Peak social media: The power of influencers

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Peak social media: The power of influencers’

VidCon attendee 1
I am a content creator on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. I make beauty and fashion content.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
And what kind of content do you think?

VidCon attendee 2
It’s a little bit of big and tall modelling. And then I started creating like family content because I have five kids. So it was kind of like balancing this modelling thing and learning how to be a creator and then also bringing up small children.

Elaine Moore
That’s our producer, Josh Gabert-Doyon, speaking to attendees of VidCon, one of the biggest annual events for what’s come to be known as the creator economy. The dream is that anyone can make a career on social media by building up an audience on platforms like YouTube or TikTok and VidCon draws a pretty lively crowd.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
This exhibition hall is huge, just massive. Smells like candy, tons of kids. It’s a bouncy ball pit, kind of soft hits that you can . . . Squishmallows that you can jump in.

Elaine Moore
VidCon took place in Anaheim, California last month. Content creators came to meet their fans and talk about how they can expand their careers on social media, add more followers and make more money. And what they post about is kind of dizzying.

VidCon attendee 3
I make educational comedic zoology videos about animals, like a hundred animals that can, you know, effing kill you.

VidCon attendee 4
I make comedy content where I do like sketches, and then for my like long-form stuff, I love making Lego sets.

VidCon attendee 5
I am a professional hockey player, so I’m connecting content creating with hockey, and I just, focusing with like, day with my girlfriends. I have a twin, so would video with my brother.

VidCon attendee 6
I started with sketches, short videos on YouTube. Then I kind of had like, how to say, mental kind of breakdown because I did every kind of girl’s problems type of sketch.

VidCon attendee 7
I work as a sound editor. I primarily work on other people’s videos, but I’m looking at creating my own brand and creating my own channel.

Elaine Moore
Over the past decade, the creator economy has become a multibillion-dollar industry, and it’s transformed the social media landscape. Platforms have become heavily reliant on the content that these creators produce, and they pay for it too. As content creators become more powerful, they’re starting to ask the question “Do social media platforms need us more than we need them?”

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This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore, deputy editor of the FT’s Lex column. And in this season of the podcast, I’m asking: have we reached peak social media and if so, where do we go from here?

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The past decade has been very good for social media giants financially. It’s also been good for the influencers who make their money using them. In this episode: how the creator economy took off and what it means for the future of social media.

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Uploading 30-second dances to TikTok or posting photos of yourself on holiday might not sound like work, but for the people who make a living putting content on social media, online popularity is a full-time job. Their success means that social media has become a place where audiences now seek out a few well-known figures instead of their friends. When I joined Instagram, I only followed people I knew, would share photos and write messages. Now I mostly follow creators. Instead of connecting to other users and uploading my own photos, I’ve become part of a large and passive audience of viewers. This is how YouTube, TikTok, Twitch and other platforms work as well. The change has turned a handful of young people into superstars, something that advertisers are keen to tap into.

Audio clips
What’s up, everybody? . . . Hello, everyone. It is Charlie . . . Hello, friends. It’s me. (Bell notification) . . . And today I guess I’m just gonna do like a “get ready with me” sort of thing.

Elaine Moore
Social entertainment has eclipsed social networking. It turns out that for platforms, it’s more lucrative for users to sit back and watch videos from Jake Paul or MrBeast than it is to have those users engaging with one another. And that’s why creators have become so important to the social media business model. Our producer Josh went to VidCon to try to understand how the industry is evolving.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I mainly spent time following around somebody named Kris Collins, who goes by the handle @KallMeKris, and I wanted to talk to Kris because she was pretty typical YouTube star. She’d gotten famous very quickly and she was kind of trying to figure out what to do next. I met up with Kris in the industry lounge, which was on one of the upper floors of the convention centre with beanie bags and low lighting.

Elaine Moore
Away from the fans.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, away from the fans. Somewhere a little bit peaceful for the creators and also with high-end refreshments.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
What are you getting?

