5 Reasons Social Media Influencers Are Getting Even Weirder

5

Companies Are Scouring Their Pasts For Scandal

Hey, remember that famous social media figure whom everyone loved and celebrated right up until it was discovered that they'd said a whole bunch of incredibly offensive stuff? What's that? You're saying I need to narrow it down, because there have been several thousand of those in just the last year? Well, companies are catching on to that. So much so that there's now a boutique industry of influencer background checkers, vetting these people for dirt like they're running for president instead of selling hair products on Instagram.

Sure, there's the obvious stuff, like making sure their engagement matches their follower count (the world is full of scammers trying to inflate their audience with bots). But then there's the more detailed background checks some companies like L'Oreal are doing. Their chief digital officer says that they spend more time looking into individuals to make sure they don't have any "brand safety issues, like nude pictures." Wow, this guy hasn't been on the internet long if nude pictures are the worst thing he can imagine in someone's past.

4

The Government Is Starting To Call Them On Their BS

One of the big problems with social media stars is that while they're great at making slime in their swimming pool or looking pretty next to a beige bowl of fruit, they're terrible at understanding the rules and regulations around disclosing advertising. Research has found that social media users react more negatively to clearly labeled ads, so a lot of influencers solve this problem by not labeling content they were paid to make as ads. This works really well! As long as the FTC doesn't notice.

In 2017, the FTC finally sent a mass letter to over 90 Instagram celebrities about clearly marking their sponsored content as such, rather than using ambiguous hashtag's like #sp. That could could stand for anything -- #spaghetti pirate, #sick pencils, #spitinmymouthJakeGyllenhaal. You know, all things I would click. This wasn't a problem for just a few influencers, either. Last year a group called Truth In Advertising reported 1,700 posts across 50 different accounts that didn't properly disclose Ciroc ads.

3

Every New Child Is A Potential Income Stream

Since it's getting harder to scrape by on an influencer's salary, a lot of times, the entire family has to work for their meal, even the ones who haven't been born yet. Six-month-old Halston Fisher has almost half a million Instagram followers, and had 112,000 of those before she was born. That's the benefit of coming into an influencer family. Her mother and father have a YouTube channel with three million subscribers. Her three-year-old twin sisters have 2.8 million Instagram followers. According to their father, ads on their Instagram sell for up to $20,000 a post. Do you know how many juice boxes that'll buy them?

Influencer families with multiple members finding success across multiple platforms as part of one corporation are becoming more and more common. The Bee family has 3.8 million YouTube subscribers. For $25, you can buy a T-shirt with their 13-year-old daughter's face on it. The Bee boy has his own YouTube channel which focuses heavily on playing video games. It comes with a membership option for $4.99 a month.

2

Burnout Is A Huge Problem

Imagine that when you were a teenager, you started a YouTube account where all you did was impressions of your cat. They were funny and your friends shared them, and all of a sudden you were making money! Now doing impressions of your cat is your job. You have to upload five cat impressions a week, and they have to be new, and funny, or YouTube will choke off your traffic and you'll be broke. Also, you can never take a vacation for that same reason. The mighty algorithm only rewards the most relentless and prolific of creators. Your entire life is now cat impressions. You sleep, eat, and breathe cat impressions. You dream about cat impressions. What was once your fun hobby is now a cat prison that you have built for yourself.

People like to think that an influencer's job is easy, and it no doubt is compared to a whole lot of jobs out there. But in the world of entertainers and creators, it's an absolute grind. Earning enough to do it full-time requires cranking out an absurd amount of content. Hiring anyone to help is beyond all but the upper crust.

1

Robots Are Taking Their Jobs

You would think this is one job that couldn't be automated, but it's 2019, and robots can take everything, from your job to your baby (before it can grow up to fight the robot apocalypse). Computer-generated influencers are "people" created by marketing firms to sell products, and they're getting pretty popular. Miquela, one of the most successful CG influencers, has 1.6 million Instagram followers, she's released a music video with over a million views, she's been in Vogue, and she has many lucrative branding deals. It's like if the cast of Reboot were trying to sell you cute shoes on Instagram.