A 3 billion dollar industry with 50 million participants? That’s $60 each on average.
It’s not terribly surprising that an agency has a 30% acceptance rate - they probably accept anyone that isn’t outwardly racist and has more than 50 followers.
Eh, this thing seems more hype than anything. There is definitely a role for influencer marketing, but inevitably the majority of the pie will be swallowed by a few participants in each product category.
I remember listening to an interview with a person involved in the design process. Apparently, it was a very conscious decision to make the important pieces immediately known followed by an more in-depth dive. Given lesser attentions spans, rationale seemed reasonable to me.
To me, it reads like a presentation prepared for upper management. The bolded headings would be standalone title cards. The text after each heading gets its own slide. The bullet points come on the next slide, fading in one after another as the presenter clicks the remote.
It's expected that the manager will begin to daydream about golfing during the bullet point slides, so the info there isn't as important :)
Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
Previously you had to be really lucky to bump into the right producers, casting agents, etc. Even if you were incredibly talented. Now you can find an audience from home.
People didn't change. Technology did.
This is only going to increase as the tools for creation get stronger and better. We'll have so much more art. Some of it will be great, and a lot more diverse interests (the long tail) will be catered to.
> Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
If it is so democratizing then why are all these people trying to become shills for the same sets of products from the same set of companies?
The only thing that seems to be democratized is that now corporations are being more inclusive about the types of people that they will let advertise their products for them.
Are 'influencers' that much different from 'celebrities'? Some are famous purely for their looks, some for their talent, some for both, occasionally some for their lack of both. For me, it feels like we've always had influencers.
But the whole point is that the reach and scale of social media means it's much easier to become an influencer, and furthermore you don't need to have some other celebrated skill (acting, sports, etc.) to get noticed.
Sure, the reach and scale is much bigger. But I still don't see how that distinguishes an influencer from a celebrity.
We've had celebrities since before electricity. The reach and scale of print was greater than word of mouth, the reach and scale of radio was greater than print, the reach and scale of TV was greater than radio. The internet is just another expansion of scope, but it's the same culture underneath. Never before have we felt the need to come up with a new word for celebrity.
You could have argued at one point that the internet gives everyone an equal chance to become famous and influential. But even that is less true every day as agencies are increasingly required to stand out in an increasingly saturated market.
I strongly dispute that celebrities need talent to get noticed too. That's never been true.
Basically point is that, yes, all celebrities can be influencers, but not all influencers are anything I'd classify as "celebrities". There is a whole section in the article on "nano influencers", e.g. think "popular kid in school", not "rock star". Being able to monetize that level of popularity is a new thing.
I'm still not seeing much of a distinction. Celebrities got famous because they were popular and were then able to monetize that. I kind of get where you're coming from, but if there is a distinction to be made, it's not this.
> Are 'influencers' that much different from 'celebrities'? Some are famous purely for their looks, some for their talent, some for both, occasionally some for their lack of both
Most people here probably follow and respect some influencers, but we don't like to admit that our own personal favorites are influencers. We only see them as respected authorities on certain topics while we pretend to ignore the ads and product pitches.
Matt Levine of the Money Stuff newsletter is a great example. His articles are widely shared across the internet and here on HN. He also places advertisements in his newsletters, using his reach and influence to promote products. He almost certainly engages with one of these marketing firms that finds and negotiates these influencer deals. Yet few people here would likely consider him an influencer at first brush simply because we like and respect him.
It's easy to be dismissive of influencer when you're only looking for them in distant topics that you don't personally enjoy or understand. But most of us are blind to the presence of influencers that hit close to home. Nobody likes to think that they're engaged with influencers or capable of being influenced. It's viewed as a negative trait, so we only project it on others and make up excuses as to why our influencers aren't actually influencers.
Couldn't agree more, and that is exactly the same story as with celebrities. For me, I'm a big fan of 'The Hoof GP' for reasons I can't adequately explain. As far as I can see he meets the criteria of influencer, I find his videos interesting and engaging, and I believe he makes a nice side-income from his online success. Bravo if you ask me.
Matt Levine is a columnist for Bloomberg. His job is to write his column. Bloomberg employees other people who figure out how to monetize his content. And more to the point, he doesn't engage with or reference the advertisers in his column.