Kris Collins
Coffee and mango. Is that OK?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Mango? Dried mango?

Kris Collins
Yeah. (Laughter)

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I was just curious. (chuckles)

Unnamed speaker
I’m just taking fruit. (chuckles)

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Kris was pretty new to all of this. She had been working a regular job up until the pandemic.

Kris Collins
I was a hairdresser before, and I was also a lash technician. So, yeah, I was just doing that full time out of my parents basement suite.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
And then the pandemic hit. She starts making videos.

Kris Collins
I started doing lip-sync videos where, like, you would lip-sync over an audio and then put your own joke with it. And I made a few about my mum and my dad, and I can’t remember exactly what they were about, but it was probably only like a month and a half in and they both got millions of views and then it just didn’t stop.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Kris also starts to build up a team. She gets an assistant, a professional video editor, a lawyer and an agent, and she starts really churning out these videos.

Elaine Moore
What are these videos that she’s putting up online? Is it mostly her lip-syncing along, or what are the scripts that she’s writing?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Well, she starts with these kind of lip-syncing gag videos on TikTok, and then she moves to YouTube, where she does these longer videos, these vlogs. She gets into something called reaction videos, which are kind of category of YouTube video, which is basically just somebody sitting in front of their camera reacting to another video or maybe a meme or something that’s gone viral. They sound something like this:

Reaction video clips
Yes, we’re gonna be watching cringey TikToks . . . What happened in this video?! . . . (Scream) it even go that high, was that real? . . . Woah, love that (Laughter) . . . 

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So she does a lot of these videos, which are maybe 10 to 20 minutes long. Some of it’s scripted, some of it’s natural, just emotional reaction to whatever it is that’s kind of hot that day. They speak to a very broad audience. She told me that most of the audience is between 12 and 25. So you know, primarily younger.

Elaine Moore
I think if you don’t spend a lot of time sitting on YouTube, it might be hard to understand what a reaction video is. How is she making money, just by reacting to somebody else’s video on YouTube?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So there are two main ways creators make money. The first is through revenue sharing from the platforms. Somebody like Kris is gonna be getting a cut of the ads that are on her videos. Maybe this is money that the ad platform has set aside or it’s just kind of a revenue share, right? The second is brand deals. So because Kris is a popular influencer, she can charge a brand a certain amount and she’ll advertise for them on a poster on one of these videos. And I actually got to see this sort of happen first-hand. Kris was doing an event with one of her advertisers at VidCon, so we had this walk downstairs to the conference from this kind of lounge-y zone. We had to walk through the entire conference hall.

Kris Collins
Oh yeah, totally. Hi! Sorry. Nice to meet you.

VidCon attendee
You look so pretty. (Inaudible)

Kris Collins
Oh, thank you. Nice to meet you. . . Nice to meet you.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I didn’t know very much about Kris. I mean, I hadn’t heard of her before I started reporting on this, but when I got to VidCon, there was just all of these young fans coming up to her asking for autographs or just straight up giving her gifts.

Unnamed fan
Do you have a pen (Inaudible)

Kris Collins
I don’t have a pen. I should have a pen.

Unnamed fan
’Cause I made a book for all of the people I was excited to see and I put you in here. 

Kris Collins
Oh my gosh. No way. I don’t have a pen.

Unnamed fan
’Cause I made a book for all of the people I was excited to see and I put you in here. 

Kris Collins
Oh my gosh. No way. I don’t have a pen.

Unnamed fan
I needed (inaudible) to find your page. Oh and I also made you a bracelet to remember . . . 

Kris Collins
You did not.

Unnamed fan
Yeah.

Kris Collins
Oh my God.

Elaine Moore
That’s so sweet. It’s like she has a very close relationship with these fans who are just watching her.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I think it was, it was pretty sweet. And she was good with these fans.

Do you get a lot of people sending you or giving you free stuff?

