Tech Won't Save Us - The Influencer Industry Is Built on Precarity w/ Emily Hund

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Emily Hund to discuss the creation of the influencer industry, how it’s been formalized by companies who profit from it, and what can be done to make it fairer for the people who work in it. Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. She’s also a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. Follow Emily on Twitter at @emilyadh.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:An excerpt of Emily’s book was published in Wired.After Elon Musk took over Twitter, a menswear account was suddenly in everyone’s feeds.Instagram is offering a paid subscription service that includes customer service.Countries have begun regulating the influencer industry. For example, Norway requires retouched photos to be labeled, while France has an even stricter law that regulates the types of products that can be promoted along with other requirements.Support the show

Once they recognize that the reason that audiences were flocking to these creators is because of their seemingly authentic nature, then that became the thing that they had to commodify. And they had to keep the pipe of authenticity flowing so that they host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Emily Hund. Emily is the author of The Influencer Industry, The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. She's also a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Now, obviously, we are all familiar with how common influencers and creators have become in our lives, in the media, all these sorts of things, right? Whether they're on TikTok or YouTube or Twitter or, you know, wherever else they happen to be these days, you might even be able to count me in that category as we talk about in this conversation. But the influencer industry has become this huge

thing as all these people online who do this for a living or, you know, who don't do it for a living, but maybe hope to, have developed these followings and advertisers and kind of branding agencies and all this have followed along with it, right? We know that this is part of the business model of this industry. And so I was interested in talking to Emily to find out how this actually came to be, right? This didn't just kind of spring up out of nowhere. Obviously, we've had celebrities and artists for a long time, but this kind of influencer industry is a specific kind of creation of the internet and of a variety of kind of forces that have emerged from that. And so in this conversation, we talk about the blogging era and how that kind of merges into the social media era and how kind

of the 2008 recession is a really key moment where you not only have like a lot of people who are kind of thrown out of their jobs, who are working in media industries anyway, who are trying to figure out like, okay, what am I going to do next? How am I going to make some money? But also you have a lot of companies and a lot of companies that did advertising that all of a sudden, like the ad industry and the wider media were experiencing issues as well. And they're wondering, like, maybe we should try something a little bit different. Maybe we should take a risk on some of this kind of like new influencer industry that is arising in this moment to see if this kind of helps out. And of course, as that begins to happen, there's a whole industry

that starts to be created around it. A bunch of people who are making money on this particular form of advertising and branding and kind of using this to sell products to people or experiences or whatever, to the point where we get to today and kind of influencer advertising and branding is a massive kind of industry that a lot of companies depend on and use to get their products in front of people. And, you know, not just products, but like, you know, you see actors going on like YouTube channels to promote their movies and stuff and like talking to various influencers, like there's kind of much more of a cross pollination between everything else that we used to consider kind of separate from the influencer industry that has recognized that this has become like a large force that they need to be engaged with if they want to be relevant with kind of popular culture, because there's

so many people, you know, watching these channels and watching these creators, that of course, it becomes this essential part of this wider media industry. And of course, we also talk about, you know, the consequences of that, like, what is it actually like to be in this kind of industry? What is it like to constantly have the pressure to like produce content and all this kind of industry? What is it like to constantly have the pressure to like produce content and all this kind of stuff? And where might this be going in future? Like how might we address some of these problems if this is to stay? So I really enjoy this conversation. I feel like, you know, influencers and creators and all this kind of stuff is something that I probably want to return to in the future as well to explore a bit more. But I think that

this is a great conversation to kind of get the examination of that started. And so I hope you really enjoy it. And if you do, of course, make sure to leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think might learn from it. And if you want to make sure I can keep doing this podcast and having these interesting conversations with people like Emily, you can join supporters like Kelsey from Cincinnati, Ohio, Bob from Tunbridge Wells in Southern England, Conrad from Portland, and Raphael in Amsterdam by going to patreon.com and becoming a supporter yourself. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Emily, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you. You have this new book that was out recently called The Influencer Industry that digs into, you know, a lot of this industry that we're all familiar with, that we all kind of interact with every day now as we use these social media platforms. And, you know, many of the people that we follow on there would be influencers themselves or kind of, in many cases, some of them will be making some income off of their posts or whatever they're doing online, right? And so I think that this is a really interesting kind of thing for us to dig into and to explore more and for the listeners to understand a bit more about because it's not something that we really explored on the show

before. And so to get us started, I was hoping that you could define the influencer industry. What is this? And how would you kind of explain it to the audience? Sure. So for the purposes of my research, I think of an influencer as someone who creates content for social media and does so aspiring to earn an income from it. And many of them already are earning some amount of money. And some people are at the place where they've cultivated a good audience and are just on the cusp of making money. And some people are at the place where they've cultivated a good audience and are just on the cusp of making money. But that is loosely what an influencer is. Behind the influencers that we all see in our feeds, though, is a sort of vast industry that is not quite as publicly visible. So there are the brands who are involved. So when you encounter sponsored

content in your feed, you might see a brand tagged and that sort of thing. Most retail brands are involved in influencer marketing in some way. They play a significant role in shaping, especially the financial dynamics of the space. There's also influencer marketing agencies who have played a really critical role in sort of getting the industry really going and growing and making the deal-making process, you know, more robust and, you know, bringing in, you know, more consistency of deal streams and seeking out influencers and things like that. And then of course, there are the platforms that all of this plays out on, you know, Meta, Instagram, TikTok are, you know, the biggest ones. And then there's the audience, you know, the people who are watching all of this content and whose attention, you know, is being collected and quantified to make this business run. It's interesting. I guess I would kind of fit into your definition of an influencer there. It feels a bit weird to be in that position, but I guess that's the reality. really been continually blurring over time. In previous times, we might look at like early influencers, like me, like big bloggers or, you know, early Instagram influencers. And it's not

