning I know the common wisdom of just do it and you'll get better but I have this anxiety of even starting at all because of being seen as less than, or try-hard, or w/e. The idea of being watched as I perform scares me, the thought of failing publically. Maybe its a certain type of bravery that I lack? Idk
Any advice appreciated. In terms of getting better at writing, and handling the anxiety of critique and etc.
Like you said the easiest way is just do it. "Real artists ship" and all that stuff. The good news is, absolutely no one will read your blog at first. You could have a live blog on the Internet for years and have no one actually read it. People just don't visit websites anymore.
One thing you can do, open up Word and write there. Pictures and everything. Just practice, offline, where no one can see it. See if it sounds good. Write stuff you want to read, and read other blogs to see how they do it. As for the critique, unless they're correcting factual inaccuracies that you should fix, I just ignore it all. Haters gonna hate, and you should be glad someone's paying enough attention to you to have an opinion on your writing. More realistically, the people who don't like what you're doing will just not read your stuff. Negative criticism I've found to be pretty rare unless you're talking politics.
And if your target audience is under 40, you're in luck: their attention span is almost nonexistent. You can get away with a good picture and 200 words and that can be your entire article. You don't need to write SAT essays for every post because no one's gonna read all of that. Save your words for "evergreen" content where people will be reading it for months/years in the future.
Oh, and read blogs about blogging so you get to know and understand terms like SEO and evergreen and stuff. There's a whole culture behind crafting a post.
> Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money.
But you're still a shill either way. Maybe I'm just old but when I was growing up being a sellout was a pejorative. Now it's considered a virtue. I frankly don't get it.
Well said. There was something I inherently disliked about the whole influencer idea. By labeling it a sellout I see exactly what it was. (Sellout actually implies they had something cool to begin with like a band, unlike influencers).
If one substitutes "write about things that interest me" for "shill," I don't have any problem with it. But I read shill as if you give me stuff/pay me, I'll write nice things about them.
Personally, I sometimes accept review copies of things/books/etc. But, if I don't like them, that's what I'll write.
Eventually the companies will ask those who reliably write positive things.
And when you have nothing, but followers, and all you want is followers, you don't really want to say negative things anyway.
So, it's a social game, of how to climb the ladder made of nothing, by latching on to those who are somehow higher up all the way up to the sky. This is the Kim Kardashian model.
Fortunately, it's not how I make money and I don't really care if a company sends me stuff or pays my expenses to an event or not. And at least some companies, especially if they believe they have a genuinely good product, are willing to roll the dice with people who have a genuine following and are frequently critical but fair.
Yes. But positive isn't necessarily credible. A positive review from the wrong source can be bad news from some brands / products.
But again, this could be why some many brands pay so little most of the time. They're just tossing shit at the wall, but in this case kinda hoping not too much actually sticks.
Exactly. Positive is at best publication bias, or self-censorship, or whatever you want to call it, but usually it's pretty simply just fake.
People know it, but that doesn't matter, what matters is that people like those who live the high-life. Crystal clear ocean lapping the painfully white sand beach, the sky so blue, even its reflection seems to burn out as it shimmers on the endless cerulean horizon, all there for those who "have it". And the next post is a seemingly boring street, just shops, and our hero, somewhere in Europe, and maybe a messy hair day photo thrown in, our hero rests, somewhere in a 5 star hotel, a scantly clad young female caught an impromptu point in time, yet somehow critically perfectly advantageous for her, all of it - of course - done effortlessly. The next post is just a boring "shopping" pic again. Maybe a bag, a shoe, a dress from Prada, Gucci, Dior, but the 1000-3000 USD ones, of course.
That's because nowadays we judge people by the size of their bank account. We equate people's value to economic value, somehow what you do hasn't any value if you can't create wealth from it.
We even talk about the "net worth" of someone, like if their money what "what they're worth".
Yeah, I'm honestly perplexed as to why anyone would follow any of these people. I'm on the various social platforms to varying extents. I use Facebook but primarily interact with friends an family. Ditto with Instagram, but I also follow some people I don't know; a few great photographers, seph lawless (photographs urban decay), the folks with the dog and cat they take camping, etc. No part of me is interested in following someone who is a celebrity for celebrity's sake, let alone a person who is ONLY a celebrity because they're attempting to monetize their following. I don't mean that would explicitly turn me off (although it probably would), I mean, I don't see the impetus to follow in the first place. What value or enjoyment would I get from content that is without value?
No, it's not. There are surely lots of "kids", which I'm guessing includes teenagers, but there's also a high percentage of people aged 20-40 or even more who follow those "influencers" much the same way. People don't really grow up from being naive, susceptible to social fashions, etc.
It is, you aren't right here. 16 year olds with a smartphone and IG account make up a big spare of those likes/shares/whatever... The other big party is bots/fake accounts/you get the idea..
And i'm generous here, even 11year olds have the ability to move trends nowadays, i can't give numbers, only anectodal reference, but i assume that's what OP meant.
I'm not right here? Where is that? Why do you restrict this conversation to one imagined location as if the same thing wasn't happening in multiple countries simultaneously?
I am right here in Poland and I tell you, the things you show, and the things described in the article and in the first comment in this thread, they are all consumed en masse by young and mid-age adults (especially women). Lifestyle, sports, fashion, diet, craft, yoga, coaching, ikebana, it's all on Insta and Facebook and other platforms and when you see who's commenting, it's not JUST kids. And there's way more people 20+ than the kids. I never said kids do not have influence (sic) of that kind, they do. But when someone says "if you see something odd or stupid, it's the kids", it's just completely wrong. Kids have serious purchasing and decision making power now, but still it's just a fraction.
Non-teen usage might be high, but teen usage is __much__ higher, and there are more teens. You just don't see them. Where as under-employed adults will naturally leave the house; because then can.
True. But following is not engagement. If you average X likes per hour on say IG and your teen doppelganger also is X p/h but they're on IG 5 or 6 times as much as you. Well, I think you can see the difference.
The number of 20 - 40 y/o that have the same amount of free time (to FO on the internet) is minimal. If you're post-college and have a job you have a fraction of the internet time of a college or high school kid.
I'm not disputing the existence of such 20 - 40 y/o, just that their percentage of YT or IG usage is small compared to real kids.
> "Yeah, I'm honestly perplexed as to why anyone would follow any of these people."
My gut feeling is, the higher the number of followers, the higher the percentage of those followers are bots.
Perhaps guilt prevents many of the influencers from charging "full price"? I also presume any contracts with big brands - however difficult they might be to enforce - clauses that attempt to mitigate such fraud.
The internet...the news is fake...the people are fake...fake is the only thing that's real.
Eh. Everyone has a job, and everyone has an opinion. The difference between an honest "influencer" and you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like is that the influencer is getting paid for their honest opinion while you're doing it for free. I don't see that as a bad thing personally.
As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company. It's literally the same thing. Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
>The difference between an honest "influencer" and you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like is that the influencer is getting paid for their honest opinion while you're doing it for free.
You're describing a reviewer, brainiac.
>you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like
The only difference between unsolicited, antisocially consumerist behavior and what you do is that you're pay to play. Sure, this is factual.
>As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company.
Imagine the frailty of a life propped up by shit like transparent tu quoques and $38 in revenue plus like sephora samples and mushroom brand watches with busted dials. Imagine the intense shame and suicidal ideation over the worthlessness of such a life
>Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Google's game is to be large enough that this process can almost be tolerable, while remaining bureaucratically impersonal yet targeted to the ad recipient's consumer profile. It's also eminently avoidable.
Your game is to get access to "exclusive social events" in Area City at the expense of anyone who might've followed you thinking you were an actual person, while failing to get compensated more meaningfully because you just ain't that pretty.
>Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
Sellouts are people without professional integrity. That's what the term means.
I'd only promote something I truly liked or "believed" in, and even then it's risky - the establishment, recipe or product can change on a dime, and then you're image and promotion is still tied to it.
Thank you for the candid insights. It's a world unknown to me.
> Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks.
Elsewhere you call your blog a passion project, but here you're calling it work -- which suggests your readers / influencees are the product, so to speak.
I'm sure it's much more nuanced than this, especially as it's sounding like you're not in it primarily for the income -- could you dive into the motivation for starting, and maintaining, your lifestyle blog?
I'm calling it work there because brands/companies do approach me to advertise for them, and I would love to get paid for it. That is work in my opinion. The fact that I don't get paid for it puts it back to a hobby level, and the fact that I do it anyway (but only for brands/companies I really enjoy doing business with) puts it as a passion project. If I buy some really good cheddar from my local artisan cheese shop, I'm going to put it on my Instagram whether they pay me to do it or not, because it's really good cheese and people need to know about it.
We originally started doing it because our city didn't have any good digital media outlets, so we knew there were all these cool events and local businesses all around us but no one was talking about them. So as long as we were already doing the research to figure out what was happening in our city, we figured we might as well share that. We started it with no intention on making money, the thought never crossed our minds until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them. After that we started asking for payment from anyone who demanded we talk about them, but even though we rarely successfully get paid, we still talk about the events and businesses we want to talk about. We just ignore demands that don't come with perks, invites, discounts, or cash attached.
I guess the motivation is kind of selfish. We live in a place that is commonly understood to be very old and conservative in demographic but we know there are a lot of cool younger people around too. We want to 1) show that our area is cool and we have young and cool people, and 2) attract more young and cool people to the area. It'd be nice to get paid, but there are these other benefits that keep us going too.
I would guess I'm mentally in the same place as you describe yourself in the first paragraph -- and reading other comments it sounds like many HNers would self-assess similarly.
It's that (probably startling) transition to 'until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them' that most of us have never experienced, and I can see how that would massively skew the expectations on both sides, especially as popularity / traffic increases and demands get more frequent, emphatic, dubious, etc.
That's actually somewhat heartening. If the majority of "influencers" (what a ridiculous word) are like you, doing it for fun and honest expression of opinion, it means we can trust popular opinions more.
There are influencers making 6+ figures. They are mostly Youtuber's, IG accounts with 500K to 1M+ subscribers. 1 million views can garner near ~$10,000 in ad revenue (depending on your partner level) and they also can monetize further with sponsorships/patreon pages. There is money but you have to build a very large audience on Twitter, IG or Youtube.
My wife is a CPA, and now by reflex when I see a story like this I think of the tax consequences. Do you have to count products and event tickets as income and declare it?
Yes, anything that's given as a promotional item is considered income, which is one reason branded events/swag often include the equivalent dollar value.
There is a line you can draw though. If you're making deductions on travel expenses or cost of attending an event, you should probably declare any swag you get at that event as income. If you're not writing off the cost of the event, you probably don't need to worry about it unless you're also getting cash or something extraordinarily valuable.
Same thing with anything you're given for free in exchange for writing a review of it. If a company sends you something and you write a review about it, regardless of if money changes hands, the value of that item is considered taxable income. But if it just shows up at your door unsolicited and you ignore it and the company never gets their review, then it's just an unsolicited gift. And you should probably send it back.
We have a whole file cabinet drawer dedicated to keeping track of "free" stuff we get so we can declare it on our taxes.
> 96.5 percent of YouTubers don’t make enough annual ad revenue to reach the U.S. federal poverty line... $12,140.
I'm surprised it's that low, honestly. May be a question of definition of a "youtuber", which I didn't see in the article. There's a long tail of "influencers" who actually make a living at it—and some a very good living—but I bet it's way less than 3.5%.
This. Many can soi-disant influencers attract sponsorship dollars, but some research we did in indexing Amazon links in product reviews is that the real earnings are in commissions resulting from consumer purchases.
Right, I'm not even talking about other revenue streams. In other words, what % of content creators on YouTube earn more than $10k/yr, even including other revenue sources? I bet it's less than 3.5%.
Yep. Although I would say the numbers (in % succeeding and in the absolute $ of their success) is much higher outside the walled garden of YouTube. You've got strong affiliate marketing programs, you've got retargeting ad companies, you have "sponsored editorial" copywriting, you have VSCO, etc. Overall the world of "advertising" is probably better than it's ever been. Every time I see a traditional 30 second TV spot these days (rare) it's like a flashback to the early 90s.
One also has to take into account other revenue streams that Youtubers will often have. Most channels nowadays will start up a Patreon account once they get a core following, and even a monthly dollar per Patron is more than all the adclicks that viewer would give. Merchandising is also big (1 T-shirt > 1000s of views), and bigger channels (100k+) can get a decent amount of revenue through sponsorship where they give in-video advertisements (like what Squarespace and a lot of VPNs do).
After the instability of Youtube's ad platform this past year ("Adpocalypse 1, 2 and 3"), many on the platform have given up on the idea of depending solely on adclicks as it's just too risky to leave your future to the discretion of a black box algorithm.
Right, I'm not even talking about other revenue streams. In other words, what % of content creators on YouTube earn more than $10k/yr, even including other revenue sources? I bet it's less than 3.5%.
I see youtubers with 6 figure followers list each of 'this months patreon supporters' by name every month, they better be donating 3 figure amounts for that to be more than beer money...
Depends how you draw the graph. I'm imagining a distribution with income on the x-axis, so people like PewDiePie would be far right and part of the long tail.
Exactly. There are 1.5 billion monthly active users. So maybe it's just content creators, which is estimated at 50 million[1]. That may be a lifetime number, so let's assume 10%, or 5M in FY17. If this is what it means to be a "youtuber", than the 96.5% stat quoted in the article means 175,000 people are making more than $12,140 in ad revenue alone, or total payouts north of $2B.
That just seems crazy high. Maybe my sense of scale is off, but I suspect their definition of youtuber/influencer is some subset of that: people with a certain number of subs or something.
We also have to factor in the following, which makes the economics of being a content creator even worse:
1) If you made $12,140 last year ($1,000 a month post tax for sake of whole numbers), how much of that went to recouping production costs? Include food, travel, electricity, amortized hardware cost for cameras and computers, etc.
2) Of the money that's leftover, how many hours went into creating this content? Divide those two numbers (e.g $800 per month / 40 hours per month = $20 effective hourly rate).
If $1,000 a month pays the bills and allows you to live a non-corporate, stress free life, then being one of the 175,000 people making this type of money sounds like a great deal. But I have a feeling the economics of this situation aren't sustainable.
Also check out EEVBlog. He makes about 40k a year on youtube with frequent, family-friendly, profitable-niche content. Decent, but not full-time family supporting money.
For a system with as insanely long of a tail as YouTube, statistics like this aren't helpful or illuminating.
I have a couple of videos of my kids on YouTube to share with friends. I am technically a "YouTuber", but obviously I make zilch. For every person trying to use YouTube to actually be a video producer, there are hundreds of people who just use it as a video hosting site.
Ah ha! I think that's it. The denominator could be "people in the YouTube Partner Program", which means 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. So this may be saying that only 3.5% of YouTube Partners make $12k+ from that program.
Is that what the article means? I wasn't able to find anything that explicitly states that but maybe I overlooked it. Would make the conclusions much more cogent.
I can say from experience that an Instagrammer with 100k followers is unlikely to get anything near $2700 to post a photo. This was probably true several years ago, but these days the number is closer to $1000.
Basically the same way SV companies come up with their valuation. You ask someone to pay $1000, and if they say yes... that's the price. Now every company who asks the price is told $1000.
