The Pomp Podcast - 282: Taylor Lorenz on Internet Culture

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Taylor Lorenz is a technology reporter at The New York Times covering internet culture. Before joining The Times, she was a technology and culture writer at The Atlantic and The Daily Beast. In this conversation, we discussed what internet culture is, how memes are the message, the business behind the largest influencers, how content houses work, what exactly is happening on TikTok, and the dark side of an influencer's fame.  =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link http://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today.  ===============================  Pomp writes a daily letter to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pomp.substack.com

This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Taylor Lorenz is a technology reporter at the New York Times covering internet culture. Before joining the Times, she was a technology and culture writer at The Atlantic and The Daily Beast. In this conversation, we discuss what internet culture is, how memes are the message, The business behind the largest influencers, how content houses work, what exactly is happening on TikTok, and the dark side of an influencer's fame. I really enjoyed this conversation, and Taylor didn't disappoint. But before we get into the episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Also, don't forget, I write a daily letter every morning to over 45,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pomp.substack.com or go click the link that's in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Taylor. I think you guys will enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or

follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Taylor here with us. Thanks much for taking time to do this. Yeah, thanks for having me. For sure. I feel like you have one of the coolest jobs on the internet because you get to sit and write about internet culture. Let's just start off with kind of your background and how do you get to that position where we're kind of you, you are the voice of the internet culture to some degree. That's very kind. It is definitely a dream job. I always tell teenagers that reach out like it's, you know, a job that you get to spend all day on YouTube or TikTok or Zoom now. But I got into media actually about a decade ago

through Tumblr. In 2009, after graduating college, I was just working a bunch of temp jobs and got into Tumblr. And that's kind of what got me into media, doing social media. I spent most of my career running social media accounts for brands and writing on the side. And then about three years ago, I transitioned to writing about this stuff full time. Got it. And so as you think about like internet culture itself, maybe just start with like, what does that mean to you, given you spend so much time understanding it? Yeah. You know, I think internet culture is like what an internet culture reporter, I think is going to be one of those job titles. That's like webmaster where it kind of will probably seem irrelevant because every year i feel like the

internet um is just more ingrained in our lives especially now in the midst of a pandemic we're literally living online um so i kind of think of it as culture coverage um with a tech bent um my technical title at the new york times is technology reporter and i definitely love tech and um you know look at things sort of look at how people socialize and how culture moves through these platforms like any any kind of social platform that can be you know something that's made to be a social platform like facebook instagram twitter um or something that you know another type of technology that people are just using to connect and socialize like google docs or zoom or things like that yeah and it feels almost like you know the internet culture is actually really

become, it used to drive culture. Now it's almost becoming the culture, right? There's less and less of a difference between the two to some degree. I think there's almost no distinction. I mean, I do think that you have some people that are still kind of offline in certain ways, but you know, it's even true for older people. I mean, if you think of boomer culture, it's very driven by the internet. Old people love memes more than anyone. You know, boomers are very online in other ways, usually email. So yeah, it's definitely kind of just culture at this point, especially pop culture. I mean, the areas that I cover in terms of like entertainment or music or movies, Netflix, it's, it's, yeah, it's just culture coverage, which is why I'm on the style section

at the New York Times, which is our, you know, we sort of cover lifestyle and culture and things like that, rather than being on like the business side, where I'm covering more of the business of tech companies. For sure. And one of my favorite sayings right now is like the memes are the message, right? Kind of taking the bent of like the medium is the message. Maybe talk a little bit just about how you see, whether it is memes or GIFs and things like that, how they're infiltrating a lot of society. Yeah, well, I think as a society, we're moving towards visual communication. And that's been true for a while. I mean, memes have been around for, I think, 20 years. I went to some retrospective at the Museum of Moving Image in New York on memes and I

was honestly surprised I think the first meme they had was like what all your base belong to us or something I was like literally from the year 2000 so you know the concept of memes as we understand them is these kind of like internet pieces of content communicating a message have been around for a while And, you know, we're also using platforms that allow us to express ourselves more visually, you know, like Instagram stories, all the creative tools we have there, Snapchat, now TikTok. You can express yourself in this very visual way, which lends itself to memes. And just as things travel around the Internet, they gain kind of this shared understanding or knowledge or humor to them. And so I think it's just easier to kind of share and riff off people's thoughts or content

or ideas. And it's, you know, it's just easier to do that every, I can't speak, it's more and more easy to do that every day. For sure. And it feels like you of all people, like if somebody said to me, who has the best pulse on the younger generations on a lot of these platforms, like I think you are probably the first person that comes to mind for many people. So maybe let's just start with going, um, how you think about each platform for the younger

generation, right? So there's Snapchat, there's TikTok, uh, there's Twitter to some, um, you know, bit, but just like, how do you think about how they're using each one of those platforms differently, um, in comparison to each other? Sure. Um, I mean, I guess I would say the main difference that i see with young people is just the extent to which they use it i mean if you think about instagram um sorry um if you think about instagram a lot of millennials or older users treat instagram um they treat the product sort of the way that that they understood the product when they initially got on it sometimes like in 2013 2014 when it was really primarily a photo sharing app um whereas younger people that's really sort of where they they it's like

the core of where they express their identity and their friendships and stuff like that so it's much more of a communication app um i mean snapchat is another one that i think older users kind of stopped embracing but it's still like a primary messaging app for a lot of young people um and tiktok i kind of compare a lot to twitter actually because it is a place where um especially young people will go to express their ideas it's almost like a mini youtube in a sense that you can make these short videos um they can get surfaced and go viral um but you know you can also live stream you can also comment you can also dm um it has a lot of other kind of capabilities too um but sort of like twitter it's like where i think while a lot of older people might go to

twitter to express their thoughts on maybe the president or something uh younger kids will tend to do that on TikTok. Yeah. A lot of them are on Twitter too, but they usually tweet about like Stan's, you know, Billie Eilish or something. For sure. And it feels like, you know, there's an entire culture on these platforms, right? So like TikTok is a great example where there's obviously the TikTok influencers, there are certain ways that people use it. And you wrote an article about even the way that people use certain functionality. And one of them was like the live streaming while people are sleeping uh maybe talk a little bit about just like that seems like such like a nuanced use case for a platform where you know most older people would