like everybody who followed them thought like, oh, I'm a blogger too, or I'm an Instagram influencer too. There's a little bit more of like a separation, I guess. And now as the industry has grown so much and reshaped the way people communicate on social media, there has been such a blurring of the boundaries between like, who really is an influencer, who's thinking of themselves as an influencer, who sees themselves as a potential influencer, should I be doing this, you know, it's like, it's really just bled out, you know, to sort of encompass, you know, anyone who uses social media. Totally. And great for the industry, I'm sure as well to

have many more potential kind of customers and people to advertise to and from and all this kind of stuff. Oh yeah. I mean, the more people who think of themselves as a potential influencer, the better for the platform because, you know, more people using the platform, spending more time on it, creating more free content to draw in more audiences. So yeah, it's hugely beneficial for the platform. I'm sure we'll come back to that throughout the course of the conversation. But you were talking about how, you know, a lot of this kind of finds its roots in the blogging industry, I guess, like if we're looking at how this is playing out online and how kind of, I guess, average people are starting to kind of be taken into this industry and how it begins to develop. Can you talk to us about those kind of origins, I guess? And when would you kind of periodize that? Like when is this blogging period?

When does that kind of start to wane, I guess? Yeah. So blogging, you know, was a really sort of buzzy and growing and really interesting space, you know, in starting in, you know, late nineties, early two thousands and throughout the first decade of the two thousands, you know, blogging kind of continued to grow, continued to sort of reshape some cultural industries, especially journalism was kind of one of the first industries to kind of confront these new people or who sort of fashioned themselves as reporters or, you know, citizen journalists or, you know, whatever the many terms that they used at the time. They also reshaped, you know, conversations around parenting and fashion and, you know, just a huge array of topic areas. But all told, when you think of the grand scheme

of number of bloggers and number of people reading blogs, it was still fairly small when we compare now to the number of social media users and things like that. But that was a really sort of electric time for blogging. And then as we get toward the end of the first decade of the 2000s, there were a number of things going on that sort of made this shift happen from blogging to the sort of origins of the influencer industry that we now think of. So the first, you know, most obviously were changes in technology. So earlier technological changes had helped make blogging, you know, grow. Like we look at the launch of blogger and WordPress and things like that helped bring blogging to more and more people

who didn't have necessarily technical skills. And I guess also kind of the rollout of desktop computers that becomes more common. So you have more people kind of using it and reading that content that way. Exactly. That brings up, you know, launch of iPhone and launch of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Tumblr obviously was really big. All these sort of social media platforms that, you know, were really novel at the time. And they kind of launched under this banner of democratization. You know, we are going to democratize culture. We are bringing voice

to the voiceless and everything is going to change. Anyone can have an audience, you know, make yourself known, that sort of thing. So these technological changes are, you know, bringing more people to these platforms and creating content in new ways. When we have the financial crisis and the great recession, that sort of opened the floodgates in a way, because we have now this enormous number of people who are unemployed or underemployed, especially people who are in creative or, you know, cultural production type of professions who are now looking to these platforms that say, look, creative expression, democratization, you're in control. Okay, that's really appealing to the person who, you know, is an aspiring writer or designer or whatever, and just got laid off and sees no

future in their industry that they had planned to work in, in a perhaps more traditional way. And so that's really appealing. And so a lot of aspiring creative professionals flock to these platforms then to say, okay, well, I guess I will start, you know, making my own videos, writing my own, you know, blog, or I'm going to start posting photos, whatever. And I'm going to self-brand online and I'm going to let the world know, here I am, here's my expertise, hire me. But then this also kind of dovetails with this growing levels of social distrust. Okay. So people are increasingly feeling distrustful of social institutions, you know, government, religion, news media, these sort of, you know,

traditional pillars anchoring society. People are feeling more and more distrust, especially fired up by the economic situation. And that provides a really interesting angle for these early influencers, you know, call them proto influencers, I guess, who were saying, Hey, I'm working on my own. I got laid off. I'm not part of the big media or big whatever. I'm just me creating this content. And so that becomes really appealing to audiences. Like I want to listen to this person because they are more authentic or more real than these corporate monsters or whatever. Now we see these content creators start to amass large audiences and a lot of people who are creating content with like the plan of, oh, I'm going to use this as a stepping stone to get a new job or go in this other direction.

All of a sudden they realize like, wait, I'm basically becoming a media business. You know, I have my own audience. And, you know, pretty soon then advertisers come knocking because, again, advertisers were also dealing with the economic fallout. Businesses were really struggling. And so they are looking for better use of their money. And they see that these sort of independent media makers were potentially offering better targeted audiences, more easily measured campaigns, that sort of thing. And so advertisers start saying like, Hey, can I take out an ad on your blog? Can I send you some product and you, you know, maybe write about it or take some

pictures of it and see what happens. And again, these people who were struggling in this economic environment said, Hey, sure. What you want to give me money. Okay. And then that is when the sort of seeds of the sort of large influencer industry that we are now experiencing, that's when they really get planted. I think you've given us like such a good picture of how this kind of comes to be, right? Coming from blogging through to these platforms and the many developments that happen kind of through that period and in kind of very quick succession through the end of kind of the first decade of the 2000s into the early 2010s. And there are a few things that I want to pick up on there, right? And first of all, I feel like, you know, obviously, we're talking a bit about periodizations, but there's obviously like a lot of blurred lines there, right? Like you have the blogs in that first decade of the 2000s. But you also I'm sure there's many of those bloggers who

