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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> At the time Platco had amassed a sizable audience of followers — large enough that he was preparing to leave his day job to create content for Snapchat full-time.

This is mind-boggling and scary. I simply can't understand how "social influencer" is a career. This person gets paid a full-time equivalent salary for... mentioning products to a bunch of Snapchat accounts following him because... he has a lot of followers, which is because... ??? Am I just having a senior moment here? What am I missing? Why does anyone care what this random guy says and why do companies think having this person shill their products has any marketing value? This reminds me of famous people who are famous simply for being famous. Has everyone just gone nuts?

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'social influencer' sounds so much better than 'celebrity', 'front man', 'personality', 'trend setter', or 'pitchman'.

This is like the 3rd or 4th oldest profession. An outgoing person has a conversational style that, combined with a media delivery platform, people actively seek them out. Think Oprah Winfrey here. She "connects" with people and she had a talk show that delivered that connection. People tune in and listen to what she says. Groups of people start adding "did you see what happened on Oprah?" to their conversations and that creates a bit of a tertiary effect where third parties listen/follow in order to having something they can relate with. Sort of "Everyone gets their arrowheads from zog, not only does he knap a mean flint that won't break hitting even the hardest bison, he knows everything that is going on around the campfire and has great stories."

I think it's less Oprah and more Kim K.

Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube have considerably lowered the barrier to entry. Before, you had to sign a contract with a media company. Now, anyone can sign up and push their personal brand.

I don't think it's a value statement.

While I wouldn't equate the two in what I perceive as value, I think conceptually the two are the same. Oprah has been around much longer and reached people through TV. For young people now it's social media. That they may not carry any relevant interviews, social discussions, philantropy, etc is unfortunately secondary.

To be fair to snap influencers, at least they're not promoting Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.

i don't know much about snap but i see celebrities selling scam health supplements all the time on instagram

Yeah in retrospect I'm not so sure I want to bet that influencers are any better. I just want to point out some of the issues where I think Oprah did a disservice to her viewers rather than educating them.

yet.

500,000 followers puts his viewership on par with, say, "Morning Joe" with Joe Scarborough Mika Brzezinski. (Rough numbers, here.)

A little research. Poking around I see "Family Guy" has been pulling, say, $250k for a 30 second spot. They've got, say, five times "Morning Joe's" ratings. So let's say "MJ" gets $50k/spot to access (influence) their 500k viewers. Super rough numbers, to reiterate, but I bet it's of this scale given what the hosts make.

So.

$80k doesn't seem that out-of-line to market directly towards a very narrowly defined demographic of that size. If you can accumulate such an audience, it's probably reasonable to compare your impact to that of a moderately popular TV show. And if you can make that impact with basically zero overhead... Well. Seems reasonable that you'd be raking in some cash.

I don't think you can directly compare followers like that, though. This guy may have 500,000 followers, but that doesn't mean they're actually viewing everything he posts. Whereas viewership of TV shows is attempting to measure how many people actually watched that show.

I'm not sure the it's all that different though really, since I don't think it measures "watched" as much as "had the show on as noted by the set box". Unless the tech has changed, I think it just is hardware that determines what was on the TV and when; it's not actively checking to see if people are watching.

Just having the TV on doesn't really mean that the people are watching, paying attention, or even in the same room. (for an example, my folks insist they can't fall asleep unless the TV is on in the background, with my mother and aunt joking that the Law and Order theme song is a lullaby for them). That certainly would be more in line with what the Snapchat audience is like.

Advertisers are well aware of this and seem pretty contented with that fact, and have devised some real-world tactics to better get their audience's attention.

Also worth noting that any view on Snapchat is indicative of active engagement because of the ephemeral nature of it (even the stories to an extent are a view it once experience). All my peers (younger age brackets) always use Snapchat when they want to guarantee a response from their friends because it forces immediate interaction. Despite its urgent nature, I've found it actually forces more thoughtful responses because people have to make time to actually view and immediately reply. Also, anyone they follow on their stories is usually viewed at some point. Browsing your Snapchat story updates is akin to a modern form of scrolling through the news but with guaranteed viewership.