like be horrified at the idea of that whereas um some of these influencers had really kind of understood like hey this is a unique way to use the platform yeah it's funny so back in 2015 I was obsessed with this live streaming app called uh you now and um I would make my friends go on all the time it never honestly really took off but um there was there were you now influencers some of them became users that are now tick tockers but um you know it was another live streaming platform where the benefit was to sort of stream as long as possible but obviously it's very hard to fill content um for that amount of hours then there was this um this trend that started called sleep squad um that took off among people and it kind of became this thing that

that people did, which is live stream themselves sleeping. And then now we see it on Twitch and TikTok. And it's kind of a thing. It's kind of a meme and it's a joke. It's like, can I, hey, how many followers can I get, you know, when I'm sleeping, but it's also a way to like go viral because it's so funny. And because what it does is provide these sort of pop-up chat rooms. So it's like it's kind of like a lot of people also just stream an inanimate object and what they're doing is really just they want to get that like chat going and then people just start connecting and chatting and having this whole thing sort of within this pop-up chat on the live stream and so that's

the appeal for users that are watching it it's not that yeah it's a dark room someone's sleeping and that's kind of funny for a second but you're also able to kind of like chat um you know with these other people in a way that you wouldn't you know have access to so it's sort of like these little ephemeral chat rooms um yeah and it seems like uh as part of that these applications aren't being used solely for the videos right so like the tick tocks uh for example you can sit and uh i think it's really unique how they put the platform together in terms of you kind of just scroll and and continue to see video after video after video And if you're just using it for the first couple of times, like that's kind of the surface use case. But the comments and kind of all of these subcultures within the platform aren't very obvious. Is that something going back to like the younger demographic is just all of their friends are doing it and they kind of learn it by talking to each other? Or is it something that it's just actually like the time on the application itself drives you to use some of the other features?

You know, that's something that I would love, like data from Instagram on, for instance, I wrote about like comment culture on Instagram a couple years ago. And it's hugely driven by teenagers. I mean, if you go in the comments of a lot of stuff, it's like meme accounts, people trying to get, you know, publicity, and then a lot of teenagers or young people, primarily. I mean of course there's still like you know other it's not just teenagers that comment but but they really do engage in that way um and I don't know I you know I don't know if that just has to I don't know if it's driven specifically by time spent but I imagine part of it is the culture like tagging friends responding to things um and I think a lot of young you know stars on Instagram also have more interesting comment sections um yeah it feels like you know in Instagram is, I think, a perfect example where you see the comments, but then there's also like a whole nother layer of usage where people take the photos or videos that are posted,

they DM them into these groups and they have these group chats around that. And it's like that conversation is more protected. It's private. It's with that kind of a selected group of friends, but that is almost the same type of thing that happens in the comments to some degree. Yeah, I mean, I think both are places to socialize. I mean, the benefit of DM is that you can share links. You know, you have a set group of people. I hear of people meeting in the comments a lot. And I think there's like somebody that was saying that they met friends actually in the comments of the comments by celeb page. Because there's all these like comments by accounts now that are really popular too, that sort of highlight some of the best parts of the

comment section so I think people are kind of going there to make connections find people with similar interests and then hop into group chats there's so many interest based group chats you know that people are involved in on Instagram and I get added to them a lot and I love it and so I just yeah I just think it's another way to socialize I think that you know a lot of users that are maybe more adults I don't know someone I mean I know some moms that have Instagram group chats but i think they're also more likely to use things like imessage um yes speaking of moms one of the the trends that just blows me away is uh on tick tock these kids who are pulling

their parents in especially now because most of them are home and their parents are growing like pretty big audiences uh simply by dancing in videos with their kids right similar to kind of i think how the vine stars all made each other famous now kids are just doing it with like the closest adult to them who just happens to be their middle-aged parent. I know. I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about sort of like how it's all family TikTok now because everyone's involving every member of their family. I saw a girl just this morning celebrating. She was giving her father a cake because he had 100,000. So yeah, it's been fun. I think everybody, you know, when you like an influencer, you like a certain person on TikTok,

you like to kind of follow everyone in their orbit, whether that's their close friends or their family. Their family usually are the ones that have the kind of like behind the scenes access to them and post, you know, funny videos. You know, a bunch of the big TikTok influencers have kind of transformed their whole family into influencers like Addison, Ray, her whole family, and Charlie D'Amelio, obviously, like Mark D'Amelio is like an influencer unto himself now. yeah and I guess part of that is so Charlie D'Amelio is I think one of the first ones that I saw where she's now got 50 million followers give or take the most followed person on the app yeah wow and and so she's famous her sister's famous her dad's famous and her mom's famous

right I mean literally the entire family and then they all got signed by UTA together like as a unit so maybe let's talk a little bit just about like the business behind a lot of this because it's, you know, it's kind of fun and games to see people post the content and grow, but there's really, really big businesses that are being built here. Just kind of at a high level, like how do you think about, you know, the commercialization or the business behind all of it? Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people sort of don't understand is the business behind it. And one, how much work it takes to grow that business. And two, the sort of like ancillary businesses that are built up around the influence industry. I mean, you mentioned

agents. A lot, you know, the big Hollywood agencies all have very robust digital divisions that sign, you know, people like the D'Amelio's hoping to turn them into essentially the next Kardashians or sort of grow, you know, grow their brand even bigger collectively. But then you also have all of these other people that support influencers. You know, you have kids that just make money essentially by helping influencers optimize their YouTube thumbnails and editing them in a certain way to get them clicks or you have you know somebody that runs a brand marketing platform that just partners brands with influencers there's like a lot of sort of businesses that are helped to sort of set up to help support the influencer economy it's not just like traditional entertainment

businesses like managers agents um you know acting coaches singing coaches a lot of these people have those people also in their orbit yeah it's it's crazy because i think um you know when you get into the game of hey just creating content's one thing but now all of a sudden we're going to start optimizing the thumbnail right we're actually going to uh strategically place you in videos with other influencers to cross promote accounts and and it almost feels like a lot of this uh loses the authenticity uh but the ones who are really good at it they're able to kind of hide the business a little bit behind um this how much of that is being driven by the kids themselves and like they want it to be a business versus they've got a family member or somebody near them who's a

little bit more uh professional or you know experience that's driving it yeah their family members absolutely are never more experienced than these kids these kids understand um monetization on digital platforms better than truly i i would say almost any digital marketing executive a lot of them um and if you look at people like david doberg or james charles right both of whom are very young influencers. You know, they're not teenagers. I think James is like 20 and David's 23 or something. You know, they are, they have teams around them, but they're incredibly adept at staying on top of the trends. You know, getting in early and promoting themselves on these new platforms, growing their audiences. And they really do want to make it a full-time career.