are sharing their blogs on Facebook, or maybe they're making YouTube videos as well. But you also I'm sure there's many of those bloggers who are sharing their blogs on Facebook, or maybe they're making YouTube videos as well. But these are more kind of nascent at the moment, and really kind of take off, especially in that kind of mobile era that you're talking about, in the early 2010s, basically, as more people are switching to their phones, I would imagine, I guess I'm thinking as well, like like even into the early 2010s, I remember I was reading a lot of like travel blogs and things like that. So like, you know, the blog is still there. It's just like, there's different forms and they're using other ways to kind of get people in and get people paying attention to the content and all those sorts of things.

Yeah, absolutely. The blog did not die in 2009, but it was sort of a fading away over the course of the early 2010s, especially as influencers moved to Instagram. That was the main platform that people shifted to. In the beginning, you know, it was interesting because it's hard to remember now, but in early Instagram didn't allow advertising. And so a lot of content creators who were creating content at other venues kind of used Instagram as just sort of a way of, you know, building another audience, maybe driving traffic to their blog, you know, sort of experimenting with personal branding in this space. But, you know, it wasn't for several years, then eventually Instagram changed their mind. But that is actually a really critical

moment for the expansion of the industry. Because in that time, when Instagram was still resistant to commercialization, that's when we see these other sort of third party businesses crop up to say, I'm going to help you monetize your Instagram presence, or I'm going to help you create your influencer business, rather than just being a blogger or someone who posts nice pictures on Instagram. And so we have the launch of companies like RewardStyle, which is an affiliate marketing tool that helps and continues to exist and grow. And they helped bloggers monetize their blog content. And they also created a tool called Like to Know It, which helped people monetize their Instagram content.

So what you did was if you signed up for it and you liked the content of an influencer, then you would get an email with all of the information. This is what they were wearing. This was the plate they were eating off of, you know, this was, you know, everything that you could buy about this photo. You know, the audience member could get that in an email and then click, click, click, buy. Influencer earns a commission. Brand is happy because they've made sales. Yeah.

And then the audience member feels like they've gotten access to this aspirational lifestyle. So companies like RewardStyle, they were able to really plant their feet in this time and establish themselves as major players in this industry. And then many other types of businesses in the sort of loose umbrella of influencer marketing agency, they just exploded during this time. These agencies took many different approaches to their business model. Their offerings were very different because everyone was sort of, you know, tussling around trying to figure out what was, you know, the most resonant business model or what message was going to bring the most consumers, what tool was going to bring the most users, that sort of thing. So there were just a huge array of types of approaches to the business

of influencer marketing. But during this time, there was just a huge expansion in the number of agencies who were trying to insert themselves in the space and basically get a piece of the pie of that burgeoning relationship between brands and influencers and trying to be the ones who manage the influencer's career, trying to be the ones who brought the brands and the influencers together, trying to be the ones who provided tools to brands so that they could select the best influencer for them, you know, all of these different things. But there's this huge expansion in that time. And that is when we see the industry really start to grow and mature and expand. And from this sort of a little bit more haphazard group of like brands and creators trying to figure out what's going on

into a larger, you know, much more organized sort of machine. The thing that really stands out to me as I hear you describe that, like, you know, you're talking about the kind of creation of reward style, you're talking about the creation of these agencies that are kind of looking to these influencers to represent them to obviously make money off of them and things like that. And you're talking about the creation of these agencies that are kind of looking to these influencers to represent them, to obviously make money off of them and things like that. And you're talking about how kind of, you know, one of the real preconditions for this or a few of the preconditions were kind of, you know, the launch of the mobile era, the 2008 recession and the economic precarity that followed that. And it also makes me think about, you know, the other major kind of emergence from that period, which is obviously the gig economy, right, where you have a ton of people lose their jobs, and they start doing work for like Uber and these various apps and things like that. And all these apps are also kind of based on the fact that many people now have mobile phones. And

so I wonder if you see any kind of comparisons between, you know, the growth of the influencer industry alongside kind of the gig economy and these other industries that are also kind of being built using technology on economic precarity in that moment. Yeah. So I think both the influencer industry of that time and the gig economy both benefited from, you know, this really optimistic public narrative about taking control over your professional life in a time where there was just immense, immense economic uncertainty, career uncertainty, you know, everyone's getting laid off. It seems like no one is safe, you know, in this environment. And they both kind of purported to allow you to regain control, whether it is build your personal brand and, you know,

monetize yourself and rely on you as it was in the influencer industry. That is very similar sort of narrative to the early gig economy. You know, it's like work your own hours, just take the jobs that, you know, feel good to you and you, and you're going to be able to, you know, make money in the exact way that you want to. And then pretty quickly, we start to see the cracks in that narrative. You know, they both really benefited from that idea in their formative years. Absolutely. And, you know, you've talked also about how there's a lot of kind of lack of trust in this period, right?