Influencer is an outcome of doing an act of something. Act could be travelling, cooking, bodybuilding etc. To start doing something to become an influencer is an anti-thesis, it is destined to fail. I am remember colleague telling he ask his children what they wanted to be and they said influencer. Influencer as a career choices sounds like a pyramid scheme and paradox in some sorts, if everybody is influencer then no body is influencing.
These influencers are just using their looks and charisma to sell products or ads in exchange for people feeling entertained for a few minutes.
It's the same thing with celebrities a lot of normies look up to. They think these celebs are nicer or better people than ordinary people, when in fact there is nothing.
One of the best parts of covid for me was how all these celebrities faded out and disappeared from view for a while. Thank you!
To me people like MHKBD seem reviewer more than an influencers , but if you remove people like him basically all you are left is girls showing their goods on instagram hoping to get picked up by some MLM beauty company.
It's not really chasing fame as such, since fame is the default on the web now. The barrier to entry of being 'known' is so low now, that the oldskool notion of fame doesn't apply anymore. Hence Everyone in the title. Buy the latest iPhone, setup a few accounts and then you can start selling stuff really easily. You're also selling your personality too though, not just some product. The best influencers have insane charisma.
The article is about a marketing agency that represents people with significant social media followings.
Now that YouTube and other platforms have become so diluted that ad revenue is minimal, it makes sense that anyone with a large following would seek an agency to help them find advertisers. I get the impression that most moderately successful YouTubers make significantly more money from in-video product advertisements than they do from YouTube's ad revenue sharing.
It's also interesting how radioactive the word "influencer" has become in tech circles like HN. Nobody likes to think of their preferred internet media stars as "influencers", but they liberally apply the influencer label to internet celebrities they dislike. How often to you see Matt Levine (Money Stuff newsletter), Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten), Marques Brownleee (MKBHD), or Patrick McKenzie (patio11) described as influencers? All of them are (or have in the past) used their platforms to sell products or show ads, yet they have enough rapport in the tech community that people almost never describe them as influencers. If you pretend the ads and sales pitches don't exist, or wave them away as a necessary part of their business, it's easy to pretend they aren't actually influencers playing the influencer game.
Instead, the "influencer" label has become synonymous with "fake person I don't like who shills products for money". In reality, a lot of the newsletters, YouTube channels, and blogs that the tech community loves to consume are also engaged in these very same influencer marketing circles. It's how the business works.
> Instead, the "influencer" label has become synonymous with "fake person I don't like who shills products for money"
I think the distaste for the word influencer is because it assumes influencing is the thing, where it is actually the output.
Marques Brownlee is… a reviewer, who also makes money by doing sponsored spots.
Mr Beast is really a director/producer/videomaker and makes interesting and fun videos, and “influences” by using his name to market burgers to make some extra money, but he does that because he is a video maker not because he is an “influencer”.
While teens say they want to be influencers growing up, I think it would be more healthy for them to think about what they will do to become influential first. It’s like saying you want to be famous without deciding if you want to be a musician, actor or famous scientist - fame is the output not the title and shouldn’t usually be the goal.
> Marques Brownlee is… a reviewer, who also makes money by doing sponsored spots.
Marque Brownlee is undeniably an influencer. Many of his videos include sponsored pitches for products like dbrand skins and he uses his rapport to give their products pseudo-reviews by showing them on his own personal phone. MKBHD is the essence of influencer, yet MKBHD fans quickly reject any such suggestion because they like MKBHD.
That is the influencer game: The closer the influencer hits to home, the less their fans see them as an influencer. We give the obvious influencer behaviors a free pass because we like the content they produce. When people don't like the content someone producers, they wave it all away as influencer content. Yet what's really happening is that the influencer is just targeting a different demographic. Same business, different audience.
The distaste for the term 'influencer' arises because the job description is basically 'gain a social media following and then influence that following to buy products, adopt political views, or do other things that your actual clients want you to do.'
In this scenario, the product being sold is access to that following, and the influencer will - like Facebook - sell that product to anyone for any purpose. It's a bit creepy because the influencer can care not at all about the following, happily pushing crappy supplements or other junk with no qualms.
It really comes down to 'do you have any ethical or moral concerns about how your flock of followers (and perhaps a good chunk of their personal data) is being used by your paying clients'?