And that's, it's, you know, I would say being an influencer, content creator, whatever, you're essentially an entrepreneur right you're running your own small business often that that business is your personal brand but you know it can also just be an interest-based account that you run you know if you're a car vlogger and you just post about cars all day you know you can end up sort of running essentially a little content company about cars right and so I think like any small business owner you know these people work really hard they understand their business better than anyone. And, um, it's usually my it's, it's driven from them because, um, if you have some outside person, you know, that can help motivate you to a point, but it really has to come from

you if you want the businesses to succeed. Yeah. And would it be fair to say that a lot of these young kids, like this is the dream, right? When I was growing up, it was like, Hey, I want to go play in the NBA or play for professional sports. People maybe wanted to be like a traditional actor or musician. It feels like now there's a lot of these kids who are saying like, no, I actually want to be an influencer like that is something to aspire to be as a career yeah absolutely i think it's like the number one thing a lot of kids aspire to be i saw some stupid thing that was going around last year of like oh in some other country kids want to be an astronaut in america they want to be a youtuber and you know people share that and they sort of joke about it which

i get but you know if you're a youtuber well one that's that's the work that you're seeing modeled every day. When you log on the internet, you're following people that are talking about their job every day. These YouTubers are talking about what it's like to be a YouTuber, how they're making money. They'll give a behind the scenes tour of the factory that's developing their merch or things like that. So they're talking about that career in a really detailed way to kids in a way that honestly, a lot of kids don't have any clue what their parents do, but they deeply understand sort of like how an influencer business works. So that's part of it, I think, is why they think it's aspirational. It's the main version of work that they're seeing on the internet every day.

And then two, you know, there's a huge amount of autonomy that comes with running your own business. A lot of people mistake wanting to be an influencer with wanting fame. But a lot of these kids, what they want is, they want autonomy and they want to be able to run their own company based off their own interests. So if you can run a small business that gets you access to certain events, maybe because you're involved in some world, I'll use cars as another example, because I know this kid, I can't remember his name, but he's on YouTube. He's very into cars, right? In the past, maybe he would have been a car journalist, to be honest, but he makes all of these really cool driving videos. He gets to test cars before anyone else. He gets to work

with all these major car brands. That's a dream job, you know, and you own your income, you set your own hours, you have enormous flexibility. I can't imagine why you would want to do, you know, some entry level job instead of sort of owning your own thing. Yeah, it's almost like the barriers to entry are so low, because literally, you know, you've got a cell phone in your hand, can you record a video posted on one of these platforms? And if you're good at it, all of a sudden, you can gain the audience and it goes from there. And another piece that, you know, in conversations I have with people who are trying to understand this stuff, I always say like, this isn't new either, right? I mean, if you look at Oprah, Tony Robbins, like all of these people basically were

the influencers before we called them influencers. They just had to do it on different platforms. It took a lot more capital. And that, do most of these younger kids understand that kind of this isn't new? It's just in a new form factor? Or are they just so focused on what they're doing that they don't really kind of make the historical connection. Yeah, I mean, I think Oprah is different, because she's more of a traditional celebrity. And so there's all these sort of gatekeepers, right before getting there. And I don't think that she really owned her own IPM business from the start. Tony Robbins might be a better example. I mean, I think some people in certain careers, right, he's an entrepreneur, ultimately. So yeah, I think that what's

different is that, you know, it's people building themselves up on this digital platforms and sort of owning their followers. And you're right, that is not new. I mean, it's funny, when I did this story recently on agencies, I was talking to this guy from Abrams, which is a big sort of talent agency, and they were signing MySpace stars back in 2006. So I think it took a while for it to emerge. I mean, I got my start on Tumblr. And, you know, there were certainly other people that were very big on Tumblr at the time that I was that have sort of launched careers from that. But it's just, it's more pervasive now. I think, you know, every year kids are more and more sort of on the internet, these social platforms get more power. And so I think that it, it sort of progressed into

mainstream culture in a different way. Just the fact that I have a job covering this stuff, you know, I couldn't get a job. I tried for a long time to write about this stuff full time. And there really wasn't an audience, I would say until three years ago. So, you know, I think it's entering the mainstream in a different way. Yeah. Speaking of entering the mainstream, like how many of these kids want to stay on the digital platforms right so uh be the tiktok influencer or whatever versus they want to cross over into like traditional movies commercials television shows and things that maybe we think is more traditional media like do they actually want to cross over or is it they they shun that and they want to stay on the digital platforms only

um i don't think they think of themselves as like specific to platforms like a lot of kids that come up on TikTok, they have, I mean, they all have different career aspirations, but what they want is to own their own businesses and brands. I think that, you know, I was talking to this 18 year old TikTok creator recently, and he's been offered a, you know, potential show of his own. And he's just like, well, that's going to impede on my YouTube show, you know, and if you, and the YouTube show, you see direct benefits, you're, you're able to monetize that you get the ad money. You know, the people that watch become your followers and you grow. When you go on a TV network, first of all, it's hard for people to find, you know, unless it's a big enough show,