Kris Collins
Yeah. And I used to have a PO box and I literally . . . my garage is filled, like to my roof, with stuff. And I had to close the PO box because I can’t have anymore stuff.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Kris has this eager fan base. They’re sending her stuff. Of course, that’s also really valuable to people that are advertising with her. She has this audience that’s ready-made. It’s built in there. Kris’s management team had organised this little demo with this company there.

Elaine Moore
What was this brand selling?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
They were an editing software company, so they did green-screen template videos. This is kind of within the realm of the creator economy. They had a booth in the exhibition hall and basically the set-up was Kris was standing on this little platform and it had a camera arm that would swing around her and a rep from the brand was sort of overseeing the whole thing. There’s this thudding music. It’s quite an intense atmosphere. This is her bread and butter. This is Kris at work, engaging with fans, being in front of the camera. There’s this whole crowd of kids wanting to just kind of watch everything that she was doing. She’s put on the spot to just stand on this platform and had to choose something kind of entertaining to do as the camera was circling her.

Unnamed speakers
Can you do like an Idol character, like in a video game where, like, they have, like, one move? . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah . . . Don’t try that. (Laughter)

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So Kris did this video game character stands. They took some photos and then they were all kind of posted on the channels. And this is part of how these brand deals work. The creator gets paid to post something. Kris was whisked off to a meet-and-greet, and I asked her agent, Keith Bielory, about the event as well.

How do you think that went, Keith? 

Keith Bielory
Flawless.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Do you think the crowd likes it?

Keith Bielory
They love it. They eat it up. And I’m glad you can come here and experience the full (inaudible) 360, you know.

Elaine Moore
So this is the money man. He’s making sure that Kris is getting paid by the brands.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
That’s right. He’s going between the brands who want to advertise with her and the talent. Kris is one of his talent. So he’s making these deals. Keith works for a firm called A3 Artists Agency in New York. He started out doing endorsement deals for Olympic athletes, but about 10 years ago he realised that more and more of what was happening was kind of being done online and these digital creators were gonna become more important. So he switched up basically to representing influencers. And of course he talked up Kris quite a bit.

Keith Bielory
So talented and educating, but also entertaining her audience 99 per cent of the time. The audience hasn’t realised they’re watching an ad which is extremely impressive.

Elaine Moore
It’s also quite controversial.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Well, I mean, you know, some people might say sneaking in ads like that is a bit controversial, but it works for the advertisers.

Keith Bielory
The content that she posts organically on a daily basis is so brand-friendly that it . . . like we’re inundated with requests.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So this is where things heat up a bit. For creators and the platforms, this relationship has been mutually beneficial, at least for the last little while. Platforms get good content and the creators get an audience. They can sell products too. But what Keith told me is that these days platforms can be kind of unreliable. They can move the goalposts, they can change their policies, they might run into regulatory problems, like with TikTok — all of these things that get in the way of creators making money.

Keith Bielory
Especially the more a talent is relying on a single platform, that’s scary. You know, that’s your livelihood. These platforms can go away tomorrow. They can just disappear. The algorithms can change. They can all of a sudden just get no views. So how do you diversify and how do you make sure that this is a career that you can be doing for years and years to come?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Kris told me that this is something that someone like her thinks about all the time. It’s an occupational hazard.

Kris Collins
TikTok changes its algorithm, like, so much that it’s affected views for sure, which then in fact will affect my revenue because brands will look at that and be like, “Oh, her views went down”, you know, 20 per cent or like 30 per cent. That definitely affects the revenue with the algorithm. Then you kind of figure out like, “OK, well what do I need to do to get back on that algorithm track?” And same thing with YouTube’s. You have so many dips that creators’ biggest battle is the algorithm. In any platform, like, that is our biggest enemy. (Chuckle)

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Another example a lot of creators told me about was the rise of YouTube Shorts.