In contrast, consider the term 'creator' which we think of as someone producing artistic or engineering etc. value, sharing that with the world, and perhaps selling their work online, with limited (and curated) need for the junk advertising / opinion manipulation / political shenanigans cash flows.
Well yes, he is an ‘influencer’, but the term ‘tech reviewer’ is more useful. Most people wouldn’t call Roger Ebert an influencer, even though he also had influence over people’s buying power, but it would be more useful to call him a movie critic imo.
Call people models, or actors, or by their actual professions that made them famous - they are all technically influencers but why pick such a generic term?
Otherwise IMO it’s a non-descriptive title that can be applied to pretty much anything in the public sphere.
People going for fame as the goal, seldom get it. Unless they go radical and shoot John Lennon, just for getting some fame. (so lets never speak the name of that person)
I half agree, people with no talent that seek fame, rarely get it - yet some do. But I can't imagine there's many famous people that didn't actively seek fame.
Seeking fame is normal, but fame as the goal was probably not the main goal for most celebs. A good actor wants to make good movies. If he is just in for the fame, he likely never can put the effort behind it, if he does not love acting in the first place.
Agreed. The problem is the word 'influencer', it also connotes that their followers and mindless drones that need influencing, because they can't think for themselves.
Let's just go back to calling them celebrities, or wannabe celebrities.
There is a more modern demarcation between people who are discussing ideas and those trying to push products on you. Joe Rogan, on the other hand, discusses ideas but also makes fairly clear when he's trying to sell you a product to make him money. Would we regard scientists and philosophers as influencers?
Within tech I do know there are both types. I tend to aschew anyone who is pushing a product on me, versus those who sell ideas. I also have a third category, which is those that push their ideas without much self-skepticism or are too aggressive in their worldview. I tend not to like that category very much.
Re #3, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking your worldview is the only right one. There's a fairly well-known historical case, this guy named Lewis Strauss, a major early US Cold War figure who pushed the hydrogen bomb and famously claimed nuclear power would be 'too cheap to meter'.
He was widely known for his debating style, in which he'd first assume anyone who disagreed with him didn't understand his argument, and after further refusal to agree, would then assume that person was a traitor in the pay of the Soviet Union.
In what way is Matt Levine an influencer? He’s a salaried columnist for a news organization. Newspapers having adverts doesn’t suddenly make every journalist an influencer
> He’s a salaried columnist for a news organization.
In other words, he gets paid to influence people on behalf of a major news publication.
I posit that "influencer" is the general term for celebrities, politicians, journalists, priests, etc. Matt Levine is a traditional media influencer. The pope is a religious influencer. Biden is a political influencer. So on and so forth. The modern social media influencers are really independent influencers as they don't belong to a corporate, political or religious entity.
But he isn’t paid to influence people to do anything. He’s paid to bring in eyeballs . If he’s an influencer, then anyone working in an ad-supported business is an influencer. In which case of what use is the term? Ok great, anyone supported by ads is “influencing”. What now?
Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging for the ego, and curating your world for Instagram or TikTok likes is choosing to live in a simulacra.
No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me ~ just Hacker News. Upvote me here so I know you agree and we can influence others not to be influencers.
It's weird I just had this conversation last night. My wife asked if I could be 17 again, would I want to go back in time or be 17 now. I immediately blurted out back in time, and reminisced about how everything seemed simpler. No smartphones, no social media, no constant fear and hate mongering. Made me really sad for some reason. But part of that could just be getting old and resistant to change, as people are known to do.
Getting bullied in school was hard enough… I'd rather not go through that again with after-school bullying via social media on top of that. I'm glad I grew up without Facebook and the likes.
But if I could go back with the same knowledge I have now, the bullying becomes more tolerable when I know that one of the biggest bullies in high school will have ended up in and out of jail before finally dying of a drug overdose (he had a hard home life which led to his bullying and post high school problems), and that the high school jock that was the most popular guy in school ended up overweight and working in a car dealership... he turned out to be a nice guy though.
It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.
I often think about what it would be like to live childhood and teenage years again with all you know now. I think in most cases I’d be able to ultimately befriend the bully and be a positive influence on them. I now also understand things like fitness and work ethic, discipline.
That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.
I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.
That's because you were young and had no idea what was going on.
A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.