The ROI used to be that good, and then the market became crowded and the consumers became more savvy.
Now the ROI is worse, the advertisers start lowballing, and the content creators keep accepting (because rent is due and nobody else is offering any higher, sooooo)
This is spot on. It's just like any other marketing tactic - it works well until everyone else starts doing it.
As for the pricing of posts, the lowballing is getting more and more dramatic, because there are many more "influencers" now. The only brands really shelling out are large corporations with large budgets looking for something very specific. Smaller brands can just reach out to a bunch of influencers offering only product in exchange for a post, and someone will say yes.
It's the agencies sitting in between brands and influencers who are that good. They're incredible salespeople, and since they get paid a percentage of the spend, it's in their interest to have as many influencers who can post, so they can sell as many posts as a brand can be talked into.
I wonder whether the advertising reach of 'influencers' is due to the lack (or absence) of enforcement of advertising regulations. I don't know about the rest of the world but in the UK many 'influencers' certainly seem to skirt the line and the Advertising Standards Authority is increasingly paying attention [0].
As far as anecdata goes, I know someone who makes around $800K a year even without some crazy-impressive a follower count on Youtube (around 600K). This is not factoring in free trips, etc.
As with any commercial exchange, there's a lot of variables other than size of audience, including the composition of the audience, how good the channel is at moving a specific product, whether there are side-opportunities related to the main influencer role, how good of a B2B salesperson one is, etc.
This particular person works as hard as anyone in a startup, around 100 hours a week, and treats it as such. She also happens to be pretty good looking which helps with the videos.
It used to piss me off a little bit, given how hard I have had to work to get to this stage, but one can think of it as very similar to modeling with probably a similar income distribution too (and I seem to intrinsically understand that top tier models make a lot and am ok with it).
My question is -- of all the people making a lot in their 20s and early 30s, how many are going to be making the same amount in their 40s and 50s? I suppose by then their peer generation will also be the same age so it's hard for me to project. I also expect it to be much more of a mature market at that time.
You're right that there are lots of variables. I'd imagine the ad revenue of Pewdiepie is far eclipsed by the sales of his merchandise.
You're also right that looking good goes a long way on Instagram. People want to see good looking models. In the world of blogging, that's far less important. All the people in our bloggers group are decidedly average looking individuals, and their appearance doesn't change how much money they're able to make. Like you said, the main differentiation there is the ruthless business spirit. You have to play dirty to make it in the big leagues.
I hope that we're not still following influencers when we're in our 40s and 50s. Kids will, of course, but they're not going to be influenced by 40 and 50 year old people on Snapchat. Save your income while you're young, it's not gonna last.
Young people seek new ideas and trends more for self discovery, to impress friends and potential partners, create new identities, etc. Once we're settled and established we don't seek new things as much and most things appear more mundane.
I'll always look for aggregate opinions on reddit, tripadvisor, amazon, etc., but I doubt I'll ever find a single other person so much like myself to trust them for everything.
> It used to piss me off a little bit, given how hard I have had to work to get to this stage
There are only so many hours in the week, only so many years in a career, and thus there's a limit to how much more one person can work than another. And yet there are people making 2x, 10x, 100x, 1000x, …, 1 billion times what others are. Compensation is largely unrelated to the amount of sweat, time, and effort we put in. Rather, it's a result of the depth of the value we provide and the number of people we provide that value to. Outcome > input.
I believe that understanding this makes us less jealous of people who seem "undeserving," and also helps us make better decisions in our own careers.
Another way to reduce envy is to realize that, ultimately, it's luck all the way down. There are plenty of talented, hard-working people who will never see even moderate success, simply because they were born in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, to the wrong parents, etc. It seems that cursing the people above us is a natural tendency for humans, but we'd do well to spend more energy thinking of those behind us, as well as appreciating our own circumstances.
Unless all the scholarly work on “how is value determined” attempting to define this is wrong. Did we just solve it on a web forum by accident?
Short answer is there isn’t an answer that’s reliable except “networking and feelings” making it seem arbitrary
Economics and Wall Street are not free markets for ideas. They’re on rails financial walled gardens. One must recite the theories and have the right keys (money) to gain entry
Billionaires are the outliers among wealthy people. Its hard to connect what they did or are doing, to anything that most people will ever know or experience.
> So clearly family connections help. But that doesn't appear to be most of the picture.
That's a very simple view of the OP's statement - notice that OP did not say inherited wealth, but instead 'family connections'.
For example, if you received personalized advice to invest a lot of money in a business that later became wildly successful, are you a self-made individual? There are even more subtle examples of how relationships can lead to wealth.
If someone tells you to buy something and you risk your money you are responsible and can claim you are self-made. There is a lot of free advice if you followed all of it you would probably be broke or dead.
It's as hard to know whether the person is giving good investment advice as it is to give good investment advice yourself, though. So generally, it's not very helpful.
...doesn't this just reinforce that having family connections matter more? Are you more likely to follow the advice of your family or some stranger? If your family connections have insight and/or inside knowledge of markets, aren't you more likely to accidentally take good advice than the average joe? You're still not immune to bad advice, but you have a higher percentage chance of having higher quality information to act on.
Everyone has certain advantages, one of the keys to creating value is to leverage those.
The public & press love rags to riches stories, so even someone without any of the traditional 'advantages' can leverage that for publicity, fundraising, etc. And many independently wealthy business-people have.
And yet IBM went to Digital Research first, and DR couldn't close the deal. Of course, Gates was already successful when IBM came by, and there's no reason to believe he wouldn't have been greatly successful with or without IBM.
Lots of people can get 25,000 and anyone can get that amount if there was a billion dollars payoff at the end.
Millions of people started a business with at least 25,000 and there are only a few billionares, most lost it all but some made a living and some got richs.
> Or was it the fact that his father could cut a $25,000 check on a whim?
There are millions of Americans like that, and only one Bill Gates.
There's no evidence, either, that his father bought the success of Microsoft. The early success of Microsoft did not require anything more than rather trivial amounts of cash.
Millions can do it, rendering the notion that that was what enabled Bill Gates to be a zillionaire absurd.
And then there are all those millions buying houses for over $500,000, and $30,000+ cars, who could invest $25,000 in a business instead. But that's why they aren't Bill Gates - they made different choices.
There are vastly more people with access to $25k in cash than there are people who end up making an impact as large as Gates had. It still takes an enormous amount of work and savvy to pull off what he did.
If you read http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post closely you'll understand the key business insight about the value of platforms that underlay a lot of Microsoft's success. And further see how Microsoft's continued success required a series of good decisions that capitalized on the famous lucky break.
There were thousands of other people involved in the industry at the time. Many of them understood the future value of personal computer operating systems.
Sure, Microsoft was on a nice trajectory, and there is no doubt that Bill Gates is smart.
However, that $25K check is the difference between Microsoft being a solidly growing company up against someone else that IBM anointed vs Microsoft is the anointed one.
$25K was about 5x the price of a car at the time. That makes it about $150K in modern dollars.
How many people can cut a $150K cash check because their kid says it's a good idea? Even most "millionaires" can't cut a check for cash at that level.
Starting a restaurant easily can cost $25K in those days. Yet people did it all the time.
Don't overlook that Microsoft was IBM's second choice. Their first was Digital Research.
And lastly, I haven't been able to find any evidence that Gates Sr. funded Microsoft with at $25,000 check. Citation needed! Certainly there's no mention in the book "Hard Drive", and my recollection is that he started MS with $5,000.
There's nothing Bill Gates did at the time that a very, very large number of people could have done, if they'd only thought of it and had been willing to risk it. I knew many computer people at the time, and they dismissed PCs as toys and saw no future in them. Including many who had money to invest in such a startup.