And how that leads to a real desire for the influences that you're following, the people that you're seeing online to be perceived as authentic, right? You know, I talked recently to David Banks, and he was talking about how cities also kind of adopted this narrative of authenticity, right? They needed to be the authentic, you know, purveyors of whatever it was that their specific city did. But, you know, obviously on social media, authenticity has been something that has been really key, right? People want to see you as someone who is authentic. And then there's pressure on the influencers, the people who see this as their profession in particular, to present themselves as being authentic. And in the book, you write that, quote, authenticity is not a social construction, but an industrial one. Can you expand on that and explain to us why authenticity is so important to the influencer

industry? Yeah. So authenticity has been important to persuasive messaging, you know, for generations. So it's already something that people have leveraged for a long time to sort of bolster themselves. As a communication scholar, I think back to previous media eras, and, you know, you look back to like the golden age of Hollywood and like the, and magazines at that time. And they were often trying to, you know, portray Hollywood stars as being like,

like, look at them at home and, you know, here are their children and their pets. And don't we just love them because the way they live at home. And so that was another like authenticity play, you know, to try to bolster these public personalities at the time. It's weird to see the celebrities kind of positioned as they're just like you and me instead of like this kind of unattainable thing that we just need to pay attention to and kind of gawk at. Yeah, exactly. So this is already sort of like a media and cultural norm, I would say, is sort of trying to find ways to leverage authenticity to bolster public personalities. Now, it's really interesting the way it took root in the influencer industry,

because in the influencer industry's early years, a lot of the sort of first generation of influencers, if you will, a lot of them were talking, you know, about who they were and how they got to where they were. And, you know, I just fell into this because I got laid off and blah, blah, blah. That story was true for a lot of these people, you know, they weren't constructing this down on your luck story necessarily. They really had gotten laid off and they really did sort of were surprised by the early advertisers who offered them money and things like that. But then that narrative just like implanted itself in the industry and has refused to quit 15 years on, even though being an influencer is obviously like something that people strategize

and aspire to be now. No, you're not just falling into it anymore. You know, we know, we get it. We know what it is that that early generation who did kind of fall into it, that narrative just became locked in as like, we are turning to social media to pursue our interests and communicate about who we are and live our passions and things like that. And that has been just like so persistent, even despite all of the stories that have come forward over the last, you know, decade plus about how this is a, this is an industry, you know, this is, this is not just people being me and having fun. You know, there is a lot of like strategy behind it.

Also, the work of being an influencer is extremely difficult. There's a lot of inequalities baked into this industry. You know, we have seen all of this, but that narrative is just so persistent. Part of the reason for that is simple in that people love to aspire, you know, it's nice to sort of have, to sort of believe in a dream, even if it's not necessarily attainable or even real. And the other part of it, the more sort of complicated end is this sort of transformation of authenticity into an industrial construction, which I get into in the book. And that is how the early sort of players,

so, you know, the, the content creators and influencers, the brands, the marketing agencies, sort of, once they recognize that the reason that audiences were flocking to these creators is because of their seemingly authentic nature, then that became the thing that they had to commodify. And they had to keep the pipe of authenticity flowing so that they could continue to build this business and everyone could continue to make money. So they had to start, you know, trying to measure authenticity, trying to pinpoint it, shape it, cultivate it, and sell it. And so the performance of authenticity in this space becomes dependent on what advertisers and marketers need in any given moment and the changing nature of the platforms, the tools that they make available to communicate who you are. And so, you know, I talked to a couple of people for my book who had quit the influencer industry, like, you know, people who had had built a thriving business and were, you know, doing really well financially. And initially, you know, we're feeling very creatively fulfilled by their work, but then ultimately decided to

quit. You know, the details of their reasons vary, but the consistent thing across these stories was a resistance to the shifting monetizable nature of authenticity. So these people who I interviewed who quit, ultimately the breaking point came when the reigning industrial definition of authenticity was paradoxically not something that felt actually authentic to them. And so I had people say, when the industry pivoted to video and I had to start coming on Instagram stories and portray myself as raw and authentic in that way of just chit-chatting with no makeup, that actually didn't feel right to me. I did not feel comfortable with that. That is not how I want to communicate. So I'm going to quit. A lot of sort of variations on that story and also how these sort of changing technological affordances and, you know, the norms and expressing yourself also sort of opened the door wider to more audience feedback.

And that, of course, becomes a problem for influencers as well when they are just kind of dealing with this immense amount of input every day from the audience. And they say, you know, I can't deal with this anymore. This is not an authentic way for me to be, even though this is the valuable version of authenticity at this time. That's so fascinating. And especially when you talk about the shifts in the platforms and things like that, obviously that is something I've talked to a number of people about in this moment,

as Twitter seems to be on a downward trajectory, and that's kind of the only big text platform left. Everything else is kind of visual or video like Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. And there's also a growing pressure now to kind of for people who do podcasts to start doing video as well and putting it on YouTube instead of just, you know, out on the audio feeds. So, yeah, I think that is a very real pressure that I definitely understand. Does it feel authentic to you, you know, to be filming these interviews, you know? Exactly. Yeah, it wouldn't, right? Like, obviously, we can see each other right now, but the video doesn't go anywhere. I only share the audio and I wouldn't want to do video all

the time. So yeah, it's I understand that feeling that you're describing, I guess. Yeah. I understand that feeling that you're describing, I guess. Obviously, you've talked about the involvement of companies like RewardStyle. You talked about the platforms. You talked about the agencies that kind of like a key part of advertising and marketing strategies, as many companies and brands are, you know, not only developing their own accounts and their own kind of personal voices on their various social media accounts, but also, you know, as you say, working with these influencers to do brand deals with them to get them to promote particular things. Like, how does that shift from people posting on social media to, okay, now there's this massive industry that is measuring all these posts, that is looking for the best way to kind of get these brands messages out there and paying kind of massive deals with these very popular influencers in order to help them do that. So I think, again, to return to the early years of