I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.
It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.
>Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.
In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.
Your 90s experience doesn't match my own. I'm not saying your version is wrong, just speaking from my experience, in the south USA. NY or some other metropolis could be miles different I'd imagine.
At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.
In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.
Let's add a 3rd option! You can be 17 again, but can choose from when you were originally 17, right now, or the difference between the 2 in years into the future.
What social trends will influence your decision? Will the future be better (correction) or even worse (exacerbation)?
>Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging [...]No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me
This seems like a generic complaint that's not specific to this particular thread's article. This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
And then there's this:
>I for one don't want to be an influencer.
But you're the CEO of:
>Gastrograph AI is an artificial intelligence platform [...] to predict consumer preference of food and beverage products.
>We helps food and beverage companies [...] optimize existing brands.
With your business background, you're actually one of the folks that can add substantive commentary to this. You want to help brands reach consumers. So do internet celebrities.
>This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
I found the articles thesis more general, that many more individuals want to become paid influencers, and the lower acceptance rate of middleman agencies as proof that the supply of want-to-be influencers has increased.
>You want to help brands reach consumers.
I am the CEO of AFS, but my company works on flavor profile development of new and existing products - deep R&D of flavor, aroma, and texture optimization. This is far upstream of marketing and branding which we are uninvolved with.
Influencer marketing done well is scary effective because audiences often have a parasocial relationship with these influencers. The main downside with influencer marketing is that you have less control over how your brand is presented. That is why influencer marketing works best with small brands that can easily track the effects of their marketing. Naturally, this is a good fit for the mobile app (games) market and small e-commerce brands.
When I was a teenager, and mind you, that wasn't too long ago, the equivalents of today's influencers tried to sign up for modelling agencies, or dreamt to be in movies or become sports stars.
In general, fame and money and what appears to be a sweet and easy lifestyle. Of course these sort of people have always advertised products, but at least they were.true models, real actors and skilled in sports.
This has been digitalized now, now every nobody can try to be an influencer, it's a bit of all the above, just digital.
Of course, it's oversaturated, most of them make nothing.
This is what happens when advertising becomes the primary economic output of your economy. It seems like there are too many people engaged directly in advertising, or working on products that are supported 100% by advertising dollars. How long until the economy is just 100% advertising?
I'm sure if you really probe influencers, most of them would rather be engaged in creative pursuits. But those don't pay anything, so they have to go to where the dollars are if they want things like a house and food.
It's incredibly easy to be a niche influencer nowadays. If I write a blog post on a niche subject that I know a lot about, I can easily take that blog post, re-word it a bit, and record it for Youtube with some light edits -> example data science account: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcQx1UnmorvmSEZef4X7-6g
Youtube recommendation algorithm is so good at rewarding continuous creators. The difficulty is that the effort in making videos is surprisingly high and scaling is hard.
There is another class of influencer that is often forgotten but is also very popular: The anti-influencer. Their goal is not to seek money or fame, it’s simply to watch the world burn and stimulate rage, all for a good laugh. They are not famous people so it’s not easy to name them or track their whereabouts, and their presence is often short lived. You can only see them in the moment. In the past, the politically incorrect term for such people would have been “trolls”.
Influencer is such a silly term. Some youtuber get s bunch of folk as fans so suddenly think they're somehow relevant to others. If everybody has this view then you have an ocean of folk who are trying to convince each other that they are somehow relevant. Meanwhile for most people life moves on but these influencers sound like they'll need to keep trying to reclaim their 15 mins of fame. I'm bored of the term already.
68 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadIt’s not terribly surprising that an agency has a 30% acceptance rate - they probably accept anyone that isn’t outwardly racist and has more than 50 followers.
Eh, this thing seems more hype than anything. There is definitely a role for influencer marketing, but inevitably the majority of the pie will be swallowed by a few participants in each product category.
It's expected that the manager will begin to daydream about golfing during the bullet point slides, so the info there isn't as important :)
More seriously, it seems to be an indicator of people being desperate enough to try anything to make a few bucks.
Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
Previously you had to be really lucky to bump into the right producers, casting agents, etc. Even if you were incredibly talented. Now you can find an audience from home.
People didn't change. Technology did.
This is only going to increase as the tools for creation get stronger and better. We'll have so much more art. Some of it will be great, and a lot more diverse interests (the long tail) will be catered to.