His father was a partner in a top Seattle law firm and his mother is a regent of the University of Washington and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell. You think that didn't give him any business advantages other talented programmers didn't have?
"Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft.
Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."
> Another way to reduce envy is to realize that, ultimately, it's luck all the way down. There are plenty of talented, hard-working people who will never see even moderate success
Realizing that it's luck all the way down only reinforces my opinion that the wealthy pay a pittance in taxes relative to the value they get from our society. Those talented, hard-working people who will never see success deserve affordable healthcare, a functioning safety net that allows them to overcome difficulty and take chances, equal education opportunities for their kids, and a hope for a retirement that doesn't require giving up everything or overburdening their families.
Unhappiness that we (in the US at least) are not on that path is more than envy.
Considering these attributes are relative by definition, it's a fact that half of the population is harder working than average, and half of the population is more talented than average. But when you add in the context that there are numerous ways to be hard working or talented (e.g. someone may suck at reading, but be an extremely disciplined bodybuilder), it becomes pretty much a guarantee that the majority of people are talented or hard-working at something.
This is always my argument for why wealthy people should pay quite a bit of taxes.
No matter what system we have, SOME people are going to be advantaged by it. We can't always know with certainty beforehand who are the people who are going to be advantaged, but we have a pretty good idea that the people who make a shit ton of money were advantaged in some way. So lets have them pay more than what would seem to be their share, since things were clearly set up with advantages for them.
> Rather, it's a result of the depth of the value we provide
The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth and therefore so far from the everyday or philosophical notions of value that it hardly deserves the term. Example: finding a reason to deny someone's health insurance claim is "valuable", feeding a starving poor person is not.
I’m not sure I understand your comment. Do you mean to say that you think the market’s notion of value DOES align with the importance acting individuals place on a good / importance worth or usefulness of something?
How could this possibly be true when the majority of wealth is held by a minority of individuals?
It’s contradictory. A majority of people are incapable of expressing their values through wealth dispersion. If you assume that wealth dispersion is an expression of value, then by definition wealthy individuals are disproportionately able to express value.
How could this possibly be true when the majority of wealth is held by a minority of individuals?
You went from value to wealth too fast. And this catchy sentence is only true because some statistical institution said so. Read De Soto about dead capital : http://www.thepowerofthepoor.com/concepts/c6.php
> The developed world has devised a formal property system of titles, title registries, and inclusive property law that includes real estate used for homes or businesses. We in the West take that system for granted, probably because it is invisible to us. De Soto shows that this is in a large part why some nations are rich while others remain in poverty.
then by definition wealthy individuals are disproportionately able to express value
How do you think "everyone able to fairly able to express it's own value" would work ?
> How do you think "everyone able to fairly able to express it's own value" would work ?
I don't believe this is possible; it seemed like that might be what you were suggesting. I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make with your links and "seems to fit" comment in response to the "markets notion of value" correlating to wealth, but I also wasn't sure that I was correctly interpreting your comment.
Monsanto has made plenty of money feeding the world, including poor people. The key is to do it at scale. Even though some of their tactics and products are controversial, they have probably made the most headway in eliminating hunger as any other organization in history.
The fact that the market places near-zero value on feeding poor people rather than exactly zero is not a ringing endorsement of its priorities.
Also, I'm not at all sure the value proposition they see in being charitable in the tail of their price grading (i.e. no terminator genes) is market-driven. It could quite plausibly be driven by fear of government intervention -- or even, possibly, compassion.
>
I believe that understanding this makes us less jealous of people who seem "undeserving," and also helps us make better decisions in our own careers.
oh no, now I'm just jealous they were able to convince people of the value of their vapid bullshit.
First, there's nothing in the definition of luck that says it gets spread around equally. That would be uniformity, but luck is about randomness, which is (by definition) not uniform.
Second, when you say "sit around watching TV," I presume you're saying that hard work leads to success, and implying that hard work is not luck. I agree with the first part and disagree with the second. What makes someone a hard worker? What makes someone intelligent? Attractive? Likable? Talented? If you keep asking why, and you keep retracing a person's history back to the beginning, then the answer invariable boils down to some lucky combination of genes and environment/experience. Even your ability to improve upon the hand you were dealt in life depends entirely on… the hand you were dealt in life.
If you read my post, you'll see that I'm not denying the existence of those choices, but I'm pointing out that those choices are the inevitable result of genetic and environmental factors that nobody ever decided on.
So what? Some people are smarter than others, some are better looking, some have a bit of both. Some grow up in wealthy families and others in poor families.
You get dealt a hand, and you play with it. You can be good looking and do horrible in life. You can be not good looking and become immensely wealthy. It doesn't matter.
Yes, genetics are a stacked deck. Aside from somehow modifying genes or picking a partner with wanted traits (intelligence, good looks, etc), there isn't really much you can do about it for now is there?
I would wager you've never heard that because most people understand intuitively that good looks get you further than a good sense of humor, all else being equal.
I'd venture to say it's closer to maybe 99% of the battle for women, and maybe 95% for men.
Even Jason Fenske, of the Engineering Explained channel, is super attractive. He has a channel dedicated to the minutiae of automotive technology that is considered highly niche. Not many people care to learn about tire sipes, yet he has a 10 minute video on the subject. I bet his audience demographics skew very heavily male.
I think you’re right to expect that many “influencer” careers will be reasonably short. It’s probably similar to any celebrity, really. Some stay in the spotlight for ages, but they’re rare, I’d guess most have somewhere from ~1-10 years of true fame. It’s not just celebrities becoming less sexy as they age - fans are fickle and get bored quickly.
With that being said, influencers have proven themselves to be entrepreneurial and great marketers. If someone has built their personal brand to $800K/year in revenue, I’d love for them to help build my businesses brand. I’ll bet a lot of these people could move on to a successful and lucrative career in marketing afterwards.
>My question is -- of all the people making a lot in their 20s and early 30s, how many are going to be making the same amount in their 40s and 50s?
If they haven't figured an additional way to make money and leverage their connections and fame by their 40s and 50s maybe they don't deserve to make "the same amount" by then...
All the major "influencers" I follow, whether in tech, clothing, coffee, games, filming, music, eating, whatever diversify like crazy...
There are plenty of blogs and sites out there that expose these women for what they are really doing. High-end prostitution. Sorry but that girl is most likely just a prostitute. Sure they have some relationships with companies for branding and whatnot but the numbers never add up.
I've seen the proof and looked at the absolute made up lies that their Instagram or whatever account claims are doing besides prostitution.
Aren't us readers old enough to decide for ourselves if we want to read a heavily down voted comment? Banning seems very authoritarian and pro censorship. (Maye I would change my mind if I had actually been able to read it, but I couldn't).
> My question is -- of all the people making a lot in their 20s and early 30s, how many are going to be making the same amount in their 40s and 50s?
My answer to that is a question.
Why would these people need to make the same amount in their 40s and 50s?
If the person you know is making $800K (guessing gross), and after tax and expenses, conservatively banking $300 - $400K a year, then when they enter the 30s in 10 - 12 years, they should have about 3 to 4 million CASH, which, if invested wisely during the accumulation period should have grown to another million or so. This amount is enough to retire with a healthy lifestyle almost anywhere in the world (except maybe Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and a handful of other nutty-expensive cities.). So they don't even need to make anything in their 40s and 50s except work to stay busy "doing what they love".
This article missed discussing the real influencers: niche influencers. I follow a number of Sailing and Hiking YouTube vloggers and I know they aren't getting rich but it does allow them to keep doing what they love to do. Sailing Delos and Sailing La Vagabonde are the two power house sailing vloggers that make enough money off of Patreon, YouTube and sponsorships to keep sailing around the world and living a really great lifestyle. I know that Sailing La Vagabonde did well enough to get a good deal on a new catamaran, free clothes and bathing suits to keep them going for a long time. I would not be surprised if Sailing Delos got a good sponsorship from Amel boats to keep sailing for many many more years.