this time of economic turmoil, I think that made brands more open to the idea of exploring these new platforms because of these economic circumstances. You know, if everything was going great, they probably would have been a lot more resistant to saying, okay, now I have to adapt to social media. What is that? What is Instagram? But everything wasn't going great. So they said, okay, let's take a look at what's going on here. And then things just really started to take off from there. And we see the early changes or the early impacts of the influencer industry in these cultural industries that were already in a lot of turmoil. So if we look again at the magazine industry, which I was working in at the time, and I read about in the book, and the fashion industry, and also, you know, journalism

and, you know, news production more broadly, these were all industries of cultural production that were struggling mightily at this moment. The people who were working in them, so, you know, aspiring writers and reporters, aspiring designers, all kinds of people were also some of the early adopters of platforms like Instagram. And so we see these industries start to sort of reckon with the power of bloggers and the power of Instagrammers, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there's a lot of like really hilarious press from like 2008, 2009, 2010 about like, oh, the bloggers are taking over, but the bloggers are, you know, taking over the tents at fashion week and what's going on? And we see like these older cultural industries have to adjust to this era of social media and they start to sort of adjust their strategies sooner. And so we see if we look

to these sort of cases of, you know, the fashion industry or the magazine industry, we can see how, again, 10 plus years ago, they were looking to, okay, who's influential online right now? Like who has the biggest readership on their blog? Who has lots of followers on Instagram? We are going to reward them for that. And we're going to give them jobs or we're going to give them product. We're going to use them in some way. And same with the journalism space. Twitter obviously became huge. Blogging was obviously a huge force in news production and, you know, and it became like, oh, wow, this person has a lot of followers on Twitter and, you know, we need to write articles that with headlines that

are going, you know, get traction on social media. And again, in the fashion industry, like we see this close monitoring of the metrics of content, you know, so who is reacting to this dress and who is able to sell this dress and how is it selling through in these Instagram campaigns? So in these early years, we already see the sort of adoption of the surveillance really of what is going on in the influencer space sort of broadly understood and then sort of taking that information and adjusting the cultural production in these other arenas accordingly. So this has been going on for a long time. And that is what actually got me interested in this as a research area, because I saw

how the early influencer industry was providing this feedback that was reshaping how information and culture were produced. Now, as the industry has changed and grown, and again, these boundaries have blurred as technology has changed, as we are all more connected to these ever-changing platforms. And now I think in the last few years, more and more people are sort of starting to notice how the influencer ethos of cultivate an audience on social media and leverage it for economic and social rewards has sort of infiltrated our daily lives, our politics, our other cultural industries that we interact with, other experiences that we interact with, you know, how restaurants have changed and museums have changed and politics and, you know, so,

so much has sort of taken what's going on out there with influencers and use that information to reshape how they work. It's both fascinating and like concerning as well to kind of see how that has developed and how these pressures have kind of, you know, are not just among people who are kind of, you know, trying to sell their lifestyles basically, you know, as this kind of became their career, but now, you know, become something that's so essential to just so many other things. I wonder, you know, talking about that and talking about how, you know, this influencer industry is kind of spread and how there's kind of a growing pressure for more people to, you know, be thinking about this and be engaged with this. There's another

side of the influencer industry, of course, it's not just the selling things, but as you were saying earlier, there's also a lot of pressure that comes with it. There's potential exploitation from commercial actors. There is also the difficulties of, you know, having to post so much, the potential mental health effects that comes with that, managing relationships with followers and all those sorts of things. How do you see kind of that side of the influencer industry and the pressures that that places on those people and those individuals as they are engaging in this kind of making this their profession basically. Yeah. So in order to successfully perform authenticity, and again, they are performing it. It doesn't mean that they're lying about everything that they do, but it is a performance that influencers have to carefully construct and they have to do it in a

way that pleases their advertisers and their audiences and the opaque algorithms that privilege particular types of content and things like that influencers are entirely reliant on because they need the visibility and the numbers to continue to build their audience and to continue to get the brand deals that they rely on. And so doing this is a really taxing, ever-changing dance. There is a lot of uncertainty in the work of being an influencer. They have to expend a tremendous amount of energy just trying to suss out what is going on with the platform on any given day. So creating the content is an enormous amount of work as it is. So, you know, creating the right video editing, especially in this time that we're in now of

video being dominant, like filming yourself is really difficult. You know, you make one little slip up and you got to start again and planning your content, shooting it, editing it, getting it posted, blah, blah, blah. That's a tremendous amount of work in and of itself. But that is almost like ancillary and what I'm talking about to all the other work that they have to do. So there is the work of, again, trying to suss out what's going on on the platform on any given day, because there's basically no transparency between the platforms and the influencers and all of us as users, you know, there's no transparency. There's always a focus on the algorithm, right? And what the algorithm is doing now,

how it's changed, what it's promoting, how you can like adjust your content in order to like appeal to the algorithm or get the algorithm to boost it. I remember these conversations about YouTube and you'd always hear YouTubers talking about the algorithm and what was going on there. But even recently with the changes at Twitter, you know, people were talking about, you know, what is kind of Twitter boosting these days, because things have changed as Elon Musk has taken over. And I remember Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter and kind of looks into this a lot, was kind of experimenting with what worked on Twitter now and like what kind of got things boosted and promoted in, you know, whatever their algorithmic feed is called these days. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's something that people are always

