Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job | Hacker News Reader

Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job

theatlantic.com

175 pointslxm87 comments

Can't really believe I'm recommending this here. But for a peek into the world of creative kids who move to LA to launch their budding empires on social media. Check out the Paris Hilton reality show "Hollywood Love Story" on Viceland. It's dark and dystopian. Not a celebration of facile overnight fame at all. There seems to be a distinct "peak" around the 50K followers mark, where no matter how hard you try, you never get past a local maximum of saturation.

This looks like a great series by Atlantic editors and will read at length when I get a moment. But I'd say most creators and influencers are well aware of the demands required to scale a personal brand. For a vlogger to get a free Lull mattress and feature it in a five minute segment is a win-win situation. Cash equivalent is ~$1K or less. They still have to make rent.

On the other hand, upside of popular social media presence is opportunity. From getting representation at a modeling or acting agency, to art students just out of school getting that first gallery show or sale. It can be considered de rigeur.

  a distinct "peak" around the 50K followers mark

You have to figure that there's a standing population of subculture participants, that represent a feedback loop of engrossed imitators, all incestuously following each other, and backslapping the whole way. Gadflies keeping up with the Joneses. Famous for being famous.

It's sort of like artificial trading volume in a niche crypto currency network. A handful of miners mint 30 million coins, then create a couple of hundred sock puppet wallets, to create a closed loop of transactions between, this way it always looks like there are people using the coin, and the system doesn't seem like a ghost town. As spectators and wall flowers show up, jaws drop at the occasional whopper trade between two "anonymous" users, which is actually meaningless, because it was really just one guy moving a million worthless tokens from one address to another, both of which he controls.

So too with having 50K followers. When they're all just bots and pros, keeping an eye on the competition, what's that actually worth?

Numbers rendered in HTML.

And so Hacker News gets hooked on a Paris Hilton reality show.

Basically everyone had summer jobs. But how many kids in a class of 30 will have a profile with 20k followers? I'd guess one at best, likely less. (average)

I know a ton of teachers and am friends with a bunch of people with monetised channels like these, but it's really not like a summer job. Virtually everyone had a summer job at some point, but in a class of 30 you'd be hard pressed to find a kid with a profile of 10-20k users. Usually it's like 5-10 kids in a school of 500-1000 who've got some instagram side hustle going on.

Otherwise nice article though, things have definitely changed and as long as parents keep an eye out I think it's a pretty cool development.

On the other hand, I'd question the extent to which kids will say no to crappy brands that offer money, whereas in my experience most serious channels by young adults will often not recommend bad products they don't believe in. If you look at all the insta feeds they're all basically clones of each other anyway, kind of low-quality reviews and just all about advertising, promotions, chances to win something etc. Seems like a pure money-grab, whereas young adults tend to build more of an experience, mention products they don't profit from, offer more varied content. I'm honestly a bit surprised at the amount of followers they got, but then you can wonder how much is real.

Honestly can't blame them, when I was a kid I always had some silly side hustle too. I just wanted to buy games, candy, fireworks and a football haha, quality wasn't the nr 1 priority.

More like the new school band then I guess. Few people actually got on stage or even just into the rehearsal room, but in the late 20th century, hardly anybody made it through school not fantasizing about it in some form.

The slope to a marketable Instagram feed is far more gentle, there are no major hurdles to take except for lack of success (which never stopped school bands either)

> Negotiation usually takes place entirely over Instagram direct message, and teens rarely sign formal contracts

This is not always the case, however. There are entire marketing agencies setup for exactly this. We use Social Native [0], which allows us to pay people to post editorialized content.

Very few (if any) people follow the FCC rules [1] that tag the posts as #ad. It is a really shady market; nearly everything in social media marketing is astroturfed like this.

[0] https://www.socialnative.com/

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/03/ftc-s...

>> Negotiation usually takes place entirely over Instagram direct message, and teens rarely sign formal contracts

> This is not true. There are entire marketing agencies setup for exactly this.

Does the fact that there are marketing agencies negate the point that it "usually" takes place like this, though?

That's entirely fair. I corrected the main comment.

The article doesn't claim that there isn't marketing agencies set up, just that most negotiation is done over DM. And from my impression that's still the case.

From what I've seen, there's very little about social media that isn't shady, both on the service provider side and how other companies use it.

Also FameBit

so this is tax evasion and the companies and individuals should be prosecuted. right?

How are the companies evading? If I pay a plumber to fix my sink and he doesn't report that income, should I be prosecuted?