I don't think it's quite fair to compare it to morning joe, which routinely also gets half a million views on Youtube and holds people's attentions for an hour instead of 20 seconds. That being said, SnapChat also reaches the prime demo for advertisers: Idiotic Tweens.

Gladiators in ancient Rome endorsed products. There's nothing new about people who other people pay attention to being paid to recommend a product, nor any question as to its effectiveness.

> why do companies think having this person shill their products has any marketing value?

Because it is incredibly obvious that it does have value?

> This reminds me of famous people who are famous simply for being famous.

Almost every "celebrity" is primarily famous as part of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Tom Cruise doesn't earn the paychecks he does because of his unparalleled ability to convey the subtle interplays of emotion. :)

> Has everyone just gone nuts?

The only interesting question, I think, is why people follow Platco on snapchat; everything else follows. I've never heard of him before, but I am familiar with the concept, and the answer is probably because he's funny, engaging, attractive and/or relatable to his audience. No different than any other celeb.

> Gladiators in ancient Rome endorsed products.

I'm not calling bullshit on you, but I'd love to read more about this.

Whether that is true or not, those gladiators earned their fame the hard way. I Wonder what hardships a Snapchat influencer has to endure on the road to fame?

I can't find a primary source on this (and Googling along the way was reminded how broken the internet is with generated content...) but there is this - http://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_Spanier/Teaching/documents/Cyri... (it's chapter 9 of this book - http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405110422... )

> Famous Roman gladiators, who also attained celebrity status through specialized types of fighting, were known to endorse products. too; some of these endorsements survive in ancient frescoes and wall graffiti. Ironically. the makers of Gladiator downplayed this historical angle on the assumption that modern audiences would not believe it.

Hmmmm...

There's even the Latin equalivalent of "For a good time, go here" on the Coliseum.

They are entertainers. And that's a full time profession. The way they make money is by plugging different brands, and that's the only difference.

Yah, a YouTuber walked the runway at Dolce & Gabbana's show last week. I was like wat? So I looked her up she's just funny and does cute "shorts". Makes sense. This is how celebrity works in the age of disintermediation.

Virgil's patron is Gaius Maecenas, who's high up in Augustus's administration. Virgil writes the Aeneid, talks up Augustus.

Medici's sponsor art, get flattered. It's been around, just not at scale.

The use of advertising for manufactured goods or mass services required the capability to produce same. Pitching influence (as the Medici did through their art) has a very long history.

The first newspaper adverts for goods were patent medicines (think, basically, Viagra of the 19th century), starting about mid-century. As the factory method came online, and it was possible to cheaply and rapidly transport goods throughout a country on rail, the problem of creating a market for those goods, as well as identification (branding) arose. Hence advertising.

There's a good brief summary of that transition in Hamilton Holt's 1909 book, Commercialism and Journalism (also speaking to the problems of influence within media and journalism). In particular, the 30x growth of the periodicals business from 1850 - 1905, which Holt attributes principally to advertising (though he gives other factors: improved mail, cheaper paper, faster printing, literacy, as well).

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

> Am I just having a senior moment here? Has everyone just gone nuts?

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll all get there at some point. But yeah, you're having a senior moment. They are entertainers. They become social influencers because people enjoy watching them. It's no different than a street magician or a busker at scale.

Since when do street magicians shill for products? The way I see it, it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in. There is a difference for being payed by people to entertain them, and by being a Trojan horse essentially.

Street magicians shill for products once they become very successful, which is what these 'social influencers' represent. They went from being the equivalent of street magicians, to another level of having a show at a venue or touring etc.

If they're successful, it means they managed to survive on their craft even before a lot of people wanted to see them. So why wouldn't they be able to continue to do that after they became better and more successful? You simply assume everybody sells out, you don't even say "many street magicians shill for products", or most, no, they just categorically do. I guess you can't tell me the exact threshold when they do? Is that different for everybody, but everybody still does (or would if they were just successful enough) at some point?