it's kind of not worth it. So I think it really depends. It also depends on whether these kids want to go into entertainment. Entertainment is really only a portion of the influencer economy, right? You have a lot of other people where, you know, their dream is to launch a fashion brand, right or you're a beauty influencer you really want to like productize yourself and launch your own beauty brand maybe that maybe that means like going on a fashion maybe project runway or something but ultimately like your goal isn't to be an actress or a singer um so i think for those you know the the

small portion that does want to be maybe a traditional hollywood person it's a huge it's a huge um step up to have a following and you'll definitely get in the door faster than people without a following But the majority of kids that I talk to, it's not that they want to stay on digital platforms forever, they just want to own their own thing. And I think they see as sometimes like doing these bigger deals with more traditional platforms as kind of like giving up some of that control. Yeah. And it's really interesting that you see them as entrepreneurs, right? Because I think that's like a very unique lens. And it would make sense that if you are that entrepreneur, you want to build the brands and kind of drive the business that you have, you don't want to go get distracted, right? So like that would make sense, but how do they actually make money,

right? So like, there's a whole bunch of things that I've heard, but like in your experience, what are the main revenue sources for somebody who's amassed one of these audiences on the digital platforms? Yeah, you know, kind of like every small business, they all have sort of a mix of different revenue streams. There's no one way that all influencers monetize. The primary way that people usually, the primary thing that people think of when they think of influencers is usually brand deals. The assumption is that influencers just make money by posting SpawnCon all day, sponsored content um that's not really true um certainly some influencers do make money from brand deals I mean most most influencers that that's a huge

portion of their revenue stream um but you know they're also making money on pre-roll ads for instance on YouTube merch has really emerged in the past I would say since 2018 really when banjo I came on the market and started working with a lot of the top youtubers um merch has become the the primary revenue driver i mean david dobrik for instance one of the most popular youtubers in the world makes hardly any money on youtube but he makes his money through selling merch and through this clothing brand that he's developed called clickbait um you know so launching your own um merchandise and product lines are really big so you'll sort of either license your name or work with a company to you

you know, develop a line, for instance, for Nordstrom, where you, you know, take a portion of that profit, or you develop your own product. For instance, this girl Gal Meets Glam, Julia Engel, she's a huge lifestyle influencer, developed this very sort of Southern unique style and launched her own clothing line. And it's now, you know, massively successful. I mean, she's still an influencer, but that's, that's the way she makes all of her money. She essentially runs a clothing brand. So you're seeing more and more of that, again, influencers are trying to keep control and they want to directly monetize their audience. They don't want to partner with someone or rely on some ad dollars that could go away tomorrow. A lot more of them too are charging

for exclusive behind the scenes access. So that could be charging people for close friends content on Instagram or setting up a Patreon, launching a podcast, having a newsletter where you give exclusive photos or videos, things like that. There's a million other things, but those are kind of all the the big ones and do they learn that from like seeing a kylie jenner go and create the um kind of the lip kit and her whole line of products or a kanye west really license his name essentially to create easies with adidas like are they seeing that and saying i basically want to do that in my own uh world or are these um you know again they're just not necessarily making that connection between what they're doing and what some of these much more traditional celebrities

i think that that influencers are pioneering that you know you see people like kylie jenner take that model because influencers pioneered that model you know growing this digital platform and then turning it into you know using it to launch a product or do you think i mean something like that like that that is classic sort of influencer monetization strategy um i think the really successful especially young celebrities are monetizing that way and copying these influencers um in terms of licensing i mean celebrities have always licensed their name so i think that's probably a more traditional business but you know you see even actresses now charging for close friends content you know that was something that was started by people on the internet so um

you know i i think it actually flows the other way more than you'd think um where you have these groups of people online pioneering new monetization strategies and then it sort of ladders up as bigger and bigger people adopt it yeah it almost feels like just like in technology innovations the necessity you know comes from necessity right they don't have the the big teams and stuff uh you've mentioned a couple of times the close friends instagram content i'm assuming most people listening don't know what that is uh and it's fascinating so maybe just talk a little bit about like how an influencer or celebrity uses that functionality on instagram to monetize sure um So, close friends is essentially this feature on Instagram where you can just

put post content on your Instagram stories just to a select group of people that you select. You know, influencers adopted it because it's just another way to get your content behind sort of a paywall. So, you know, people charge maybe, yeah, the influencer will charge maybe $3 a month. And if you pay that or you support them at that level on Patreon, you'll get access to those additional videos posted to Instagram stories that are only, you know, gated to close friends. I wrote a piece a couple years ago on like up and coming rappers and like sort of SoundCloud rappers and how they've pioneered monetizing every single feature on Instagram. And I think it's an example of this kind of like ground up, like, I guess, like these monetization

strategies where these these rappers are essentially charging for literally every single thing i mean they'll charge posts they'll charge for like they'll charge to comment um you know if you're a fan and you want me to comment like great you know um that's going to be five dollars from you whatever i mean if you think about it like cameo is kind of built off this right like asking for shout outs from certain celebrities um you know prior to cameo people were just negotiating these things on instagram so um yeah so i think that it's uh you know that that kind of those kind of monetization strategies are are definitely things that influencers have pioneered really people on the internet have pioneered i mean a lot of these rappers a lot of sex workers a lot

of other people that have been shut up shut out for more traditional forms of monetization have um developed these sort of other schemes that have been more widely adopted yeah and maybe talk a little bit about how these influencers like work together to grow their audiences so we saw you know the vine stars all lived in the same apartment complex pull each other in i've heard of instagram groups where like if we're all in the same group i post i dm it into the group everyone goes and likes and comments on it just like what do you see there and is that becoming more pervasive where people realize like hey let me team up with other influencers and really grow our audiences together Yeah, you know, it's, I would say people constantly underestimate collaboration

when it comes to growth. Because if you're collaborating with the right people, you're going to grow. And I think what you see is a lot of people have come up this way. I mean, I was a big fan of O2L, which was this YouTuber group back in the day, like 2012. And, you know, that was this essentially this group of guys that met at VidCon and decided to kind of all partner up and create videos together um you know essentially every day of the week in this collaborative channel and grew huge and um you know you see vlog squad you mentioned the vine generation like you have to kind of partner up and collaborate on content in general because just posting videos of yourself gets old you want people in your orbit um and if you can find sort