TikTok is a stepping stone.
Less Disney, more indie.
That seems to be a dramatic over-generalization.
> Technology is a democratizing force that is giving people voice, greater reach, and a higher probability of success.
If it is so democratizing then why are all these people trying to become shills for the same sets of products from the same set of companies?
The only thing that seems to be democratized is that now corporations are being more inclusive about the types of people that they will let advertise their products for them.
That hardly seems like a win for anyone
We've had celebrities since before electricity. The reach and scale of print was greater than word of mouth, the reach and scale of radio was greater than print, the reach and scale of TV was greater than radio. The internet is just another expansion of scope, but it's the same culture underneath. Never before have we felt the need to come up with a new word for celebrity.
You could have argued at one point that the internet gives everyone an equal chance to become famous and influential. But even that is less true every day as agencies are increasingly required to stand out in an increasingly saturated market.
I strongly dispute that celebrities need talent to get noticed too. That's never been true.
Most people here probably follow and respect some influencers, but we don't like to admit that our own personal favorites are influencers. We only see them as respected authorities on certain topics while we pretend to ignore the ads and product pitches.
Matt Levine of the Money Stuff newsletter is a great example. His articles are widely shared across the internet and here on HN. He also places advertisements in his newsletters, using his reach and influence to promote products. He almost certainly engages with one of these marketing firms that finds and negotiates these influencer deals. Yet few people here would likely consider him an influencer at first brush simply because we like and respect him.
It's easy to be dismissive of influencer when you're only looking for them in distant topics that you don't personally enjoy or understand. But most of us are blind to the presence of influencers that hit close to home. Nobody likes to think that they're engaged with influencers or capable of being influenced. It's viewed as a negative trait, so we only project it on others and make up excuses as to why our influencers aren't actually influencers.
Count me out. I do not follow a single person. When I need info I search.
So, no. Matt Levine is not an influencer.
It's the same thing with celebrities a lot of normies look up to. They think these celebs are nicer or better people than ordinary people, when in fact there is nothing.
One of the best parts of covid for me was how all these celebrities faded out and disappeared from view for a while. Thank you!
To me people like MHKBD seem reviewer more than an influencers , but if you remove people like him basically all you are left is girls showing their goods on instagram hoping to get picked up by some MLM beauty company.
It's not really chasing fame as such, since fame is the default on the web now. The barrier to entry of being 'known' is so low now, that the oldskool notion of fame doesn't apply anymore. Hence Everyone in the title. Buy the latest iPhone, setup a few accounts and then you can start selling stuff really easily. You're also selling your personality too though, not just some product. The best influencers have insane charisma.
They’re people with no obvious skills, talent or work ethic attempting to get stuff for free.
Now that YouTube and other platforms have become so diluted that ad revenue is minimal, it makes sense that anyone with a large following would seek an agency to help them find advertisers. I get the impression that most moderately successful YouTubers make significantly more money from in-video product advertisements than they do from YouTube's ad revenue sharing.
It's also interesting how radioactive the word "influencer" has become in tech circles like HN. Nobody likes to think of their preferred internet media stars as "influencers", but they liberally apply the influencer label to internet celebrities they dislike. How often to you see Matt Levine (Money Stuff newsletter), Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten), Marques Brownleee (MKBHD), or Patrick McKenzie (patio11) described as influencers? All of them are (or have in the past) used their platforms to sell products or show ads, yet they have enough rapport in the tech community that people almost never describe them as influencers. If you pretend the ads and sales pitches don't exist, or wave them away as a necessary part of their business, it's easy to pretend they aren't actually influencers playing the influencer game.
Instead, the "influencer" label has become synonymous with "fake person I don't like who shills products for money". In reality, a lot of the newsletters, YouTube channels, and blogs that the tech community loves to consume are also engaged in these very same influencer marketing circles. It's how the business works.
I think the distaste for the word influencer is because it assumes influencing is the thing, where it is actually the output.
Marques Brownlee is… a reviewer, who also makes money by doing sponsored spots.
Mr Beast is really a director/producer/videomaker and makes interesting and fun videos, and “influences” by using his name to market burgers to make some extra money, but he does that because he is a video maker not because he is an “influencer”.