paying attention to, because it's so important, especially if, you know, I guess your income is dependent on these platforms kind of boosting you and treating you in such a way where you're going to be in front of a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, we've all had that experience, I think, as users of opening up our apps of choice one day and thinking like, what am I looking at? Where did this come from? I'm seeing all this stuff that I've never seen before. People I'm not following. What you just said reminded me of that moment a few months ago when the dye workwear guy became the main character at Twitter. He is super interesting and creates all this really thoughtful and like historically grounded fashion content. But suddenly like Twitter is just promoting him to like everybody. And he's

getting like thousands of new followers. And then also with that comes an influx of harassment and bad faith people who are, you know, following and engaging with you in a really negative way and, and all of that. So there is just so much unpredictability with this. And it's sort of unnerving enough to all of us who are just users when you wake up and your feed is like totally different. But yeah, imagine if your livelihood was dependent on that. And then it becomes a real panic situation. And again, there's no one that you can like call. There's no HR, like customer service really at these platforms that an influencer can call and say, Hey, you know, what's going on, but it's not working today. You know, I know Instagram recently introduced like a

paid tier where you do get access, you know, to someone, but that's bananas to me. And also the fact that it's taken so long to even offer that like little crumb. I mean, it's just like, why do we put up with this? I mean, I know, I know why, but it's, but it's just mind boggling how I guess I resigned to putting up with this and how these platforms are able to get away with it. But yeah, so influencers have to spend a tremendous amount of time trying, you know, there's a lot of like folk theories of like the algorithm and like, what's it doing now? And, and this is another challenge of working as an influencer is there is not a lot of like professional sort of cohesion or identity, like shared identity or solidarity because influencers do kind of work independently.

I mean, they have many of the higher tier ones, I guess, might have a small team or, you know, things like that. But it's not like a bunch of influencers are all like working together every day. And so they're kind of on their own. And so, you know, influencers will sometimes, you know, try to reach out to each other, you know, they'll try to sort of form like support groups almost like, what's working for you or, you know, there was that moment years ago when the pods was a thing and it was like,

oh, the influencers are getting together in these pods and they're all agreeing to like each other's content to boost visibility and things like that. And then the platforms crack down and say like, oh, that's inauthentic behavior. And it's like, well, it feels pretty authentic to me as a person who's struggling to make a living. I feel like a few years ago, there was a big focus on hype houses and things like that as well, right? Getting these people all together. And then there were stories that came out about the exploitation and stuff that happened in some of those, you know, houses and whatnot. So yeah, I think it's always something that is difficult. I wonder, you know, could not go to their

locations for shooting, you know, really glamorous content and things like that. And they were kind of at home like everybody else. They continued to resonate with their audiences, I think, because more than they had been in a long time, their experience was actually a bit more similar and shared than it had been for years. Everyone was just kind of dealing with this same sort of scary moment and the same, you know, having to be at home situation and all of that. That shifted to the, you know, reigning industrial definition of authenticity that pushed things even more toward the chit-chat, the seemingly off-the-cuff, you know, video content. Obviously TikTok, that is when TikTok really gained a foothold in the U.S. and many influencers tried to move to TikTok and many, you know,

new up and coming influencers kind of found their footing on TikTok. And that was, you know, that moment. And also in the early months as well, you know, affiliate marketing, like reward style and things like that, they did really well. You know, they had no competition from brick and mortar. Everyone was buying everything online for the most part. And they did quite well during that time. And I think the pandemic showed that despite massive changes to people's daily rhythms and routines, that the influencer industry could continue to adapt and survive and actually grow and actually recruit more people to want to be a part of it. Again, because people were home and it's like, maybe I'll mess around with TikTok and see what happens. Another, you know, sort of totally different aspect of what happened during the pandemic. So first we had, you know, not just

the pandemic going on, but also, you know, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor's murders happened around that time. And then the fallout, the massive protests, the sort of public conversations about, you know, persistent racism and inequalities, you know, that are sort of baked into institutions. And in the influencer industry that, you know, became a really public and sort of pertinent conversation as well. Sort of prior to that time, you know, there have always been inequalities baked into this industry. Actual comprehensive data of the industry is really difficult to come by. But from interviewing people, you know, over years, it has become clear that, you know,

gender inequalities and racial inequalities and class inequalities are sort of baked into the space. And it's something that influencers sometimes sort of whispered about with each other. You know, it was something that was kind of a little bit talked about internally, but not a lot. And then in that context of 2020, that became a much more public conversation. And brands, again, realizing that they needed to meet the moment in order to continue to be a viable partner and sort of not totally reviled in the public eye, they had to sort of, you know,

adjust their messaging and practices as well. So in some ways, some good came of it because some brands, you know, adjusted their pay policies, for example, and, you know, making commitments to always pay in money, for example, and not just free product, committing to more diverse casting and campaigns, things like that. So there were some like steps in the right direction, but that also was sort of, you know, it was like brands and marketers kind of like just went far enough to not be reviled without going like really far and really sort of rebuilding from the ground up and in like a consistent way, you know, it was like a moment. And now the conversation has sort of faded from public view again. But that definitely, that was a moment of change for the industry as well. And the other