of other like-minded people it just it it makes your content more sticky and engaging you know um because even if i like you know you for instance um maybe i follow you on youtube and then you constantly have your friend joe in the video even if i'm not like a huge fan of joe i might just follow joe anyway because he's friends with you and so it's just kind of this way to grow your influence and also you know help others you know build up others and and they'll build up you yeah and so this then led into uh these hype houses or content houses like explain what these are and kind of like what the hell is going on with a bunch of teenagers all living in the same house yeah well again um this you know these have been around for almost a decade like the o2l house

the blog squad had a house you mentioned 1600 vine which was back in 2013 um this apartment complex that all these binders lived in so creators have always sort of lived together in these collaborative houses in mostly los angeles but they're kind of all over i mean the original Faye's house was in New York, I think, actually. So it's great to kind of live with people that you collaborate with. It provides more opportunity for content. Usually when you're coming up, you can't live in your own apartment. You can't live by yourself. So it's cheaper to live with other up and coming creators that have the same goals as you. You see this kind of thing happen in the comedy world, right? Or actors that start out living together. But I think with the TikTok

generation, they grew up seeing all of these collab houses on YouTube and wanting to emulate that lifestyle that, you know, as soon as they have any amount of money in clout, they want to move to LA and start something like the Hype House, for instance, which is this TikToker collective. Now you have the Sway House, you know, there's the Club House, which is, you know, a bunch of people that left the Hype House, and sort of, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of them. You know, jake paul had his team 10 there was the cloud house um these sort of these places serve as little hubs almost and they're not just for the influencers that live there they're for other people and that kind of generation of stars to come over collaborate hang out for people to stay

you know places for people to stay out when you're in town yeah and my understanding is that there's not a lot of um kind of hardware or uh infrastructure that's in the houses or that these people are using but maybe just talk about like somebody who's got you know 50 million followers even a million followers like are they literally just using their cell phone to do all this or is there a little bit more that goes into the production that that might not be as obvious to people just watching the content yeah i mean it's i mean with tiktok it's cell phone maybe a ring light maybe a stand um although at the hype house when i was there in january they were using literally a smart water bottle and a toilet paper roll as their default stand to film all their

videos. So I think it's a lot more low-fi than people would probably imagine. Sometimes you'll have like a DSLR to film YouTube content, but a lot of times people like the sort of more authentic raw way it looks if you film it with an iPhone and it's just easier. A lot of kids I see just edit it all on their phone which is insane um but that's that's more for content on you know youtube and instagram if you're doing something with more higher production value maybe for youtube you know sometimes you'll shoot with a camera but it's not like you have a massive production crew with like a tv camera or anything like that yeah does that make it harder for either the traditional players uh or you know folks who want to bring this stuff to television and try to

recreate it but it isn't necessarily authentic to them does that make it harder for them too because they're used to coming with you know 10 people in a crew and and lighting and tv cameras and all of that yeah i mean i think you know people always reach out to me because i think over the years people have wanted to do different reality shows i think that it's i mean jake paul had his team 10 essentially a reality show on youtube um and i think that he did have maybe a part of a production crew for that or like he had you know he it was definitely more highly produced than normal content. Um, a lot of big YouTubers have, you know, specific editors and they'll have maybe like a boom mic or something. Um, but I think it's, I think it's probably, you know,

I don't know. I don't really know anything about the TV world. I think they would probably be shocked at how lo-fi a lot of stuff is, but I don't even know what is required for TV. Cause I'm so out of touch with the TV, but it's crazy, right? Like literally you're talking about people who you know as you said they have like a toilet paper roll right and they're using that as a stand and they actually are probably getting more views on some of the content than a traditional television show oh 100 and so the world has kind of really really changed and you also wrote this piece on like the american teenager bedroom and like how that's kind of changed and almost become like a headquarters for a lot of the stuff maybe talk just like what exactly does that mean right

Yeah. I profiled this 15-year-old kid, Rowan Winch, who is a little entrepreneur. He ran a bunch of meme accounts, which is another thing that teenagers do to kind of get clout and followers on the internet. And I do think a lot of people are doing a lot of this stuff from their bedroom. I mean, the more entertainment, like personal brand people may move to LA, but then have this whole generation of young kids that is getting into things like e-commerce right like drop shipping using meme accounts growing meme accounts to promote that um which is essentially influencer marketing right um growing digital brands and kind of engaging in the internet and promoting yourself on the internet but they're not necessarily doing it um like with their own

face on it um and that's kind of what i was interested in is just like how these kids are running these little companies um from their bedrooms and how challenging that is one to manage when you're young um and two just how volatile it is because you have no i mean none of these kids have any contact with the platforms they're usually doing stuff that's technically violating you know terms of service like growth hacky type spam stuff and um you know so yeah that's that was what i guess was interesting to me and um why i wanted to write about that yeah and it feels like again, you know, not new in the sense of there's always been kids who have had their little side hustles, you know, really just trying to get some cash, right? It was kind of that even when I was

growing up, whether it was selling, you know, things that you had selling sneakers, going and buying and stuff, but then the internet opened it to like, hey, I can now sell to anybody in the world, these kids taking an even step further, whereas, you know, even maybe 5-10 years ago, let's say merchandise, for example, you would have to literally put an order in, you know, take risk up front get the actual inventory and then try to sell it and if you sold it great but if not then you're left holding you know a bunch of sweatshirts that you don't want uh drop shipping and things like that obviously change that and it feels like these kids really really understand the logistical side of this and the true business behind it it's not just hey i've got an account

let me you know just turn a switch on all of a sudden money starts pouring in right no they're so sophisticated in terms of their marketing I mean branding understanding of e-commerce understanding of like promotion and digital marketing in general I mean it doesn't mean that they don't make constant missteps I mean I think a lot of kids are always DMing me on Instagram because they're getting banned or blocked or you know they're got kicked off Shopify for something but it you know it is it is I think it's great that that all these kids are sort learning that stuff. And it is through, through this influencer culture. I mean, it's, it's sort