Notice how that channel hardly ever goes as in depth on major maintenance requirements as the other sailing channels do? It's all fun and adventure. Not to say that's wrong -- I enjoy watching that channel.
There are soooo many sailing channels right now (I can think of at least 40 somewhat popular ones) and the vast majority of them are filming low quality content and sticking their hands out.
Side note: If you want to gauge which channels aren't getting heavy sponsorship dollars, it's the ones that _almost always_ anchor vs tie up at the marina.
> Side note: If you want to gauge which channels aren't getting heavy sponsorship dollars, it's the ones that _almost always_ anchor vs tie up at the marina.
Can you explain this for someone who doesn't know anything about boats?
Marinas generally charge by the foot (and sometimes additionally by the hull, as in 2x for catamarans). A one month tie-up in a marina will run you several hundred to several thousand dollars depending on the above factors, the location and the season.
Anchoring is free, but then you need to come to shore in (and store) a dinghy
Basically yachting is very expensive. A Panama Canal crossing in your pleasurecraft these days will run about $2k. Those youtube channels are basically lifestyle advertising -- some of those cruisers are heavily (financially) supported.
Generally, it is free to "anchor" but you have to pay to tie up to a dock at a marina. When you anchor (drop a heavy weight on a rope to the sea bottom to keep your boat from drifting away) you have no connection to the land. You have to use a smaller boat (perhaps a dinghy) to row or motor over to the dock. Even then, you have no external electrical outlet or water hose.
If you pull your boat up to a dock in a marina, you can get electricity and water, and you can walk away to dine or shop, etc.
These are generalities. Sometimes you have to pay to anchor, and sometimes you can park at a dock for free.
Anchoring is usually much cheaper/free since you don't get any facilities, whereas staying at the marina costs $$ per night, due to electricity, WiFi, water, restrooms, showers, etc.
This thread seems like the perfect place to plug a side project.
WP Commission (https://wpcommission.com) is a WP plugin which helps influencers maximize affiliate revenue. The plugin makes sure all Amazon.com links are tagged with an affiliate tag - and we even follow, expand, and tag shortened amzn.to links as well.
Additionally, we provide a shortcode which creates a carousel displaying products that have been linked to in prior posts. We've found that showing a pretty carousel can lead to substantial revenue improvements, especially when on the home page of a blog.
WPC charges a token fee to keep the servers running, but anyone doing a few thousand in revenue should see a net profit from the service. At the end of the day, we're publishers who want to help quality content creators monetize so they can support themselves.
It's very much a power law curve. There are a few at the top making most of the money, and pretty much no one else is. It's true for fake internet points too -- there are a few top users on reddit who have most of the karma.
I think it varies by industry, and would probably be hard to see the power law curve if not accounting for this. Paul Graham found that the #1 startup for art galleries in the 90s wasn't worth a whole lot. http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
YouTuber with 30k subs, 50k on twitter. Programming content. My sponsored offers from random marketing firms are almost always $100-$250 / video. Not sure how it scales up to larger channels.
I've always wondered how accounting/taxes work for being a US-based influencer. If I'm comp'd a hotel room and meal in return for an IG feature, I assume I have to report the net dollar value of that somewhere. Doing that year 'round seems like an accounting mess, even with an accountant helping.
Instagram influencer with 30k +150/day. Can confirm that it is difficult to get paid. I do get about $5k in premium products a year. I'm also picky on what I post to not dilute the feed with ads.
I work for "free", posting beautiful photos of food, and cocktails on Instagram. In exchange I get fed, I get invited to every social event, every new restaurant opening, every special sit down, and I'm now well connected to every major player in the local food scene. When I release my new product(the reason for the last two years of work), I'll have that network to deploy it to.
Care to share your Instagram username? I don't see anything in your profile, but I am interested in the niche community/local business space, and how to drive customers to those places that I am proud to recommend.
I read this since "influencer" is roughly the business I am in. While I use number of followers on Twitter to demonstrate my reach, I do not think of social media as the primary channel for influence. Tech industry analysts, bloggers, and writers are hugely influential and derive a living wage from their work. Other than Walt Mossberg I have not heard of anyone making seven figures.
> “an influencer with 100,000 followers on Instagram can charge around £2,000 per picture (approximately $2,700), while celebrity influencers with between four million and 20 million followers can charge £5,000-£13,000 ($6,700-$17,500).”
So 2.5x the price for 40x the reach? These numbers just don't seem to make sense.
Revenue is not ROI. I personally know someone with 500k YT subscribers and his / her eyes go blank when asked about less obvious KPIs. Their #1 strategy for increasing revenue is to spit out more content.
Rat on a wheel doesn't feel like much of a biz model to me.
Omg, what a waste of time. I’m so glad almost no one is making money doing this stuff. Shill for free, shill for money, the shilling part is the common part.
I don't know about anything else, but those three quoted Instagrams are perhaps the most tedious thing I've ever seen, and they make me feel sad inside.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadIf Linus from Linus Tech Tips says not to buy the latest AMD Radeon X921gtstx, a large number of people won't buy it. That's an influencer.
In reality, in the three years we've been doing this we've made a grand total of $38.50 in cash. Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks. We've tried to collect cash for obvious advertisements we're asked to make, and nothing shuts a brand up faster than asking for payment. The reason for that, I'm speculating, is that when we ask to be paid, there are a dozen more "influencers" in the area willing to do it for a free sample of the product.
We've since pretty much determined that we're doing this for fun and for the local influence/access and perks we get, and not for cash. We started as a hobby without the intent to make money, so it's not like we're losing anything. As an added benefit to this approach, we can afford to be super picky and only advertise the brands we actually enjoy using and the places we actually enjoy visiting. If a place/brand we hate asks us to promote them, well... we take cash or card. And 99% of the time, that's the end of the conversation.
Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money.
I guess that's the downside to trying to make money from a hobby. Either it stays a hobby that you don't make money from, or it becomes a second job and stops being a hobby.
Ignore the emails.
So I think the circle is you buy followers to look popular, and fake real people into following you. Then you delete the fake followers and then have real followers to sell.
For those that look at that, they’ll be more turned off than a smaller following count but good engagement ratio.
Keeping the network healthy is one of the more interesting topics. Simulating a real network is the biggest thing. It's very easy to embed yourself, unless it is that closed of a network.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-t...
Or have you promoted any Amazon products with an affiliate link?
Another thing to consider is that sponsored/branded posts don't get as many clicks as you might think. Brands want social media presence and they want links to their site, not yours. Going through the funnel of "clicking from Facebook to my site, then clicking from my site to the brand's site" is the same funnel as any other web interaction. 10% CTR from Facebook, the same or less inside the article. And Instagram is worse, since there are no links allowed in an Insta post.
Shilling for money is not much better... On my social profiles and chatrooms, I evaluate products solely for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, rather than for financial gain.
The idea here is that we should all be receiving value because we are finding the best products for our needs, not because some company is paying us to shill.
Do that for a while. A few months at least, with a few dozen quality posts. Also look in your area for a local bloggers group. One blogger doesn't have a lot of power, but the groups tend to get a group invite to big social/branded events.
You're probably not going to get anywhere unless you pay Facebook. $1/day is enough to get them to show your page to a wider audience. FB ads can work on Instagram too if you pick the right settings.
What we do most of the time is go out to a local restaurant, somewhere we were planning on going anywhere, but write an article about it afterwards. Shop local stores, and write about them. Look for upcoming events and write about them. Share all your posts on social media. Tag businesses in them. This is all stuff we would be doing anyway, the only difference is when we get home we write about it on our blog. That makes it an easy habit to keep up.