Is your plumber a child?

How sustainable is this before it starts to destroy trust and integrity in the friendships between these kids. As an adult, I would not like my friends to be promoting products to me rather than expressing their real preferences and insights. How much more toxic is this in teenage years when relationship skills are being formed?

This is not for friends at all. You have one account for these kinds of things and another one, often private, for real friends. Of course many of your friends follow both accounts but they understand very well it's a kind of job and, in general, are supportive. You're not selling things to them like in MLM.

Right, someone with 8,000 followers is not "friends" with all of them.

It's MLM reinvented with more child labor.

Hardly, from what I understand. There's no initial financial outlay beyond phone, internet, and time - which they already have - and as far as I can tell there are no commitments or personality contracts. Will it last like this, though? I doubt it. I expect the near future will being middle-men driving down the already low prices and demanding increasingly more of the advertisers in terms of what they can and cannot post, who they are allowed to work with, etc.

But the analogy is still tempting. How much of the attention heaped upon influencers is coming from people who hope to get some back for their own rise to influencerdom? Still closer to plain old high-school popularity, but now with a dangling carrot of a career possibility.

They are not promoting to their friends. Most have different accounts for talking to friends. The accounts with 8 thousand, or 20 thousand, or 50 thousand followers are obviously not all close friends. They are people following the child's internet persona.

But what if you're a crappy social media maven and you HAVE conflated your fake friends and real friends?

What if you had no real friends at all...

Then you likely learn a tough lesson. This is called growing up.

Yeah: the account 'for friends' is called "frinsta" (or something) nowadays.

> Yeah: the account 'for friends' is called "frinsta" (or something) nowadays.

rinsta = real instagram = public, heavily managed to project an image, for acquaintances and others

finsta = fake instagram = private, informal, for real friends

https://thetechieguy.com/what-is-finsta-and-rinsta-and-why-d...

Welp, I feel old.

Don't worry buddy, my guess is 95% of us are in the same boat.

Plus, it's information with short-term relevance. Think Beanie Baby jargon. Does anyone really think "having an Insta" or knowing the vernacular is going to be relevant in 10 years? Any more relevant than knowing your way around MySpace is today?

Tangent:

When I was younger, I assumed that old (well, “old”, like 45) people couldn’t figure out how to use technology. So I’d roll my eyes as some adult seemed confused about Facebook or whatever.

Now that I’m aging out of the “young adult” category, I realized I had it wrong: I can still figure out how to use the new hot new social media app, I just don’t see why I should give a damn about any of it.

Those terms seem to mean the opposite of what they should. Shouldn't you be "real" with your friends, and "fake" with the public?

The sheer fact a 'rinsta' is "heavily managed to project an image" means that it is fake. I guess it's just another example of language evolving counter to logic and original meaning.

Maybe because it has your True Name, rather than a pseudonym to disclose to good friends?

The idea is that the fake account is known to be you by only a few people that you chose.

Who are these 20k people and why would they be interested in following an account being paid for promoting products in a very obvious way? Of course the ideas of advertisement aren’t lost on me and I can see how a product mentioned on Gruber’s blog or podcast would be somewhat persuading, but the difference is that Gruber seems to be curate and select advertisers he actually cares for and enjoys, products that are actually relevant to its audience. The sponsored content on instagram however looks rather random and open to any advertiser - I don’t see the appeal to the followers of said accounts. Maybe I’m just too narrow-minded.

If it teaches kids to distrust by default what they see online then that would be a positive.

Blind trust in everything on the internet is equally as bad as assuming that everything from the greatest collection of human knowledge is a lie. Skepticism and critical evaluation are the skills that should be encouraged.

Eh, give the kids some credit. This is the modern equivalent of bringing candy from home and selling it at school. Kids these days are likely far better than you and I at sussing out a social media hustle.

While I'm not a big fan of marketing/ad model it is neat to see kids 13-15 be able to do something to make some money. At 13 I was buying candy like WarHeads in bulk and selling them to other kids on the bus to make a 5x return. I wasn't able to get a real job until I was 15 and even then, I had to really hustle and find a retail company that was willing to take a chance on me.

I don't see anything wrong with this - we're still so new in social media (it's only a couple decades old), so its constantly evolving no different than the "wild west" Internet days.

The only concern I have is the experience they are earning. In a "traditional" summer job (car wash, manual labor, cashier, etc.), you gained experience in something I'd call "grit" - harsh work conditions, people yelling at you, etc.