big change that happened in the context of the pandemic was the sort of rise of influencers who were claiming to be experts on a variety of topics. So this has always been sort of a part of the influencer industry. Again, if we look back to like the fashion and, you know, there's sort of travel and things like that. Anyone was sort of posing as an expert 10, 15 years ago, you didn't have to have like formal training or whatever. And that was part of the controversy at the time of this person, you know, doesn't really know fashion or, you know, whatever. But the stakes were a little bit different, I would say, when it was a some, you know, an untrained person commenting on, on fashion or travel or, you know, sort of untrained people commenting on a public health crisis or, you know, the political environment of the time and things like that. And so that has been extremely consequential for the industry because it really ushered in this sort of new era of the industry of

being like really focused on sort of like ideas and approaches to the world. And, you know, in the book, I say like, it's about what to think rather than what to buy now. And it's sort of brought in this time that is, we're almost getting acclimated to this moment where like anyone can sort of tell us about any sort of topic and they're able to monetize their personal brands and monetize their audiences sort of, you know, positioning themselves as an expert on healthcare or, you know, the intentionally vague wellness term or, you know, in these political subjects and things like that. And that is, you know, very worrisome to me and something that we as, I think, you know, we as a society and those who are actually

working in the industry really need to confront and act on before things spiral, you know, even more so than they already have. Yeah. Because I guess like on one hand, you did have like a lot of doctors who were gaining a lot of kind of followers or whatnot during the pandemic as they were kind of educating people about what was going on. But then on the other hand, you had a lot of anti-vaxxers and people like that who were also gaining a lot of followings as they were, you know, pushing out alternative views on these things. I also find it interesting that, you know, I feel like for a long time there was a view or, you know, kind of commonly accepted knowledge or just

approach was probably not comment very much on politics because you might alienate some of your, you know, potential followers and then that wouldn't be good for advertisers or whatever, or the brands who are working with you. But now it feels like increasingly you can't really ignore the politics that is kind of going on. And if you're not saying anything, then that's probably going to be noticed. Yeah, absolutely. For so many years in the in the early years of the influencer industry, yeah, the expectation was don't say anything that might alienate anyone, because you want to build, you know, as large of an audience as you can, and you want to, and this is still true, you have to be brand safe, as they call it, you know, as large of an audience as you can and you want to, and this is still true,

you have to be brand safe as they call it. You know, you need to, your feed needs to be a place where brands feel comfortable inserting their message. And so for a long time, that was like, don't say anything political because brands won't like that. Then the environment shifted, you know, and it's like, you have to, I think because of the seriousness and severity of the things that we were confronting, you know, but also because of the shifting sort of like technological dynamics of the industry as well, where it's like, we have to be chatting, we have to be casual. And with that comes sharing what you think about politics and sharing where do you stand on the protests that are going on?

And have you gotten your vaccine yet? And why or why not? And if you did, tell us about the side effects and tell us about your whole experience. Let us see you do it. And yeah, so there was just a tremendous shift in that direction as well. And again, many influencers, that is another moment where I think a lot of influencers too dropped off, like people who had already sort of established themselves, then met that moment and said, no, this is not authentic to me. So I am not going to do this anymore. So yeah, it's really sort of opened the floodgates in that sense.

Yeah, that's a really good point about kind of, you know, the shifting nature that being more chatty, but then you also need to share your opinions on other things. I'm wondering, you know, as we start to kind of wind down this conversation, you know, you talked about how these platforms, this industry kind of keeps growing, right? It needs to keep kind of bringing more people into it. And in the book, you talked about how, you know, you see more of a shift in kind of the terminology away from influencer toward creator as a more kind of explode overnight. And it's a very different kind of way of building a platform and potentially building influence than maybe what we saw on some other platforms in the past. So how do you see this kind of continuing as these platforms and as this industry wants to kind of bring more people into it and keep kind of expanding that. Yeah. So I think the shift to creator as a term is, it's like really fraught because I totally understand why some influencers are pushing in that direction because the word influencer has become sort of like a dirty word almost.

It kind of brings to mind someone who's like just trying to sell you something or just trying to get you to believe something or act in a certain way. And there's a number of people who work in the space who say like, I'm an entrepreneur. I do a lot more than that. I'm a creator. And I totally get that. But as a term, you know, it is very vague and it really does. I think it benefits platforms and other bodies who are not us personally. If more and more people, you know, if we can think of ourselves as creators,

and especially in this moment of platforms like TikTok that do seemingly pluck people out of obscurity in a way that Instagram doesn't or hasn't done in a really long time, there is this sort of endless potential of like, I'm a creator, you're a creator. Tomorrow I could have this enormous audience and my whole life will change. And so I better, you know, invest some amount of time and energy into creating content for these platforms because you never know. And again, that really speaks to how these sort of fundamental structural pieces that made the industry possible, you know, 15 plus years ago, have not really changed that much. The world has obviously changed tremendously. Technology has changed. A lot has changed. But this sort of basic principles of

economic uncertainty, a sense of professional precarity, a sense of uncertainty about the future and the sort of pressure to rely on yourself and figure out how to survive on your own. And also the sense of social distrust, sense of sort of powerlessness or resignation to the sort of monopolistic billionaires that are seemingly taking over more and more like functions of our lives, these sort of fundamental, negatively tinged feelings of uncertainty really haven't changed. And so that I think keeps the appeal of becoming a successful content creator influencer. It keeps going and it continues to sort of lock people into this sort of loop of, I have to find ways to create a safety net for myself. So like, maybe I should start posting on TikTok, you know, even though

I'm a vet or something like that, or like, even though I am a school teacher or something like I should start making content on TikTok because you never know. And so that sort of fundamental uncertainty and the economic reality that many people, even super educated professionals, are living paycheck to paycheck in many cases. And so that kind of keeps gas in the tank of this industry. Yeah. And you can very clearly see how so many of these platforms do depend on kind of constantly having people who are making content for them who maybe don't expect to take off or maybe are doing so in the hopes that they are going to kind of replicate the pathways of one of the influencers or creators that they follow and will kind of join those ranks.