After a few months and a few dozen quality posts, start making sure people know who you are. If you want to talk to a business owner, email them directly, introduce yourself, see if you can get an interview. Now they know who you are. Keep doing that. Keep attending blogger events around you. Congratulations, you're now reaping the social status that you're looking for.
This all works best if you have no significant competition. If there are other high profile blogs doing exactly what you're doing, you're going to need a niche. And just like in startups, don't be afraid to pivot or re-launch a few times. We're in the middle of a small pivot right now, we grew a big audience over the years and now we're going to try to flex some muscle to see if our audience can pitch in and help with community projects.
Natural growth is slow. Keep plugging away, and keep paying Zuckerberg his pound of flesh, and you'll get there. But the day it stops being fun without any additional cash in your pocket, that's the day you might want to rethink it.
Any tips on how to blog? Or be better at it?
I'm always doing things with my gf but never think to write about it, or think that id have some unique perspective or opinion to offer. How do I find my voice? How do I get better at writing? Before I even start? Meaning I know the common wisdom of just do it and you'll get better but I have this anxiety of even starting at all because of being seen as less than, or try-hard, or w/e. The idea of being watched as I perform scares me, the thought of failing publically. Maybe its a certain type of bravery that I lack? Idk
Any advice appreciated. In terms of getting better at writing, and handling the anxiety of critique and etc.
Thank you!
One thing you can do, open up Word and write there. Pictures and everything. Just practice, offline, where no one can see it. See if it sounds good. Write stuff you want to read, and read other blogs to see how they do it. As for the critique, unless they're correcting factual inaccuracies that you should fix, I just ignore it all. Haters gonna hate, and you should be glad someone's paying enough attention to you to have an opinion on your writing. More realistically, the people who don't like what you're doing will just not read your stuff. Negative criticism I've found to be pretty rare unless you're talking politics.
And if your target audience is under 40, you're in luck: their attention span is almost nonexistent. You can get away with a good picture and 200 words and that can be your entire article. You don't need to write SAT essays for every post because no one's gonna read all of that. Save your words for "evergreen" content where people will be reading it for months/years in the future.
Oh, and read blogs about blogging so you get to know and understand terms like SEO and evergreen and stuff. There's a whole culture behind crafting a post.
But you're still a shill either way. Maybe I'm just old but when I was growing up being a sellout was a pejorative. Now it's considered a virtue. I frankly don't get it.
Personally, I sometimes accept review copies of things/books/etc. But, if I don't like them, that's what I'll write.
And when you have nothing, but followers, and all you want is followers, you don't really want to say negative things anyway.
So, it's a social game, of how to climb the ladder made of nothing, by latching on to those who are somehow higher up all the way up to the sky. This is the Kim Kardashian model.
But again, this could be why some many brands pay so little most of the time. They're just tossing shit at the wall, but in this case kinda hoping not too much actually sticks.
People know it, but that doesn't matter, what matters is that people like those who live the high-life. Crystal clear ocean lapping the painfully white sand beach, the sky so blue, even its reflection seems to burn out as it shimmers on the endless cerulean horizon, all there for those who "have it". And the next post is a seemingly boring street, just shops, and our hero, somewhere in Europe, and maybe a messy hair day photo thrown in, our hero rests, somewhere in a 5 star hotel, a scantly clad young female caught an impromptu point in time, yet somehow critically perfectly advantageous for her, all of it - of course - done effortlessly. The next post is just a boring "shopping" pic again. Maybe a bag, a shoe, a dress from Prada, Gucci, Dior, but the 1000-3000 USD ones, of course.
So little said, everything implied.
We even talk about the "net worth" of someone, like if their money what "what they're worth".
It was always thus.
To me, I am worth infinite money. But I accept that to others, I am hardly worth much of anything.
Fun rule: if you're ever wondering why something odd or stupid is popular, it's probably kids.
I am right here in Poland and I tell you, the things you show, and the things described in the article and in the first comment in this thread, they are all consumed en masse by young and mid-age adults (especially women). Lifestyle, sports, fashion, diet, craft, yoga, coaching, ikebana, it's all on Insta and Facebook and other platforms and when you see who's commenting, it's not JUST kids. And there's way more people 20+ than the kids. I never said kids do not have influence (sic) of that kind, they do. But when someone says "if you see something odd or stupid, it's the kids", it's just completely wrong. Kids have serious purchasing and decision making power now, but still it's just a fraction.
My wife does the same in interior design.
There are lots of kids, true. But try looking at mommy-instagram and you'll see a whole other world.
But older people spend lots of money on non essential items.
Also have you seen how much time a stay at home Mom spends on social media? They'd give any teenager fair competition.
I'm not disputing the existence of such 20 - 40 y/o, just that their percentage of YT or IG usage is small compared to real kids.
My gut feeling is, the higher the number of followers, the higher the percentage of those followers are bots.
Perhaps guilt prevents many of the influencers from charging "full price"? I also presume any contracts with big brands - however difficult they might be to enforce - clauses that attempt to mitigate such fraud.
The internet...the news is fake...the people are fake...fake is the only thing that's real.
Eh. Everyone has a job, and everyone has an opinion. The difference between an honest "influencer" and you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like is that the influencer is getting paid for their honest opinion while you're doing it for free. I don't see that as a bad thing personally.
As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company. It's literally the same thing. Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
You're describing a reviewer, brainiac.
>you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like
The only difference between unsolicited, antisocially consumerist behavior and what you do is that you're pay to play. Sure, this is factual.
>As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company.
Imagine the frailty of a life propped up by shit like transparent tu quoques and $38 in revenue plus like sephora samples and mushroom brand watches with busted dials. Imagine the intense shame and suicidal ideation over the worthlessness of such a life
>Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Google's game is to be large enough that this process can almost be tolerable, while remaining bureaucratically impersonal yet targeted to the ad recipient's consumer profile. It's also eminently avoidable.
Your game is to get access to "exclusive social events" in Area City at the expense of anyone who might've followed you thinking you were an actual person, while failing to get compensated more meaningfully because you just ain't that pretty.
>Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
Sellouts are people without professional integrity. That's what the term means.
I'd only promote something I truly liked or "believed" in, and even then it's risky - the establishment, recipe or product can change on a dime, and then you're image and promotion is still tied to it.
> Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks.
Elsewhere you call your blog a passion project, but here you're calling it work -- which suggests your readers / influencees are the product, so to speak.
I'm sure it's much more nuanced than this, especially as it's sounding like you're not in it primarily for the income -- could you dive into the motivation for starting, and maintaining, your lifestyle blog?
We originally started doing it because our city didn't have any good digital media outlets, so we knew there were all these cool events and local businesses all around us but no one was talking about them. So as long as we were already doing the research to figure out what was happening in our city, we figured we might as well share that. We started it with no intention on making money, the thought never crossed our minds until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them. After that we started asking for payment from anyone who demanded we talk about them, but even though we rarely successfully get paid, we still talk about the events and businesses we want to talk about. We just ignore demands that don't come with perks, invites, discounts, or cash attached.
I guess the motivation is kind of selfish. We live in a place that is commonly understood to be very old and conservative in demographic but we know there are a lot of cool younger people around too. We want to 1) show that our area is cool and we have young and cool people, and 2) attract more young and cool people to the area. It'd be nice to get paid, but there are these other benefits that keep us going too.
I would guess I'm mentally in the same place as you describe yourself in the first paragraph -- and reading other comments it sounds like many HNers would self-assess similarly.
It's that (probably startling) transition to 'until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them' that most of us have never experienced, and I can see how that would massively skew the expectations on both sides, especially as popularity / traffic increases and demands get more frequent, emphatic, dubious, etc.