of like wanting to be an entrepreneur and wanting to own your own thing and leveraging the attention economy to, you know, get you there. Yeah. And, and I guess as part of that, like if you're a traditional business, you not only are very good at kind of your business yourself, but you also are probably pretty good at measuring, are you being successful or not? Are you growing? Is revenue going up or down? You know, what's your cost of acquisition? All these metrics that would almost go in like an investor report. Do they have any understanding of that stuff or is it more of just, okay. So they, so from a data driven standpoint, they're actually pretty sophisticated. Oh my God, these kids, I was literally on the phone with this 19 year old

who runs a really popular giveaway company with a 16 year old. And they, so, you know, they orchestrate these massive Instagram giveaways, which are essentially growth marketing, you know tactics for influencers that they sort of have an influencer that that hosts a cash giveaway and then they sell spots where basically you have to follow these 70 accounts you know to enter the giveaway and then they'll charge all those 70 accounts to be part of it and make money on top of that and yeah this teenager was just explaining to me you know the difference in CPMs and all of these different forms of advertising and why giveaways are you know currently the highest, but, you know, you have to get this kind of thing and how, you know,

he has these calculations that he's determined in terms of how many followers each person, you know, each sponsor can expect and how that affects his pricing. And, you know, this is a kid that is, I believe, a freshman or sophomore in college. And I truly, sometimes I'm like, why are these, why are you even in school? I understand wanting a degree, but I think, And his 16 year old partner, you know, it'll be interesting to see if he goes to school. But, you know, even if their business fails, because, you know, the giveaway bubble is definitely a thing on Instagram right now. And I don't think it'll be there forever.

You, you know, you have this really deep understanding of analytics and Instagram and, you know, advertising, basically. So, yeah. And I guess one of the reasons why a kid would still be in school, even though they're doing that's making money is because their parents are probably to some degree saying like, hey, you're going to go to school. What is the parents' reaction to a lot of this? Are they supportive of their kids? Are they scared shitless and saying like, I can't believe my kid is playing around on the internet and somehow money's showing up? What do they just generally think?

Yeah. And by the way, I think kids should go to school anyway. I think a lot of kids I talk to go there for social reasons too. It's fun to be in college. Even if you don't ever go to class. It's still fun. And if you're making money and you can afford to pay for it yourself or get a scholarship, that's great. You know, a lot of parents that I talked to don't understand this stuff at all. I mean, it's, you know, Rowan's mother was very shocked by a lot of it. I think he was also keeping money as a lot of kids do in PayPal accounts. So you can keep money in PayPal, you know, never transfer it to a bank and then use it. All these teen retailers accept PayPal. um so you kind of don't have to let your parents know necessarily the amount of money coming in

you're not claiming it on taxes um so i think some parents are you know worried about that i know rowan's mom was like where is he getting this money this is suspicious um but you know once realizing that you know her son was doing running this sort of like businesses was like that's i'm really proud just save it um i always tell kids to save their money as well most kids don't i have to tell you, the majority of kids that I talk to make some kind of financial misstep, which I think is, it's good to make that, you know, those mistakes when you're young, when you're a teenager and your, you know, quality of life is not going to meaningfully change. You know, some kids also use it to help pay their parents rent or cover medical costs for their parents or whatever,

you know, their parents need. So I think a lot of parents are grateful when they see their kids making money, you know, just the way they would if their kid went out and got a part-time job somewhere else. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Obviously, I think you and I have a very rosy perspective of a lot of this, and we generally are fans of it and understand why it's happening. But there's also kind of a dark side to a lot of it. First, like, what is like the bad behavior look like from the adults, right? So whether it's parents stepping in and like taking the kids money or doing anything like that, or even like the agents and people who realize, hey, you know, you're an influencer, or you've got a big audience, like, let me quote, unquote, help you. But that help really is just

help me make money off of you rather than truly help you. Like, you see any of that happening? Well, I have to tell you, not from the big agencies. I mean, like UTI, CIA, I mean, it is like a huge sign of achievement for a lot of kids to work with those big agencies because of the deals that they get them. And I haven't seen a lot of parents taking advantage of kids, to be honest, a lot of these kids are more sophisticated than their parents when it comes to the internet but I do see sort of predatory managers come in a lot of the time you know you see these management companies or management collectives come in sign kids to bad contracts promise them the world and really kind of act like vultures that is what is really disturbing I'm you know

I saw one contract recently that somebody sort of leaked to me that I showed to an entertainment lawyer and he was like, this is the most unethical contract I've ever seen. And, you know, there are these big kids out there that have signed it. And, you know, so I think it's stuff like that that is upsetting. I think that the entertainment industry has always preyed on young people, unfortunately. So in that sense, you know, these people are not new. These people were scamming wannabe models and actresses before all of this um the good thing is that a lot of times you know these kids have their followings and so that's good as long as they don't sign away their ip or something like they you know can at least have their following sometimes to kind of

negotiate back on some of these people but yeah that's that's kind of bad i mean there's also the actual scammers so like people that are constantly trying to hack these kids take down you know get them taken down. There's all the drama accounts that feed off of drama between these kids and start feuds and it can get really toxic really quickly. I mean, a lot of kids end up quitting because of bullying. It's mentally exhausting to live on the internet all day. So I would say there's like a lot of sort of bad mental health stuff that can happen to you as well. I mean, burnout is huge. Yeah. Like with the contract where you say like it's unethical, like any kind of specific things that are in there or just generally like it's obvious that somebody's

taking advantage of somebody else yeah it's obvious somebody's taking advantage of somebody else i mean i well for instance i'll give you a public um case that i wrote about as well which was the tfue lawsuit against phase clan last year right like tfue one of the best fortnite players in the world had signed to phase clan one of the best esports sort of this like influencer collective esports conglomerate you know that lives in this massive house in la um content creators and you know tfue rightly sued to get out of that contract because in some cases they were taking up to 80 of his revenue for certain things and certain you know winnings was you know he got really bad splits and he's like look i'm the number one fortnight player in the world right