Elaine Moore
That’s basically to compete with TikTok.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
That’s right. Short-form content to compete with TikTok. You can imagine that if you’re a content creator, you’ve gotten really good at making these long 10-to-20-minute YouTube videos and getting paid off that, and all of a sudden YouTube turns around and says it wants 30-second videos. It’s a lot of insecurity for them to take on.

Elaine Moore
I have some sympathy for that. If you look at what’s happening with Twitter under Elon Musk, relying on just one platform whose ownership could change all of a sudden and could destroy your audience would be quite scary. So I guess diversifying across different platforms makes sense, but there’s nothing they can really do about this. The audiences are on the platforms.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I think at the very least, somebody like Keith wants to make sure that the creators that he’s representing are diversifying because, yeah, you want to make sure that you’re not gonna be at the whims of these platforms. In Kris’s case, she’s not relying on one platform. She’s crossed different platforms, and she’s also trying to move her audience also towards merch, right. She has this clothing brand called Otto. And then, you know, the other thing that she talked to me about was that you might try to direct people towards a newsletter so that you can kind of get their contact details, so that if you want to sell them something at a later date, the creators have that more direct relationship with their audience. So this is what a lot of people are looking for is a more direct relationship with their fan base that can kind of circumvent the platforms.

Elaine Moore
It’s amazingly enterprising when you compare it to the origins of a company like Twitter. When we spoke to the founders of Twitter, they said they had no idea about how to make money. And yet we’ve evolved to a stage where creators who are just using the platforms are so enterprising that they have their eyes firmly on the prize from the beginning.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, and of course, there’s another thing here too, which is that because of the competition between platforms like YouTube and TikTok, this kind of video content, you know, it gives creators a certain amount of power to draw their audiences to different places. I mean, Kris was conscious of this. She went from TikTok fame and immediately went on to establish herself on YouTube. And it’s something that Keith thinks about a lot.

Keith Bielory
These creators generate so much revenue for these platforms that I do think they are gaining leverage. I think the ones that are polarising, the ones that really have that relationship with their audience, you don’t want to piss them off. There’s a lot of places that they can go, you know, like all of these platforms are competing with each other. They’re competing for eyeballs. They’re competing for screen time. And it’s very easy for a creator to just stop posting on a specific platform for whatever reason.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
The language that he’s using there, I mean, it’s loaded.

Elaine Moore
It’s a threat.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, I think it is. It’s a threat because he’s saying the platform needs his talent more than the creators need the platforms.

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Elaine Moore
The relationship between platforms and the creators is growing more complicated. Creators need platforms to find an audience, but they also know that platforms are increasingly dependent on them and will pay to keep them. We’ve seen an increase in companies setting aside pots of money and agreements to share ads revenue. The question is how far creators can push things. Can they take their audience with them if they leave a social media platform? Surely the creators need the platforms to find their audience. How do they go off on their own? Here’s Josh again.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
The next day at VidCon, I met up with Kris and her entourage at their hotel because they were planning something for the festival before their very first panel of the day. So I got there very early. I had to go through heavy traffic so I could catch the big black Escalade that was travelling from the hotel to the conference.

So it was Kris in this car, and she was also with another influencer named Celina Spooky Boo.

Elaine Moore
I know who she is. I watch her on TikTok. She does these sleepwalking videos. She’s very adorable. I think she must . . . I think she eats something before she sleeps to ensure that she sleepwalks. But it’s just her, cackling to herself, or walking around, or talking to herself or thinking that a plant is someone she knows. They are very sweet.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Well, Celina Spooky Boo was set to do this panel with Kris, and they were orchestrating a prank as part of the panel.

Kris Collins
(Laughter) We’re gonna get up and yell at them like, “Came all the way from Texas”, like . . .

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Which they would later turn into a prank video. They were going to sit in the audience before the panel started. The emcee was gonna go on stage and say, “They’re not here yet. They’re late.” And then in the audience, they were going to be wearing costumes. They were going to jump up, start screaming, and then they rushed towards the backstage area. And obviously, somebody had not briefed the security guards about this. So one of the security guards comes and tries to tackle Kris. The crowd loved it. The crowd’s eating it up.