There is a line you can draw though. If you're making deductions on travel expenses or cost of attending an event, you should probably declare any swag you get at that event as income. If you're not writing off the cost of the event, you probably don't need to worry about it unless you're also getting cash or something extraordinarily valuable.
Same thing with anything you're given for free in exchange for writing a review of it. If a company sends you something and you write a review about it, regardless of if money changes hands, the value of that item is considered taxable income. But if it just shows up at your door unsolicited and you ignore it and the company never gets their review, then it's just an unsolicited gift. And you should probably send it back.
We have a whole file cabinet drawer dedicated to keeping track of "free" stuff we get so we can declare it on our taxes.
I'm surprised it's that low, honestly. May be a question of definition of a "youtuber", which I didn't see in the article. There's a long tail of "influencers" who actually make a living at it—and some a very good living—but I bet it's way less than 3.5%.
After the instability of Youtube's ad platform this past year ("Adpocalypse 1, 2 and 3"), many on the platform have given up on the idea of depending solely on adclicks as it's just too risky to leave your future to the discretion of a black box algorithm.
Anecdotally, it's very safe to assume that for every Pewdiepie, there's 10 million accounts making less than $100 a month.
That just seems crazy high. Maybe my sense of scale is off, but I suspect their definition of youtuber/influencer is some subset of that: people with a certain number of subs or something.
[1] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/
We also have to factor in the following, which makes the economics of being a content creator even worse:
1) If you made $12,140 last year ($1,000 a month post tax for sake of whole numbers), how much of that went to recouping production costs? Include food, travel, electricity, amortized hardware cost for cameras and computers, etc.
2) Of the money that's leftover, how many hours went into creating this content? Divide those two numbers (e.g $800 per month / 40 hours per month = $20 effective hourly rate).
If $1,000 a month pays the bills and allows you to live a non-corporate, stress free life, then being one of the 175,000 people making this type of money sounds like a great deal. But I have a feeling the economics of this situation aren't sustainable.
Also check out EEVBlog. He makes about 40k a year on youtube with frequent, family-friendly, profitable-niche content. Decent, but not full-time family supporting money.
I have a couple of videos of my kids on YouTube to share with friends. I am technically a "YouTuber", but obviously I make zilch. For every person trying to use YouTube to actually be a video producer, there are hundreds of people who just use it as a video hosting site.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851#eligibility
Now the ROI is worse, the advertisers start lowballing, and the content creators keep accepting (because rent is due and nobody else is offering any higher, sooooo)
As for the pricing of posts, the lowballing is getting more and more dramatic, because there are many more "influencers" now. The only brands really shelling out are large corporations with large budgets looking for something very specific. Smaller brands can just reach out to a bunch of influencers offering only product in exchange for a post, and someone will say yes.
I think we should all tread carefully here. In reality, monetizing content is not particularly easy and usually isn't ethical or sustainable.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43470227
As with any commercial exchange, there's a lot of variables other than size of audience, including the composition of the audience, how good the channel is at moving a specific product, whether there are side-opportunities related to the main influencer role, how good of a B2B salesperson one is, etc.
This particular person works as hard as anyone in a startup, around 100 hours a week, and treats it as such. She also happens to be pretty good looking which helps with the videos.
It used to piss me off a little bit, given how hard I have had to work to get to this stage, but one can think of it as very similar to modeling with probably a similar income distribution too (and I seem to intrinsically understand that top tier models make a lot and am ok with it).
My question is -- of all the people making a lot in their 20s and early 30s, how many are going to be making the same amount in their 40s and 50s? I suppose by then their peer generation will also be the same age so it's hard for me to project. I also expect it to be much more of a mature market at that time.
You're also right that looking good goes a long way on Instagram. People want to see good looking models. In the world of blogging, that's far less important. All the people in our bloggers group are decidedly average looking individuals, and their appearance doesn't change how much money they're able to make. Like you said, the main differentiation there is the ruthless business spirit. You have to play dirty to make it in the big leagues.
I hope that we're not still following influencers when we're in our 40s and 50s. Kids will, of course, but they're not going to be influenced by 40 and 50 year old people on Snapchat. Save your income while you're young, it's not gonna last.
I'll always look for aggregate opinions on reddit, tripadvisor, amazon, etc., but I doubt I'll ever find a single other person so much like myself to trust them for everything.
What do you that makes $800K/year?
There are only so many hours in the week, only so many years in a career, and thus there's a limit to how much more one person can work than another. And yet there are people making 2x, 10x, 100x, 1000x, …, 1 billion times what others are. Compensation is largely unrelated to the amount of sweat, time, and effort we put in. Rather, it's a result of the depth of the value we provide and the number of people we provide that value to. Outcome > input.
I believe that understanding this makes us less jealous of people who seem "undeserving," and also helps us make better decisions in our own careers.
Another way to reduce envy is to realize that, ultimately, it's luck all the way down. There are plenty of talented, hard-working people who will never see even moderate success, simply because they were born in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, to the wrong parents, etc. It seems that cursing the people above us is a natural tendency for humans, but we'd do well to spend more energy thinking of those behind us, as well as appreciating our own circumstances.
Not really. It’s mostly family connections.
Unless all the scholarly work on “how is value determined” attempting to define this is wrong. Did we just solve it on a web forum by accident?
Short answer is there isn’t an answer that’s reliable except “networking and feelings” making it seem arbitrary
Economics and Wall Street are not free markets for ideas. They’re on rails financial walled gardens. One must recite the theories and have the right keys (money) to gain entry
Nothing about the system is objective
So clearly family connections help. But that doesn't appear to be most of the picture.
https://imgur.com/a/Bu8iLiz
> So clearly family connections help. But that doesn't appear to be most of the picture.
That's a very simple view of the OP's statement - notice that OP did not say inherited wealth, but instead 'family connections'.
For example, if you received personalized advice to invest a lot of money in a business that later became wildly successful, are you a self-made individual? There are even more subtle examples of how relationships can lead to wealth.
Anyway, perhaps a better analysis is asking what happens to children who grow up either in poverty or in wealth: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
Yes. You took the risk. The rewards are yours - and if you fail, nobody's going to bail you out.
Having lots of ready liquid cash gets you the ability to make deals that normal people do not have access to.
You don't even have to be that rich. Take a look at Craigslist at the end of the month before rent is due.
And his mother had good connections with the IBM board, leading IBM to give the operating system business to Bill .
The public & press love rags to riches stories, so even someone without any of the traditional 'advantages' can leverage that for publicity, fundraising, etc. And many independently wealthy business-people have.
Millions of people started a business with at least 25,000 and there are only a few billionares, most lost it all but some made a living and some got richs.
Yes.
> Or was it the fact that his father could cut a $25,000 check on a whim?
There are millions of Americans like that, and only one Bill Gates.
There's no evidence, either, that his father bought the success of Microsoft. The early success of Microsoft did not require anything more than rather trivial amounts of cash.
And then there are all those millions buying houses for over $500,000, and $30,000+ cars, who could invest $25,000 in a business instead. But that's why they aren't Bill Gates - they made different choices.
However, that $25K check is the difference between Microsoft being a solidly growing company up against someone else that IBM anointed vs Microsoft is the anointed one.
$25K was about 5x the price of a car at the time. That makes it about $150K in modern dollars.
How many people can cut a $150K cash check because their kid says it's a good idea? Even most "millionaires" can't cut a check for cash at that level.
Don't overlook that Microsoft was IBM's second choice. Their first was Digital Research.
And lastly, I haven't been able to find any evidence that Gates Sr. funded Microsoft with at $25,000 check. Citation needed! Certainly there's no mention in the book "Hard Drive", and my recollection is that he started MS with $5,000.