And why still call them street magicians then? Why not marketers? You don't call people who make advertisement spots filmmakers like you would call Hitchcock a filmmaker, and you wouldn't call those who write "copy" authors like you would any of the ones serious authors aspire to. But most importantly, you don't call someone who sings loudly to distract someone so another person can pick their pocket a singer, you call them an accomplice.

> it's an attempt to capture forced attention from people who do not have an interest in the product by intermixing it with something they do have an interest in

you mean the $200bn+ advertising industry? yes, that. separating entertainment from advertising isn't as easy as you'd think.

Speak for yourself, I find it super simple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp4l7eASeOk

Influencer marketing is a thing, people do this on every major social network. I wouldn't be surprised if people do it here on hn too.

Sure. I recall a fairly recent post about some service that does that, for many sites, including HN.

You miss that there are even companies just to connect influencers and brands... so it's even bigger that you depict it.

I can get how it works if people are unaware what's going on, but the term "product placement" is widely known now, and I can't fathom how does it work when it's obvious? I mean, how can people know that someone's being paid to advertise junk to them, and still be actually more likely to buy that junk?

I'd guess advertisers are desperate to target audiences <30 and particularly the youth susceptible to the bandwagon effect who also have access to disposable cash. If the mobile game market is any similar indication of other markets, the top ~1.5% are enough of a market to validate these campaigns.

http://www.recode.net/2014/2/26/11623998/a-long-tail-of-whal...

It looks a lot like the early days of commercial radio.

Having worked in this space, people do what celebrities do, and I was just as surprised. They are "influenced", I put it in quotes but it is by the strictest definition of the word.

Consumers do not like advertisements in the form of banners and popups. They don't like commercials for a product unless it is ironic.

There is a lot of utility in having someone with a lot of followers merely using something and enjoying the existence of this thing in their life.

Nothing new here, just new ways to reach a collective more efficiently. An industry - that relied on movie stars too heavily that missed where people are getting information - is simply adjusting where the deal flow goes.

Which part of this surprises you exactly?

why do companies think having this person shill their products has any marketing value?

People buy the products he mentions? It's pretty easy to measure these things, and it works really well.

This kind of intersects with some research I'm doing so I'll take a stab at answering.

Something psychologists, sociologists, and advertisers have known for a long time is that your behavior is heavily influenced by the people you interact with. If your friends all started getting in to a new TV show, you'd probably start getting into it too. If your friends are mostly Republicans, you will be more likely to be a Republican. This is kind of obvious, but it extends towards more commoditized things as well. If your friends all use iPhones or have Beats, for example, when it comes time to buy a new smartphone or headphones, you are more likely to buy an iPhone or Beats.

Within the past 10-15 years, two very important things happened. First, social networks became almost ubiquitously popular among many demographics. These networks are able to collect large amounts of data on their users' behaviors and preferences. This allows for personalized advertisement, which uses this data to determine the value of showing a specific advertisement to a person; this is the second big thing.

An innovative idea came in extending the concept of friends influencing purchases to social networking: when advertising to members of a social network, you should not only consider the value of a sale to an ad target, but also the expected value of the sales gained from that member influencing other members [0]. This was further formalized in 2003 by presenting the problem as follows: create a graph with vertices representing social network members and edges representing probabilities of one member influencing another to buy a product via influence propagation [1]. If you are only allowed to target k members of the network to influence, how do you pick the k members that will maximize influence propagation? Although this is an NP-complete problem, good ways to approximate might be to look at max degree vertices, or to generalize, vertices with neighbors (with neighbors with neighbors with neighbors... etc.) with lots of neighbors.

So this gets back to why someone can be paid to be a social influencer. First, a social influencer is a real person with "real" connections to the people that are connected with them via a social network, so they are likely to influence those they come into contact with to buy new products. Secondly, because having both quantity and quality of connections within a social network enhances the number of people you can reach, you want to look at people with high engagement and high number of followers. These people are able to influence a lot of people to buy products, so they get paid to do so.