Elaine Moore
That’s what matters.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
That was the important part. Anyways, Kris and Celina continue on their panel. I went to go talk to some other people about the creator economy because after talking to Keith, Kris’s agent, I was sort of wondering what would this actually look like if creators are gonna start taking more power? And there are a couple of different ways that the creator economy could evolve over the next few years. Megan Lightcap, an investor with a VC firm called Slow Ventures, she leads their investments in the creator economy. She’s hoping to be part of how creators gain a little bit of independence from the platforms.

Megan Lightcap
We’ve observed this really interesting kind of shift in power away from brands, institutions, corporations towards the individual. I mean, I even think this is happening kind of across industries. Creators or individuals are building crazy parasocial relationships with their fan bases. And so they have unbelievable distribution, crazy high engagement. And many of them are building businesses, brands, different ventures or projects kind of on top of that distribution.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Basically, Megan is betting that creators are gonna become more and more important and that they’re gonna have economic force as a business in their own right. She’s helping to provide the creators with some capital to do that.

Megan Lightcap
Despite looking and feeling like businesses, they don’t have access to capital in the same way that start-ups do. We saw this and said, “OK, well, what if we actually provide creators themselves with growth capital to invest and deploy any way that they want?”

Elaine Moore
So these individual online celebrities are being turned into start-ups, effectively.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, and that seems like a good bet for a VC firm.

Megan Lightcap
We’re chatting with a creator now who has a very specific niche. Call it like within a slice of home DIY. So he has this YouTube channel which makes money off just from AdSense and brand deals and all that stuff. And now he’s thinking about launching almost like him being the distribution arm for equipment manufacturers within his space.

Elaine Moore
So this would be a home improvement creator selling power tools.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah. So this creator already has an ad revenue share. They have brand deals and now they’re thinking about like a full-on way to act as a distributor for power tools. The bigger idea, of course, is that creators are looking to be less tied to the platforms and they’re looking to other forms of financing to do that. We also know that there’s a rise of more direct revenue streams like Patron and OnlyFans.

Elaine Moore
I can see that if you have a huge audience, if you’re MrBeast, then you can pick that audience up and take them across to somewhere else. But that presumably works for a very small number of creators. What’s everybody else at VidCon trying to do?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah, for most people, the idea of building a business without the platforms is much harder for the average creator, just about getting paid more fairly for their work. This is something that Lindsey Lugrin is trying to do. She was at VidCon. Lindsey is an influencer herself. She started out as a model, mainly using Instagram.

Lindsey Lugrin
All these brands would hit me up and they’d want to give me free clothes that I didn’t really want. Nobody wanted to pay me.

Elaine Moore
That’s quite a common complaint that influencers are not actually getting paid for their work. They just get free stuff from brands.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Yeah. And she later moved away from modelling.

Lindsey Lugrin
And then I started my goofy online alter ego Ms Young Professional, which is like a comedy about sexism in the workplace.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
So mainly skits and memes and she found she wasn’t really getting paid very much from her brand deals with that account either. So she starts this company.

Lindsey Lugrin
I am the co-founder and CEO of Fuck You Pay Me. Essentially how it works is if you have a strong audience on social media and brands are asking you to post about them, you can look them up on FYPM and see how much they paid other people for the same thing.

Elaine Moore
That’s quite a name for a company.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
It’s a bold choice and I think that it shows a certain amount of resentment toward the brands that aren’t really paying influencers very much. And from Lindsey’s perspective, getting brands to pay more for these deals would help expand the creator economy and it would give them more leverage online.

Lindsey Lugrin
Pay transparency has helped lot. Think that it’s something that brands know they’re gonna have to embrace just because creators expect it now. And I think that that’s gonna lead to just an expansion of the creator economy in general.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
There is this effort for the creator economy to actually talk about these issues of pay and working conditions. And creators are flexing their muscles more in pay negotiations. They’re starting to see themselves as more self-sufficient. That could be something that really shapes the industry of social media in the next few years.

