This makes me wonder: How many Instagram influencers are there in total? What is the percentage of influencers in the entire population of (active) users? At some point it's just influencers influencing each other, right?
Was also surprised to learn these are still a thing outside the US
I guess because of this one might not refer to them as purely an "influencer" but more and more people I know use instagram as a primary platform for advertising skills / wares as well as a place to spend money.
If you know your audience spends time on instagram, you'd be stupid not to put resources into engaging with them on the platform.
I am not talking trash about your point. Just that you replied to a comment with not much understand of multi level marketing (pyramid schems) that the previous comment was aluding to (and the commenter didn't expand on it either). Most people in the tech business do not have much exposure to it. But the success of things like herbalife, avon, etc rest on the "marketing reach potential" of their network, not just for the direct product.
so in a way you are confirming the similarity that you thought you were denying with your comment. And the great insight here is how "influencer" is a kind of organic-multilevel-marketing scam.
Small-to-medium brands engaging with small-to-medium scale individual marketers/influencers could be quite different than traditional MLM, with way fewer intermediaries.
Is it a scam though? A pyramid scam is self-similar: you sell to people who then expect to sell to people who expect to sell to people etc.
I thought Avon, Tupperware etc. had a fixed length chains and multi-decade track records of sales to real consumers at the end of the chain.
However things like tupperware didn't seem to work that way, the product was actually mostly sold to end customers which makes it a legitimate business and not a pyramid scheme.
Yeah, I had absolutely no interest in the platform until I learned of some shoe makers communicating/selling only through it. It seems to have become a very popular showcasing platform for crafts.
Ex: I don't have an instagram currently, but if I did I'd bet I'd have better chance of selling wireless pineapples than even a "megainfluencer" like Kylie Jenner.
That's a pretty broad statement, not all "techies" are straight males.
Would you still be counted as a nano influencer?
They do almost no personal branding, they're just well-known in their area. I imagine it's the same for most sports with a lot of participants, save those with a high financial barrier to entry (e.g. racing cars).
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/28/18116875/influencer...
From the article:
> What do influencers charge per post?
> It depends on the influencer, and their follower numbers. A micro-influencer, which is someone that has 10,000 to 50,000 followers, is actually pretty valuable. They used to only pick up a couple hundred bucks, but today, they get a minimum of a few thousands dollars a post.
> Influencers with up to 1 million followers can get $10,000 [per post], depending on the platform, and 1 million followers and up, you’re getting into territory where they can charge $100,000. Some can even get $250,000 for a post! Especially if the content is on Youtube and the influencer is in the gaming industry.
> How much do typical influencers make annually?
> People with smaller followings [who are known as nanoinfluencers] can make between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. The micro-influencers can make anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000. Celeb influencers make way, way more.
>I've paid for a bit of influencer marketing.
Rates depend on the influencer, demographic, industry, and many other factors.
Just contact some IG pages and see what they are willing to accept. The proliferation of meme pages, fake likes, news feed algos that decide what to show you, everyone wanting to become an influencer, and general inflation (1MM followers is nothing these days) have driven down costs. It's a bit of a lemon market too. I paid around 1/50th or 1/100th of the figures quoted in the other comment. Ofcourse it varies though.
- custom/tracked coupon codes
- custom/tracked swipe-up or bio links
- general increase in sales for the day
Instagram ROI for consumer products is good enough that the tracking doesn't need to catch 100%.
$25k+ per post is just normal celebs. $250k on a social media post is extreme and only happens if the person is incredibly famous. It's no different than tv commercials and sports deals. Nothing has really changed other than adding a new medium to monetize. The fame is still the hard part, although there's more of it to go around and more opportunity for those that try.
assuming 30%+ US & 10%+ likes to followers ratio & 50%+ female
$250K per post is Kylie Jenner's territory.
A girl with 1.5MM and some connections can make up to $500K/y. About $5K per post. About 10MM impressions.
Someone with 500k can make up to $200k a year. Around $2k per post.
If your audience isn't as the one I described, the prices drop considerably. Rare exceptions apply.
Note that unless your "influencer" is a singer or an athlete or a politician or royalty, they're not "influencing" anyone. just treat them as pure ad impressions.
If you're paying more than $2K per 1MM impressions of the audience I described above, you're doing something wrong. Unless it's a singer or an athlete or a politician or royalty. In that case up to $2.7K makes sense
is there a standard metric to check how many of your followers are active?
if you have 1.5mm followers, but the same 10% on average are the ones to engage/like your posts, is it the same as having 15,000 really engaged followers?
Also, Instagram simply doesn't show your stuff to 100% of your followers 100% of the time, so it's just impossible.
If you were to ask, could an 800K account with 150.000 likes per post charge as much as an 1.5MM account with 150.000 likes per post? Yes, and it would make sense. It's just rare that someone has an higher than 10% ratio. I've seen them upwards of 20% with the current algo.
As I said, as an advertiser you should look to pay about $2K per 1MM impressions (which are about 50k likes). In other words, if you paid $2K to get your product posted on an account with the audience I described previously and it gets 50K likes, you're doing it right and you're supposed to make a profit.
$2K per 1MM impressions it's my opinion tho (and it's pretty market average in my experience). It's derived from the fact that you can pay $3.5K to FB directly to get 1MM female US impressions on IG - with zero hassles and better traceability.
Is it 10% for any one post?
My question is, in a rolling 30 day period, are 10% of all followers overall liking posts, or any given random 10%?
If there's a point on the spectrum that's more "meta" and further away from the idea of "connecting & sharing with friends" I don't know what it is. Maybe it would be whoever's out there marketing themselves as fake followers to help would-be marketers market themselves to marketers? Or marketing themselves as marketing coaches to help would-be marketers market to marketers? You know they're probably out there.