[0] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/kdd01a.pdf [1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/kdd03-inf.pdf

OK, that makes sense. But why don't social influencers lose credibility once it becomes clear that they're just recommending what they're paid to recommend?

Why don't celebrities lose credibility when they do it?

They tend to also. Its called cashing in your fame. You finally agree to endorse all those products you thought were shit for some money after your spotlight fades.

They probably do, but the thing with these influencers and the networks they use is that for every (young) adult who stops following you, you gain a fresh (pre)teenager ready to idolize you for years. Although in all probability maintaining a long-term career is not likely for the majority of these influencers.

These 'social influencers' are great for marketing, because they allow you to reach a demographic — indirectly, so it all seems sincere and authentic — that is notoriously hard to reach via traditional channels.

Right, like a fire.

I think this comes down to loyalty. Not to a brand of course, but the whole basis of the social media celebrity is that they are "like you" enough that you can regard them a bit like a friend. A cooler friend that does cool things and hangs out with more attractive people. And I think the audience sort of accept that the funding for the cooler lifestyle must come from somewhere. Did that gamer guy you follow who talks about his Nvidia graphics card and Oculus Rift a lot pay full price for them? Does it matter? Does that girl who posts bikini photos from a lot of beautiful holidays while holding energy drinks pay full price for the holidays? Does it matter? Would you do the same yourself if you had the opportunity to do those things but "sell out" a little in the process?

(That's the third person plural you, not you specifically as an individual, mirmir)

Discussions over "selling out" go way back in the music business. And somehow it doesn't matter too much even if it's really obvious and insincere, the product still gets mentioned and works its way into people's subconscious where purchasing decisions are made.

That's a good point. There's the joke about Americans feeling like "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", plus the fact that American culture has been very invasive. Plus the "it's sarcasm all the way down" vibe that's become so pervasive. So yes, I get that.

It's an interesting topic that I don't know much about but I have noticed a very interesting correlation over a small sample. In my extended social circle I'd say I'm least prone to "social mimicry" (even though it would be best to ask a third party obviously) and there's a couple of people that are very prone to it and some that are not all that prone to it. I have noticed that the people that tend to mimic are also the people that strongly prefer instant gratification over long term benefits (time preference in economic terms). That's pretty constant over different domains, a trivial example would be "must develop this pokemon immediately" vs. "I'll just wait a bit until it gives me a bit more XP to do so" but it's also true for shopping and a lot of other things. I used to be very interested in time preference (and time preference in children vs. adults). I'm not aware of a model that links time preference and social mimicry but it's by no means my area of expertise.

As an aside: it seems very rational to pay social influences. I'm not entirely sure which pop-sci book it was (something I must have read on the train) but there's an interesting section on this in iirc. "The Tipping Point".

I will answer your question with a question... Is Donald Trump President of the United States? Anyone has the numbers on how much 500k fake snapchat followers cost? ^^

Jeez, there are just so many scarier things to me in the world today. Is it silly, yeah, sure it is.

Isn't this just the television model? Do enough "content" to draw in viewers and then sell as many ads as possible. It's not really new.

It's no different than the Slap Chop guy getting out of the county fairs and onto TV.

In the 19th century the equivalent was "preacher".

this guy is not going to make it. he draws beards on snaps and has a grand total of 22.7k ig followers.

he had a good thing going, but it's coming to an end

people are scared and want to follow others so they don't have to decide everything for themselves. Humans are pack animals.

i get how it's mind boggling but how is this scary?

When you have lived your life feeling at the edge of innovation and laughing at people who don't get it. And suddenly you realize that some of the newest stuff, you don't get it.

That's scary.

I don't get Snap. I use it occasionally and think the filters are a pretty cool technology, but I don't get the rest of it (the part that makes them money). I'm surprised Wall Street seems to understand it so well.

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