But obviously, you know, there are way more people trying to do that than there are people who ever kind of succeed and have it become their incomes. And I'm wondering, you know, reflecting that and kind of, you know, recognizing what you're saying about the economic precarity that that is based in this, the kind of potential exploitation that happens in this industry, like what is the right approach to try to improve these things? Do we need more government regulation? Do we need more organizing by influencers to try to kind of demand better treatment? Or, you know, do we need to kind of reconsider how this industry just works at a much more base and fundamental level? Yeah, so I think that change has to come at multiple levels. You know, I think the biggest work has to be done, you know, for better or for worse by the people working in the industry themselves.

You know, those working in the industry need to recognize where we are at sort of fundamentally, you know, we have like, yes, it has been shown that this industry can make a lot of money. It has been shown that, you know, it's a great tool for getting brands messages out there and driving sales and all of that. You know, some influencers are able to sort of make it in an entrepreneurial way and have a thriving business and things like that. There are a whole lot of other people who are not and who are essentially providing free labor for both brands and platform companies and people who are being exploited. And even the people who have made it are still working in this really uncertain space where everything can be ripped away from them

tomorrow. And it's very taxing mentally, you know, it's taxing on people's mental health. We see what's going on and we've seen now the direction of like the people who are, you know, pushing misinformation, people who are portraying, you know, really harmful content. We talk about, you know, self-harm content and body image and all this stuff. Like we, there is enough information out there where people in the industry can understand what, where the industry is at. They have a choice to make, you know, are we going to steer this industry into a more pro-social future, which would look like better, you know, worker organization on the, on the part

of influencers. So they professional solidarity building demand making as, especially as far as pay equity and transparency, I think are huge. Are we going to be more transparent about the work that we do and, you know, educate the public about like, what actually is this, you know, and sort of explain to people, like, what an influencer is, how they work with brands, you know, sort of like how the advertising industry had to make a case for itself, you know, in its early years of existence and growing and platforms to need to have a way of, you know, flagging content. So people need to, people need to have a better understanding of the context, you know, when they are viewing an influencer's content.

This is not just a person that I happened to stumble upon who makes like funny videos or whatever. This is a person whose job it is to create content. And with that means like they have, they are sort of beholden to these other groups and we need to have like a better basic public understanding about what the influencer industry is. And so the people working in the industry at brands, at the major agencies, influencers themselves, they have to choose, are we going to shepherd this industry into a more sort of professionalized, organized future where we kind of sort of shape the industry into a sort of more structured cultural industry

like many other cultural industries? Or are we going to continue to just sort of like try to scrape by and like survive on our own or make sure our business doesn't fail or, you know, our agency doesn't fail and turn a blind eye to the many problems of this space and cross our fingers and hope we don't burn it all to the ground. But I think that making the latter choice, you know, will have, you know, extremely detrimental effects. We have already seen, we've already gotten a taste of those. You know, when we look at what has happened with messaging around COVID, what has happened around political messaging and, you know, how difficult it can be to sort of suss out the, you know, truth from fiction on these platforms or sponsored from not sponsored, we've already gotten a taste of that. And I don't think it really benefits anyone to allow that to

sort of go on out of control. And so it's really incumbent on the people working in the industry to shepherd it into a better future. But then of course, there's also, I think there is a role, you know, for regulation there, especially when it comes to the transparency between platforms and their users, not just influencers, but all of us who have little to no understanding about how the algorithms work and why we're seeing that what we see, what kind of data is being collected on us, what are they doing with it, that kind of thing. There needs to be much more transparency and much more autonomy given to the user about more control on the, for the users about how their experience is being sort of curated for them. And then it sounds throwaway, but I don't think it is. I think on the part of the user as well, if you're just a person who is, you know, scrolling and enjoying or not enjoying content, influencer content,

I think that little changes on the part of the user can make a difference. At least, you know, I like, I would like to see larger structural and collective change. But in the meantime, users can choose to not look at content that they think is, you know, that content that is making them feel bad, you know, content that they can suss out is, you know, providing money to brands that they don't agree with or things like that. You know, you can unfollow, you can look away, and you also can advocate for yourself on a political level as well and sort of and recognize that you are a part of this as well. If you're posting content, you are part of the reason that these platform companies have so much value because you are helping keep users there, too, because your followers want to see your content and you're spending time on the apps as well. So, yeah, recognition on the part of

users of the sort of amount of power that they do have in this situation and sort of advocating for themselves and acting in their own best interest for their own, you know, well-being would be helpful. Yeah. Don't be scared to block. Don't be scared to unfollow. I do that all the time. You know, it can make the experience much better if you choose the right way to use them. And, you know, I think you can very clearly see how obviously these companies have benefited a lot from this industry and they probably have certain incentives

not to change it a whole lot. And that's where, you know, there needs to be pressure from organized influencers who create this stuff, but also potentially from government to kind of push them to do the right thing. Emily, it's been great to chat with you. It's been great to learn more about the book and the influencer industry more generally. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you. I had a great time.

Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry, The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media and a research affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication. You can follow Emily on Twitter at atemilyadh. You can follow me at atparismarks, and you can follow the show at at techwontsaveus. TechWontSaveUs is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.