now um and yeah maybe faith clan helped me get there a little bit by promotion but these are really bad terms and you know that actually caused phase to completely revamp all of their contracts with talent. So, um, you know, I think you kind of need at least one influencer to be like a whistleblower if they're in this kind of bad situations or working with bad management. Um, I think they tried to do the right thing because they realized that, you know, whatever, but they're, I don't know, the, the lawsuit was sort of ongoing. They definitely got people into some bad contracts. Um, with some of these TikTokers, they're just so excited to be in LA and they're very swept up by this lifestyle. And I think they're promised a lot of things. And so they'll

sign away, you know, rights to their content, for instance, not really understanding what a big deal that is. Yeah. It's pretty sad too, because the kids in many cases probably don't actually understand it. Right. And so it's one thing if you enter a contract and you understand what you're signing and then maybe later you have regrets like, okay, that's just kind of, you know, the part of business. But when you sign something, you don't understand it. And then all of a sudden you realize, Hey, I made, you know, a million dollars last year, but 800,000 of it, I didn't see. And then I got to pay taxes on 200 K like, eh, it's probably not the best situation. And it's the kids, you know, it's not the kids with, for instance, Mark D'Amelio as a father

who understands this kind of stuff. It's kids that often have more working class families, their parents are not, you know, they don't know a lawyer, for instance, that can take a look at it for them. And it's, so it is, it's really, it's, it's a bummer, you know, how many people are taken advantage of and that's sort of like i said always been true in the entertainment industry as well you know with up-and-coming models and other people it's just yeah yeah you recently wrote uh about strip clubs on instagram uh what what the hell is that yeah well you know like everything else that's closed in the pandemic uh so are strip clubs uh and so i wrote about how, you know, they've kind of been reimagined on Instagram. There is this guy, Justin LaVoy

and Justin Combs, Peter D's son, who were hosting this thing called Demon Time, sort of this Instagram live strip club show. I literally was surprised I got it into the Times because like the Times can be kind of prude about that stuff. But yeah, it's basically just, you know, women stripping on Instagram live during these sort of pop-up shows obviously the handle gets banned immediately so they'll kind of create a new handle for each show and you know they pin the girl's cash app and then the girl you know essentially makes money through tips from the cash app and since they started doing it the this guy Tory Lanez copied them and started this thing called quarantine radio where he was kind of also letting women dance and then magic city big strip

club in atlanta also was offering virtual lap dances basically this woman dancing on instagram stories for you um it's it's pretty crazy how um it also falls in line with other tech trends though right like we all see kind of these virtual worlds popping up and so like i don't know if anyone expected uh strip clubs to go virtual right because of the quarantine but uh it does fit within uh more and more things going online and you can quickly see how uh if they can figure out out the monetization they can figure out their way around a lot of the platforms right and that's another piece is just like constant cat and mouse game between the platforms and a lot of these creators uh trying to police something like this versus the kid who just gets reported you know

essentially a bullying situation how do you know who to take down who not to take down and it feels like it's pretty complex uh for the platforms to navigate as well yeah definitely yeah they're always in a race with the platforms for for sure um and the last thing is uh on podcast uh there seems to be uh this like very big trend of taking traditional podcast where uh there's very little interaction with fans right because it's basically a one-way communication channel uh and it's trying to build that community around it we see some of the top podcasters in the world doing everything from you know literally live in-person shows where you can buy tickets and show up uh to doing more of the like uh pay and you can get access to exclusive

content amas you know live video but you also wrote about like facebook groups and things there you know is that something where the podcasters are trying to learn from the influencers in the digital platforms uh or are some of those people actually both right you get an influencer who starts a podcast and just naturally understands the digital platforms yeah i mean i think that the whole resurgence in podcast culture is driven by this growth in influencer culture i mean podcasters are influencers a lot of the times there are people that um you know their fans really look to for making decisions or you know shaping their outlook on life um and so they have this fandom around them that is very influencer-like fandom where they have this close

they feel like they have this close personal relationship with the podcaster you know in the way that they bond with a lot of influencers right like it's like a youtuber that you're watching every day um also i think it's all of these youtubers getting into the podcast world and launching things like discords and facebook groups um that has you know pushed a lot of more maybe traditional podcasters to also get into those types of realms um but it yeah it's it's been really interesting to see the growth in podcasts because every youtuber is like starting a podcast now um and i think it's just another way to monetize and kind of like it's a natural thing you know it's like a lot of them do youtube podcasts where they can you know you can also

watch the person and um it makes sense uh you talk to hundreds if not thousands of uh these influencers i can't imagine that they are all uh super sophisticated articulate uh mature etc what are some of the most ridiculous stories you have of either uh communicating with them because you're doing it through like Instagram DM and not traditional means or also like ridiculous inbound that you get that's unsolicited. Yeah. Well, I did talk to the influencer who licked a toilet seat in the coronavirus challenge last week, which was an interesting conversation. I'm assuming that that person is not necessarily showing up to Madison Avenue and asking for brand deals.

no but she did launch um this song which has now been streamed i think a million times on spotify and she's making a lot of money because it's a it went viral on tiktok it's called skinny girl anthem she'll love that i can't even believe that i just even gave that a shout out because this girl is like the number one clout chaser on the internet um but and i was like i am not writing about you stop a lot of my conversations are like i am not writing about you um do they pitch you stories like well kids literally just dm you on a platform and be like hey will you write a story about me oh my god anthony i well as you know i had to deactivate i started sort of deactivating my twitter and instagram sometimes the amount of messages that i get i get hundreds

and hundreds and hundreds of messages a day um almost all from young people um i would say teenage 22 and under um asking for articles they know that in order to get verified on instagram for instance you need a certain amount of press in mainstream media and so they're literally like just out being like look I'll talk to you or can you write a story on me they usually have to be like no yeah do they are they pitching like a certain angle or story or is it literally like just write the story on me it's a business story it's always a business story it's always like write a story about my business I'm doing this write a story about how I made five thousand dollars this summer um you know write a story about whatever it's it's always that which is