Elaine Moore
There are signs that the role of creators in the social media business model is changing. Some investors are willing to back internet creators directly instead of social media companies. That’s going to start causing headaches for the platforms. For years, people were posting on Facebook, MySpace, Snapchat and Instagram for free. Over time, that’s changed. To be a successful platform with compelling content, you need to pay.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
What I found talking to people at VidCon was that there were all these small ways where creators were exerting a certain pressure on the social media companies, and particularly when you think about all of the young people that were at VidCon, I mean, that was their fan base. Their allegiance is to these creators, and that’s going to end up impacting the platforms and the kind of choices they make about the product that they’re offering users. The relationship between content creators and the platforms, it felt like it was hitting an inflection point.

Kris, the creator who I was following around at the conference, she was exploring her options and I think she was doing that partially because she was in a position to do that. I mean, she was in a position of power and partially because she was aware of how insecure her position was.

Kris Collins
I’m like working on a million things. I’m trying to diversify my revenue streams as much as I can. I don’t want to be stuck like, “Hey, YouTube’s gone”. I’m like, “Oh, no”.

Elaine Moore
It seems like young people who grew up watching YouTubers like Jake Paul get rich are much better at seeing the business of social media than I was when I joined. And I just saw it as some way that you connect with your friends.

Kris Collins
I think that’s right. I mean, I think they see them as businesses. They’re also seeing these platforms as something that might not be here tomorrow. We’ve seen a lot of social media platforms come and go.

Elaine Moore
So you were at VidCon talking to lots of creators, but how many of the social media companies were there? Did you see them taking this idea seriously?

Josh Gabert-Doyon
I mean, they had this massive presence at VidCon. It really is an industry event. You know, TikTok had a big room and a big section. YouTube has a big section. Instagram has parties. You know, we’ve seen these companies increase the amount of money that they’re willing to give to creators as part of these ad revenue and these creator funds. So we know that YouTube pays very well. TikTok pays OK. Snapchat has also put a lot of money towards their creator fund. We also know that Twitter recently has been doing this. So they’re definitely taking the threat seriously and they’re seeing it as a cost of doing business.

Elaine Moore
But creators are still at the mercy of the largesse of these companies, because if TikTok wants to remove its creator fund, there’s no formal agreement that says that it has to keep paying out money to creators. Is that . . .

Josh Gabert-Doyon
No, no. We saw this recently with Twitch where they cut how much they were paying out to their creators and there’s very little recourse. I think that’s a big threat to their creators.

Elaine Moore
They’re not unionised.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
They’re not unionised. They don’t have much power as a collective, but there’s still signs that that could be shifting. I do think that the platforms are taking them more seriously. It’s also impossible to talk about social media without talking about creators. You know, however they work out their relationship and in the next few years, we’re not going back to a world of social networking. Modern social media is the creator economy. There’s kind of no way of pulling them apart.

Elaine Moore
Josh, thank you so much.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Thanks for having me.

Elaine Moore
On the next episode of Tech Tonic: How to build a better social media.

Ethan Zuckerman
These spaces should at least, in part, be public spaces. They should be run more like parks and libraries and less like shopping malls and corporate campuses.

Elaine Moore
Is the era of the all-encompassing global social network over? And are smaller platforms the answer to a healthier social media experience?

Sarah Gilbert
They have really strict rules around, you know, sort of civility and basically, like, you know, don’t be a jerk, don’t be hateful. So individual communities can provide these really unique spaces for people to sort of come and find and build a home.

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Elaine Moore
You’ve been listening to Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Elaine Moore. Our producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon and senior producer Edwin Lane. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Mixing by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco. The FT’s global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks for this episode to Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy.

And before you go, we’ve made some articles related to this podcast free to read on the FT’s website. You can see links to those articles in the show notes, including a recent piece I wrote on the evolution of social media. Thanks for listening.

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