Being an Instagram model or YouTuber still deals with its share of internet trolls, but are people learning to handle when things "won't go their way"? I don't think that's the term I'm looking for, but just the overall "not enjoying the work" part of, well... work!

My concerns are because people are failure-averse, we hate negativity. A YouTuber/Instragammer can simply not read the comments, or selectively filter the comments. Are they getting the same "grit" experience as the more traditional work environments I mentioned above?

EDIT: As you'll see in my responses to comments - what about non-person "grit"? Does being an Instragram model or YouTuber develop the grit to push through the annoying/boring/tedious/stressful parts of making money? When you a digging ditches, you don't exactly get to "ignore" the negative parts of the job. When learning, you don't get to "ignore" the struggle of not understanding something. Grit or perseverance (pick which one you like better), is a necessary skill that more physical jobs teach. Being the center of some social network clique, does not.

> My concerns are because people are failure-averse, we hate negativity. A YouTuber/Instragammer can simply not read the comments, or selectively filter the comments. Are they getting the same "grit" experience as the more traditional work environments I mentioned above?

1) Should we aspire to that grit/negativity continuing as part of everyone's working lives? I'm not so sure...

2) Sure - and as a SaaS owner I can ignore customer complaints/support requests. But I'll end up out of business pretty quickly. Same goes for influencers and their audience. The difference is (perhaps) that a bit of negative press isn't necessarily bad for business in the influencer world...

> Should we aspire to that grit/negativity continuing as part of everyone's working lives? I'm not so sure...

I'll say yes, mostly due to the fact we cannot control life. If a family member is injured or killed, you cannot ignore it.

Let's change the "grit"-building away from interacting with people to other "sucky" grit-building attributes; for example, physical fitness. Starting off sucks and hurts, but you have to "push through" to develop the ritual and motivation to improve. To do Couch to 5K, you have to deal with the upfront costs of huffing, wheezing, AND allocating time in your schedule to huff and wheeze. With a job like car washing or landscaping, you can quit, but you're out of work. The only thing you can do is lay a wet bandanna on your head and get back to work.

Another analogy is Computer Science, and more generally STEM. I think one of the primary reasons from the high attrition rates isn't because people "weren't born that way". The constant failure is commonplace; at least when compiling your first programs in intro to CS. I think people choose to pursue other careers because you have to "deal with" compiler errors.

My concern is that you don't learn this by being a billboard. Maybe Youtubing, since there's video editing, but again why I'm not sure. This gets back to my "failure-aversion" - if people are not building enough "grit", or perseverance if you don't like the term grit, then they will not be able to do anything BEYOND be a walking advertisement.

If you think it's necessary to be yelled at in a menial physical job to learn "grit," then you're probably short a few desirable professional characteristics yourself.

Instead of interactions, what about my example of car wash or manual labor? I don't think yelling is necessary. I do think standing outside in the summer because you are working does teach grit.

They are getting a much grittier experience. No-one ever came to me at my summer job and told me to kill myself, or that I was too ugly to rape.

I take it you never worked in a customer facing position?

As I've said elsewhere, what about non-customer interaction activities? I grew up digging ditches for my family's business. I WILL say shoveling clay in the summer in North Carolina humidity is a much grittier experience than reading someone's comment on the internet I don't know verbally attacking me.

If it provides so much value for the kid, why stop here?

I think we should start torture camps for spoiled children - shoveling clay in North Carolina summer, shoveling snow in Alaska winter, and so on! That will teach them!!

If it is so good, parents will certainly pay good money to put their kids in the best torture camp!

Slippery slope fallacy aside since that is advocating we go back to a time before child labor laws, yes. The hard work involved is my point. This doesn't have to be physical labor, see my error handling example in learning computer science. K-12 also refers to what I'm advocating as "productive struggle", and I'm not sure being an advertisement teaches this skill.

Sorry, I disagree. I honestly find this whole business of not just marketing to relatively young children but paying them to be your marketing drones pretty disgusting.

I mean, some of the kids in this story are 12 and 13. I find this commoditization of "friendship" distressing enough when adults do it, but with developing children I find it to be a gross abuse of power.

As another poster said, perhaps the one good to come from this is that (hopefully) kids will get so turned off from the constant stream of bullshit that they will disconnect entirely.

I apologize, I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. Also, I agree, commoditization of friendship is not good and I do not support that.