There's nothing Bill Gates did at the time that a very, very large number of people could have done, if they'd only thought of it and had been willing to risk it. I knew many computer people at the time, and they dismissed PCs as toys and saw no future in them. Including many who had money to invest in such a startup.
His mother is credited in her obituary with pulling strings to get him the IBM contract: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
"Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft.
Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."
Realizing that it's luck all the way down only reinforces my opinion that the wealthy pay a pittance in taxes relative to the value they get from our society. Those talented, hard-working people who will never see success deserve affordable healthcare, a functioning safety net that allows them to overcome difficulty and take chances, equal education opportunities for their kids, and a hope for a retirement that doesn't require giving up everything or overburdening their families.
Unhappiness that we (in the US at least) are not on that path is more than envy.
I can assure you that most people in the world have neither of those attributes.
No matter what system we have, SOME people are going to be advantaged by it. We can't always know with certainty beforehand who are the people who are going to be advantaged, but we have a pretty good idea that the people who make a shit ton of money were advantaged in some way. So lets have them pay more than what would seem to be their share, since things were clearly set up with advantages for them.
The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth and therefore so far from the everyday or philosophical notions of value that it hardly deserves the term. Example: finding a reason to deny someone's health insurance claim is "valuable", feeding a starving poor person is not.
> instead value is determined by the importance an acting individual places on a good for the achievement of his desired ends
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/value
> The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something
Seems to fit
How could this possibly be true when the majority of wealth is held by a minority of individuals?
It’s contradictory. A majority of people are incapable of expressing their values through wealth dispersion. If you assume that wealth dispersion is an expression of value, then by definition wealthy individuals are disproportionately able to express value.
> The developed world has devised a formal property system of titles, title registries, and inclusive property law that includes real estate used for homes or businesses. We in the West take that system for granted, probably because it is invisible to us. De Soto shows that this is in a large part why some nations are rich while others remain in poverty.
How do you think "everyone able to fairly able to express it's own value" would work ?I don't believe this is possible; it seemed like that might be what you were suggesting. I wasn't sure what point you were trying to make with your links and "seems to fit" comment in response to the "markets notion of value" correlating to wealth, but I also wasn't sure that I was correctly interpreting your comment.
Monsanto has made plenty of money feeding the world, including poor people. The key is to do it at scale. Even though some of their tactics and products are controversial, they have probably made the most headway in eliminating hunger as any other organization in history.
Also, I'm not at all sure the value proposition they see in being charitable in the tail of their price grading (i.e. no terminator genes) is market-driven. It could quite plausibly be driven by fear of government intervention -- or even, possibly, compassion.
oh no, now I'm just jealous they were able to convince people of the value of their vapid bullshit.
Second, when you say "sit around watching TV," I presume you're saying that hard work leads to success, and implying that hard work is not luck. I agree with the first part and disagree with the second. What makes someone a hard worker? What makes someone intelligent? Attractive? Likable? Talented? If you keep asking why, and you keep retracing a person's history back to the beginning, then the answer invariable boils down to some lucky combination of genes and environment/experience. Even your ability to improve upon the hand you were dealt in life depends entirely on… the hand you were dealt in life.
Depending on the demographic, that's half the battle right there.
You get dealt a hand, and you play with it. You can be good looking and do horrible in life. You can be not good looking and become immensely wealthy. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't pre-determine your outcome.
It does matter, in that it helps to start out wealthy or smarter or better looking than your competition.
Have you even met anyone successful who whined about how disadvantaged they were? Or do they tell you what they did to overcome the odds onstead?
Just because people can beat stacked decks doesn't make stacked decks okay.
Even Jason Fenske, of the Engineering Explained channel, is super attractive. He has a channel dedicated to the minutiae of automotive technology that is considered highly niche. Not many people care to learn about tire sipes, yet he has a 10 minute video on the subject. I bet his audience demographics skew very heavily male.
With that being said, influencers have proven themselves to be entrepreneurial and great marketers. If someone has built their personal brand to $800K/year in revenue, I’d love for them to help build my businesses brand. I’ll bet a lot of these people could move on to a successful and lucrative career in marketing afterwards.
If they haven't figured an additional way to make money and leverage their connections and fame by their 40s and 50s maybe they don't deserve to make "the same amount" by then...
All the major "influencers" I follow, whether in tech, clothing, coffee, games, filming, music, eating, whatever diversify like crazy...
I've seen the proof and looked at the absolute made up lies that their Instagram or whatever account claims are doing besides prostitution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ha, as if the vast majority will ever make close to 800k a year.
My answer to that is a question.
Why would these people need to make the same amount in their 40s and 50s?
If the person you know is making $800K (guessing gross), and after tax and expenses, conservatively banking $300 - $400K a year, then when they enter the 30s in 10 - 12 years, they should have about 3 to 4 million CASH, which, if invested wisely during the accumulation period should have grown to another million or so. This amount is enough to retire with a healthy lifestyle almost anywhere in the world (except maybe Tokyo, San Francisco, New York and a handful of other nutty-expensive cities.). So they don't even need to make anything in their 40s and 50s except work to stay busy "doing what they love".
You mean free?
Notice how that channel hardly ever goes as in depth on major maintenance requirements as the other sailing channels do? It's all fun and adventure. Not to say that's wrong -- I enjoy watching that channel.
There are soooo many sailing channels right now (I can think of at least 40 somewhat popular ones) and the vast majority of them are filming low quality content and sticking their hands out.
Side note: If you want to gauge which channels aren't getting heavy sponsorship dollars, it's the ones that _almost always_ anchor vs tie up at the marina.
Can you explain this for someone who doesn't know anything about boats?
To anchor, you just need an area where anchoring is okay, no need to pay anyone.
Anchoring is free, but then you need to come to shore in (and store) a dinghy
Basically yachting is very expensive. A Panama Canal crossing in your pleasurecraft these days will run about $2k. Those youtube channels are basically lifestyle advertising -- some of those cruisers are heavily (financially) supported.
Yachting can be very expensive. Annie Hill, Moxie Marlinspike and many others prove that it can also be extremely cheap.
https://www.amazon.com/Voyaging-Small-Income-Annie-Hill/dp/1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lwbHYOFD-4
typical cost per one night: 35 feet * $4 = $140/night.
If you pull your boat up to a dock in a marina, you can get electricity and water, and you can walk away to dine or shop, etc.
These are generalities. Sometimes you have to pay to anchor, and sometimes you can park at a dock for free.
I tend to gravitate towards FTB, Uma, Vagabonde, Delos and racing channels though.
Watching mostly naked 20yr olds gets boring after a while though.
WP Commission (https://wpcommission.com) is a WP plugin which helps influencers maximize affiliate revenue. The plugin makes sure all Amazon.com links are tagged with an affiliate tag - and we even follow, expand, and tag shortened amzn.to links as well.
Additionally, we provide a shortcode which creates a carousel displaying products that have been linked to in prior posts. We've found that showing a pretty carousel can lead to substantial revenue improvements, especially when on the home page of a blog.
WPC charges a token fee to keep the servers running, but anyone doing a few thousand in revenue should see a net profit from the service. At the end of the day, we're publishers who want to help quality content creators monetize so they can support themselves.
We're putting together some case studies about sites who most effectively use the Amazon Associates program. The study is up here: https://medium.com/@sku_67047/how-kinja-earns-so-much-in-com...
[1] https://www.wicproject.com/ponderings/blog-taxes/
What does this mean? You have 30K followers and are adding 150 new ones / day?
https://megnoelheaton.com
https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/414/how-much-do-youtu...
So 2.5x the price for 40x the reach? These numbers just don't seem to make sense.
Rat on a wheel doesn't feel like much of a biz model to me.
They have near 400M views and 600k subscribers but all their videos use big commercial pop hits.
Do they actually get a cut or does all the ad revenue flow to music authors and Youtube?