great it's inspiring I wish I could tell all these kids stories um but I usually just I like to hear it or I'll read it I'll read their dm and then kind of be like if it ladders up to something I'm writing about a lot of kids just want to go viral um or they send me weird stuff I've definitely gotten like a lot of inappropriate memes but that's fine it's the internet so I'd rather over, I'd rather like be getting more messages and have to filter through them than not be hearing from people. I try to respond to everyone that's genuine. How do you pick which stories to actually write? Like if you have a hundred kids who DM you all these ridiculous things, like how do you pick which one is actually the one you write? Well, I don't ever really write

stories that I don't, I don't really write many stories about one person. That Rowan kid I wrote about because he had sort of like, he was so intertwined in so many things that I had covered that I was like, let me just like look at this one kid and use his, him as an example. And so it's usually that it's like, I'll look at one thing. I'll want to write about some trend and I'll kind of find some people that fit with it. You know, a lot of people like consider me a youth reporter, I guess, cause I write about so many young people, but I really don't like skew that way. It's more like I, I noticed an interesting trend or user behavior and then it ends up being like young people behind it but i'll usually kind of like lead with the interesting trend and then

try to find people that validate it or whatever um instead of the other way around like trying to tell some kids story but yeah uh which leads me to the point of like in this weird internet culture world like you've become somewhat of an influencer to a lot of these kids um and even to the point where i think i saw you tweet that you've got you know a hundred plus thousand people on tiktok and and things like that like how has that been for you as an experience of like going from constantly writing about it to now like hey i got a hundred thousand people on this one platform you know tens of thousands on uh instagram or 100 or uh on twitter like how does that change the way you view the platforms yeah i know i got 400 000 on tiktok and i was like this app is so inflated

i told cory my boss that if i get half a million i'm gonna quit and join the hype house be the hype house mother um but no I I don't know I mean I started on tumblr like I was I was pretty big on tumblr in my own sort of worlds and I ran some popular tumblers and when I started out I ran social media for a bunch of really big brands so I'm familiar with I think coming from like the ad agency world too where you're like speaking like I kind of am familiar with speaking to a lot of followers or having that voice I guess but I would say the thing that I don't like the most is just how overwhelmed I get with people asking me for things. Um, that's the main thing. I don't mind if it's kids asking me for things, but just people ask me to do everything for them.

And I'm like, so lazy. I want to be helpful, but sometimes I'm like, no, I can't, you know, do your whole research thing for you, you know, for your company or whatever. I don't know. Yeah. What, what, what did you post on Tik TOK to get 400,000 followers? Oh, well, so I honestly just was posting like behind the scenes stuff of my job. Like, I mean, I I'm with a lot of the thing is, is like, I'm, I know a lot of, um, I know a lot of YouTubers personally, I guess, through my job. And I know a lot of like TikTokers through my job. So, you know, I'll be with them at certain points. And so I've posted some like behind the scenes

videos of some TikTokers and all of these kids, um, started following me and messaging me being like how can i get your job it's so cool and i always like to advocate for new york times because a lot of these kids that's their first introduction to the new york times um and definitely when i was young you know i thought that the mainstream media was so far removed and so i always want to respond to them so um yeah and then i you know i wrote a story about okay boomer this tick tock trend and a lot of kids thought that was really funny that i was on tick tock and so they were duetting me and then I had a couple subway videos go viral and I don't know just add it up but now I'm stuck in quarantine I don't know what I'm gonna

do my contents falling off look there's a lot of kids who who are in the same situation that's why I guess they're pulling their moms and dads and yeah I'm alone in my New York apartment I need to get some parents involved awesome what um what are you looking to forward to the rest of the rest of this year is it just more of kind of understanding what those internet uh culture trends are or anything else you got on the uh horizon honestly the only i think you're asking me how i pick stories i have a list of like 80 stories and the only thing that it slows me down is like my editor is saying like don't focus on this or just my me being slow kind of and not filing them faster so i kind of my goal

to just you know keep writing about the stuff that I care about and you know trying to get some of these other projects that I do so I do a bunch of stuff on the side so I'm trying to like do more of that and I don't know I just you know meet new cool people that's my goal every year is to try to like make new friends every year you know and like connect with new cool people every year so just trying to do that it's hard you know when on Twitter it's like there's so many people coming at you and sometimes when you um you know get too much of an audience not like a hundred thousand dollars or something is too much of an audience but sometimes it's like you know it's hard to make those more personal connections i just want to make sure i'm still meeting people

even though i'm stuck in this department yeah there's no shortage of people on the internet for sure yeah uh well listen i appreciate you doing this um where can people connect with you find you i know you're kind of all over the internet where do you want to send them yeah um definitely just dm me anywhere um on instagram or twitter i love dms it's never weird if you slide to my dms i love hearing from people as long as they're not like asking me to do some project for them for free uh but like um yeah just like send me stuff or you can email me as well um my email address is like in my bio it's just taylor.lorenz at nytimes.com so uh but but yeah just follow me on instagram and twitter and tiktok now i i uh i am jealous of your uh your tiktok fame because

i feel like you have a a pulse on a completely different part of the internet that uh if people aren't on tiktok they don't see it and uh recently pulled up tiktok and started showing me some of the videos and i was amazed at uh the level of detail and obvious work that went into just like some of these dances and stuff i was just like what are people doing the dances are next level I like cannot I I wrote this story about the girl that um created the renegade which was this very popular dance and like she was in her room trying to show it to me and I was just like I forgot I can only remember three steps of this dance also like every kid now I feel I can do a backflip and I'm just like how is it that every teenager suddenly can do it like I didn't know anyone

that could do a backflip growing up on TikTok I feel like kids are evolving or something I don't know well they probably never had to practice because the internet wasn't there right so now all of a sudden it's like hey yeah i can go viral for doing a backflip let me work on doing a backflip yeah that's true that's true that's a good point all right well listen i appreciate taking time to do this i think people will really enjoy kind of understanding all of this and uh and we'll have to do it again as uh as more kids do crazy stuff on the internet and keep evolving culture yeah thank you for having me i feel like i know you on the internet for so long so it's been great to chat

Thank you.