I was more referring to this as the modern-day hussle and that if people are going to choose Instagram'ing as their occupation, they aren't gaining necessary "grit" from other types of work

They're getting a crash course in branding, advertising, and media.

It's a low level marketing role.

> The only concern I have is the experience they are earning. In a "traditional" summer job (car wash, manual labor, cashier, etc.), you gained experience in something I'd call "grit" - harsh work conditions, people yelling at you, etc.

This is a positive? O.o

Check through my other responses; I don't view it as positive or negative, just necessary.

Shouldn't all those shilling posts include disclaimer: 'Includes paid promotion'? Sometimes you can see it on YouTube videos, but I haven't seen it anywhere on Instagram so far.

Also this situation reminds me about this 'marketing' strategy some companies do, that they are hiring salesmen on some easy-to-break contracts with sole purpose them selling product (most of the time it's some financial bs or insurances) to friends and family, then when their sales drop - fire them.

FTC says they have to be hashtagged as #ad. No one cares though.

Rather specific question: does anyone have experience working with a college student who organically promoted service or product on their physical campus? If so, how did you find them initially and how successful was the effort?

This is about validating/bootstraping an idea that requires a set of users in the same physical and social space, and as I have no confidence in myself or my direct friends being able to create the right seed culture for this, I’m trying to find a person within an existing community (like at a university) who can. To be clear, I’m not looking for like a one off, Tupperware party style infleuncer, but almost like a social evangelist for the product who can stick with it for a few months and who can also tell me why the product sucks

Tinder and red bull are really good at this. In Europe they're called campus ambassadors.

In America they're called brand ambassadors.

It sounds like you're describing "flyering", where you have a group of people handing out flyers in a space where large groups normally travel. A common example is college clubs advertising for new members in their campus quad, during passing periods. Is this what you mean?

Very interesting article! I wonder what the ROI on these ads are considering two things: 1) the ability to buy lots of fake followers and 2) teens having very little spending money.

This is a decade old so I imagine the numbers are much higher now, but in 2007:

"With an aggregate income of $80 billion, teenage consumers represent an important consumer segment in their own right. Moreover, parents spend another $110 billion on teens in key consumer categories such as apparel, food, personal care items, and entertainment."

$190+ billion is a good sized market.

https://www.packagedfacts.com/Teens-1493744/

Advertisers have smartened up to this. Followers don't mean shit, it's all about engagement. In fact, a lot of companies are focusing on many "micro influencers" over one large influencer. They can spread their advertising dollars over a larger range of people, with higher engagement rates, than one single giant influencer with an audience they may not even care about your product(and much lower engagement rates). The bigger the following on IG, the lower % engagement. With Facebook in control now, the crackdown on fake has already begun.

Buying followers isn't terribly difficult, even getting fake likes as well isn't hard either. $100 goes a long way for an artifically inflated account.

Not every follower is rated equally either. There are tools like followercheck which determines legitimacy of followers an influence has. It isn't that far off from fakespot for amazon reviews.

I have a friend that is super insecure. I know for a fact she bought followers, 5000+ followers and 0 engagement with silly motivational posts says a lot about a person.

IG constantly cleans up those fake accounts[1] you buy so eventually they will go away. Look for big dips in people's following count as the rush to buy them back.

1]https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/19/technology/social/bieber-in...

You can expect to lose money on the first posts (weeding out the fakes, building a relationship, shipping product etc) but once you find someone who works well, it's easy to get a great ROI from future posts with them.

To give you a rough idea, I run a small ecommerce jewellery store as a side project and a post by a micro influencer (<1000 followers) netted us over $3000 in orders. We just gave her $89 worth of jewellery.

That's obviously an exception, but you can definitely build up a network of trusted partners who can get you 5-10x returns pretty consistently.

Do people browse Instagram as a shopping experience or are those impulse purchases?

In that case it was probably 95% impulse purchases.

If you're more of an 'expert' than an influencer (for example you're 'the car guy' on YouTube) then there's probably much more prior intent to purchase... (Information not inspiration)

Very impulse driven. People usually browse Instagram casually like people browse HN - for general tips, interesting videos and content, and the lifestyle of people they are interested in.

So if you can get someone people look at every day to promote one of your products, and it happens that the person is looking for new shoes / jewelry / style, you can convert those into purchases.

Teens have an enormous amount of disposable income, because for most of them, nearly all of their income is disposable.

It is beyond me why companies pay for this. A user with 10k followers is nothing, you can get 90% of them to be bots. Really hard to figure it out if a network is from bots or real individuals.