Isn't that the ages old, "fake it till you make it"?
I get a feeling the news feed of long time users get so spammy that "real content" gets lost.
I've made a twitter account for my niche real estate statistics site and the amount of answer I get from people that are following many users is minuscule. People with less followers are more prone to answering.
(NB: I'm not spamming my site to them, but like trying to talk about estate prices with people that are talking about real estate prices).
It's like what I write disappears when writing to those people. Twitter feels like a place where user involuntarily stalk the elite rather than a social network. Instagram the same thing.
The feed algorithm is hugely favoring algorithmic "friends" and popular users, most likely.
I've often felt similarly. Twitter has always seemed more of a "broadcast" type of network, with personalities/small companies doing the "interact with users" thing only until they make it big, at which point it becomes all advertising, all the time.
Having worked in this space back in 2010, I can say that at the time about 150 million Americans had a blog, but only about 10,000 had 10,000 or more subscribers. The numbers are bigger now with the popularity of platforms like Twitter / YouTube / Instagram / Twitch, but only a few times bigger, not orders of magnitude bigger.
Probably more accurately maybe 10% of the population had 10 or so abandoned blog-starts. (I've never "been a blogger", but I'm sure there's remnants of at least 5 or 10 failed attempts on my part to become one - littered in archive.org, search engine indexes, and web hosting that's not yet expired...)
just make an instagram
it's harder to stand out
It is slightly less obnoxious than just calling it "first class" vs. "commoners" instagram, but still pretty obnoxious nonetheless.
If you are unable to see the value in influencers (from a business perspective) it would simply suggest you are part of a segment that aren't engaged by them. If so don't let that fool you into underestimating the effect these people are having. Their audiences are highly engaged and are the same people who don't watch any TV and have adblock installed.
It's an ugly trend taking over everything. Stratify all humans, treat the elites differently. Forget about net neutrality, we can do this within websites, within APIs, and so now we do.
I tend to follow niche manufacturers (of guitars or other handmade instruments) directly because I am interested in their 'behind the scenes' photographic essays. No need for me to see them draped over someone who has no idea about the product but will happily drape them over themselves at some ubiquitous beach sunset shot.
I don't think it is a 'class' thing as much as it is a 'positioning' thing.
From HN's FAQ:
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments.
(I don't _like_ it, but it's kinda part of choosing to use someone else's free service and the community it builds. They get to choose the rules, including who gets to monetise that community and how...)
Anybody can download an app and do celebrity (read "taxi driver") stuff, and cash in on the gig-economy celebrity market...
I wonder how long until we see a court case claiming "influencers"should be given employee benefits by Facebook???
If that's not a good example of different classes rubbing up against eachother and getting angry about it then nothing else on the planet is, either.
You know that coach used to be better than first class is now, right? This idea that the back of the plane is bad and horrible suffering is a new invention, a new construct of the airlines that everyone just bought into all at once.
Traditional ads are marked as ads and given generally separate spaces. This generation is all about “normal” people trying to organically influence people to buy some company’s cheaply made shit. It’s a real thing and it’s working.
"Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles."
I think today's "influencers" are similar but perhaps more shallow versions of Gladwell's "Connectors".
I know if _I_ ask a question social media, I'll mostly get an answer if any of my friends know the answer. But when - for example - jwz asks "Dear Lazyweb", he'll get the guy who wrote the linux kernel subsystem or who runs the datacenter he's having problems with explain what's going wrong (often after having fixed it).
The concept of some people being well connected enough to reach and influence a valuable number of important-in-some-context people is 100% "real". (Whether an attractive blonde showing off a specific brand of sunglasses or luggage in Instagram qualifies is questionable, part of me wants to say "Nope!", but I don't make my living trying to convince people to buy my brand of sunglasses or luggage, so what do I know?)
That statement is ridiculous to me - actually more ridiculous than I find the whole "influencer" culture in the first place.
"Influencer" absolutely is a real thing. The reason brands are willing to pay many thousands of dollars to get something as simple as a tweet, story or post about a product is quite simply because it works. On the other side, Snapchat lost $1.3 billion in valuation when Kylie Jenner tweeted "sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad." Seems like "influencer" very accurately describes the role.
Baloney. How many teenagers could make literally millions of dollars in centuries past based primarily on their relatability (in addition to their video game or makeup application skills). Modern social networks and YouTube have opened up an entirely new way not to just have influence, but to monetize, productize and quantify it.
I get it, you probably think it's all dumb and pointless, but to say it's "nothing new" is like saying the internet is nothing new because people have been sending messages back and forth for centuries.
Sure there are new avenues to create and connect with people to gain that recognition, along with increased opportunity from a bigger population and lower costs, but how fame works and the monetization of that fame is a very old concept. There's nothing new there.
Study the principals, not the buzzwords. You can find all this in a 50 year old marketing book.
'Influencer' is new-speak trying to hide their shadiness.
It depends on where you set your bar. For some individuals (probably the bulk of Fyre Fest attendees) this is going to require explicit text.
Depends what they are shilling and whether the creators of the show would actually endorse those products themselves genuinely.
Like, I personally wouldn't have an issue endorsing something that I use myself, but I would absolutely be a sell-out if I did it just for the money. I'm not a salesman.
To an extent, everyone is an influencer: if you tell another person about an experience you had, you were influencing them. In other words, influence is an analog scale, not a binary switch.
As for how influence is distributed, influence is a secondary property of a person, that is to say that one's success at being an influencer is dependent on other secondary properties (skill at writing, photography/videography skills, etc.) and primary properties (sexual attractiveness being a big one).
Since it is a secondary property, the distribution will look like a logarithmic distribution (it may not actually be a logarithmic distribution, but the general shape will be correct, as opposed to a Gaussian distribution, for example).