While teens say they want to be influencers growing up, I think it would be more healthy for them to think about what they will do to become influential first. It’s like saying you want to be famous without deciding if you want to be a musician, actor or famous scientist - fame is the output not the title and shouldn’t usually be the goal.
Marque Brownlee is undeniably an influencer. Many of his videos include sponsored pitches for products like dbrand skins and he uses his rapport to give their products pseudo-reviews by showing them on his own personal phone. MKBHD is the essence of influencer, yet MKBHD fans quickly reject any such suggestion because they like MKBHD.
That is the influencer game: The closer the influencer hits to home, the less their fans see them as an influencer. We give the obvious influencer behaviors a free pass because we like the content they produce. When people don't like the content someone producers, they wave it all away as influencer content. Yet what's really happening is that the influencer is just targeting a different demographic. Same business, different audience.
In this scenario, the product being sold is access to that following, and the influencer will - like Facebook - sell that product to anyone for any purpose. It's a bit creepy because the influencer can care not at all about the following, happily pushing crappy supplements or other junk with no qualms.
It really comes down to 'do you have any ethical or moral concerns about how your flock of followers (and perhaps a good chunk of their personal data) is being used by your paying clients'?
In contrast, consider the term 'creator' which we think of as someone producing artistic or engineering etc. value, sharing that with the world, and perhaps selling their work online, with limited (and curated) need for the junk advertising / opinion manipulation / political shenanigans cash flows.
Call people models, or actors, or by their actual professions that made them famous - they are all technically influencers but why pick such a generic term?
Otherwise IMO it’s a non-descriptive title that can be applied to pretty much anything in the public sphere.
Let's just go back to calling them celebrities, or wannabe celebrities.
Within tech I do know there are both types. I tend to aschew anyone who is pushing a product on me, versus those who sell ideas. I also have a third category, which is those that push their ideas without much self-skepticism or are too aggressive in their worldview. I tend not to like that category very much.
He was widely known for his debating style, in which he'd first assume anyone who disagreed with him didn't understand his argument, and after further refusal to agree, would then assume that person was a traitor in the pay of the Soviet Union.
You could argue his job is influencing people.
> He’s a salaried columnist for a news organization.
In other words, he gets paid to influence people on behalf of a major news publication.
I posit that "influencer" is the general term for celebrities, politicians, journalists, priests, etc. Matt Levine is a traditional media influencer. The pope is a religious influencer. Biden is a political influencer. So on and so forth. The modern social media influencers are really independent influencers as they don't belong to a corporate, political or religious entity.
Social media is damaging to society, doing things for likes is damaging for the ego, and curating your world for Instagram or TikTok likes is choosing to live in a simulacra.
No Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, WeiBo, or TikTok for me ~ just Hacker News. Upvote me here so I know you agree and we can influence others not to be influencers.
It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.
That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.
I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.
A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.
I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.
The 24 hour news cycle has been a thing since at least 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN#Gulf_War which incidentally are some of my first memories.
In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.
At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.
In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.
What social trends will influence your decision? Will the future be better (correction) or even worse (exacerbation)?
This seems like a generic complaint that's not specific to this particular thread's article. This article is about the rise of middleman agency platforms to connect brands to internet celeberties with a following.
And then there's this:
>I for one don't want to be an influencer.
But you're the CEO of:
>Gastrograph AI is an artificial intelligence platform [...] to predict consumer preference of food and beverage products.
>We helps food and beverage companies [...] optimize existing brands.
With your business background, you're actually one of the folks that can add substantive commentary to this. You want to help brands reach consumers. So do internet celebrities.
I found the articles thesis more general, that many more individuals want to become paid influencers, and the lower acceptance rate of middleman agencies as proof that the supply of want-to-be influencers has increased.
>You want to help brands reach consumers.
I am the CEO of AFS, but my company works on flavor profile development of new and existing products - deep R&D of flavor, aroma, and texture optimization. This is far upstream of marketing and branding which we are uninvolved with.
I'm sure if you really probe influencers, most of them would rather be engaged in creative pursuits. But those don't pay anything, so they have to go to where the dollars are if they want things like a house and food.
Youtube recommendation algorithm is so good at rewarding continuous creators. The difficulty is that the effort in making videos is surprisingly high and scaling is hard.
Do they really?