Also, if it is about girls, then 90% of the users are guys wanting to see some ass and boobs. What do companies get from such a target audience? They don't wear bikinis and don't care in which hotel the girls are staying...

How can they just pay them like that? What about taxes and social security fees? I doubt the kids have their own company.

exactly. I don't know about US but in Euro you always have to submit an invoice, pay VAT. These companies and individuals should be prosecuted.

That's just not true. There are lots of countries in Europe *yes, and Euro zone) where you don't have to collect VAT if you sell under a certain amount of revenue per year.

I'm not saying that everyone involved in the activities you're describing are doing it 100% by the book. Far from it probably. But that isn't an excuse to just blatantly spread misinformation.

For example in UK, you don't have to pay VAT if you make under 80.000 or something like that. But, you still have to register as a company or sole trader with HMRC and say that you are involved in an economic activity.

And you still have to submit invoices. I doubt that any of these people send invoices through instagram messages...

I work in the space and the real trouble is that it's so easy to build a 'fake' profile (including on platform engagement and follower ratios etc) that sure, you might only be paying $20 per post, but only 10% of posts will deliver anything approaching value for money.

The good news is you can then build up a relationship with the 'good' influencers over time, but it's still a lot of work. And once an influencer reaches a certain level of fame, they are basically bought out by the big brands with contracts and serious money to throw around.

Another big problem is that it's still really hard (impossible) to track 'the good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it seems organic and there's no transactional gift voucher or discount code shared with the influencer's audience.

We actually got so fed up of this that we decided to turn it on its head and are working on [a tool](https://postperk.com) to help brands turn their customers into Instagram influencers instead. It's pretty early days, but I'd be happy to throw out a free month or so to any HN readers who are interested in trying it out.

Is your comment 'the good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it seems organic and there's no transactional gift voucher or discount code shared with the influencer's audience ?

> I'd be happy to throw out a free month

Oh, guess not.

> Is your comment 'the good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it seems organic and there's no transactional gift voucher or discount code shared with the influencer's audience ?

Hey, it's just a free month (we don't offer that anywhere else) - we're currently going through the advisor track of YC Startup School and if we can help anyone out there (for free) in return for some feedback, we're happy to do so.

I should probably have made it clear that I meant 'the good kind' from the brand's point of view. Sorry.

Yep, it's not a very well known fact to the public, but most of the influencers with 5-10M+ followers you see are easily 90% fake accounts, especially if these people have no real fan-base to draw upon outside of IG. If you're Drake or Justin Bieber, you have real clout, people follow you around platforms because you actually are a legitimate celebrity. If you don't exist outside of IG, let's say you're just a hot model that appeared out of nowhere, then I would be very suspicious as a brand, about to pay him/her for posts.

In fact, that's what brands have discovered. They'll pay a 10M followers influencer for a sponsored post, maybe give them a coupon, and see barely any sales, the ROI is not there. They go: "Huh, that's odd, this person is SUPER popular", but it turns out it's all fake numbers, thus the influencers start getting paid progressively less and less.

Those people selling hair gummies and laxative tea are not living lavishly through that, no matter how hard they try to create that impression.

That seems to completely ignore market segment and organic trust, which many of the 'influencers' actually garner. That is if your a car youtuber, or paramotor youtuber or makeup instagrammer your audience is highly focused and the influencer not seen as compromised by big sponsorship appear more genuine, "if x wrenched on that tool that hard and it works for him it does for me". Maybe it doesn't matter how 'powerful' they are but where they wield their power... in that moment.

That's true - there are definitely verticals where what you're describing is really advantageous.

“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!”

Baudrillard was right.

...Do any of you still get reams of paper junkmail on your doorstep or a mailbox crammed so full of kruft that the real post office complains about not being able to deliver mail?... So now that its gone digital, how do we chase junk mail carriers away with a lawn sprinkler anymore?

The junk mail carrier is the real post office, sadly. At least in the US that’s the case.

Spam filters?

...but i dont want to put a lock on my mail box, i want the spam carrier to get wet and destroy the rest of the junk mail so it doesnt bother me again or anyone else for the rest of the day...

Do any of you still get reams of paper junkmail on your doorstep or a mailbox crammed so full of kruft that the real post office complains about not being able to deliver mail

Yes.

My mail lady called me lazy because I let my box get so full.

I shrugged my shoulders and told her I was a millennial.

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