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Comment by bongoman42 | Hacker News Reader

Most of these domains show power law like earnings. 13% making $100K or more is actually fairly healthy and way more than I expected. Also, given that many of these influencers are international, the dollar goes a lot more in many countries and if one were to adjust for cost of living, this would be even more healthier.

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That’s revenue though, isn’t it? What are influencers’ costs?

I guess living the lifestyle is part of the benefit but the successful influencers I’ve seen often pay production crews, rent luxury products like expensive cars, travel, and just a ton of little things that add up. That’s not including the promotion costs like paying to cross promote with other influencers and other growth hacks.

I suspect it’s more like 1-2% make a significant profit.

I would suspect its one of those things like driving for Uber where the majority of people don't check the math on their true profit per hour, so there is a lot of churn.. but the truly successful are the ones with rigor in their process.

The luxury product, materialistic worship influencer segment is only a tiny percent of the influencer economy.

For every one influencer posing with a sports car in Dubai, there are a thousand other influencers whose content can be produced at very low cost. Video games, parenting, fitness, beauty/make-up/skincare, cooking, woodworking, gardening, backpacking, dancing, DIY, personal finance, etc all have tons of content creators working from home (or the gym, park, shop, whatever).

I know a woman who started posting videos that were just her holding her cell phone recording a selfie video talking about being a mom. She now has brands paying her tens of thousands of dollars to promote their products, and her videos are still just phone selfies sitting on her couch.

My observation isn't limited to that segment (I've never actually seen any content from them). Attention is finite and eventually each niche becomes a zero-sum game of competing over limited eyeballs. Once it becomes competitive, spending money becomes the best lever available to the content creators.

I don't think this necessarily applies to all influencers like those with loyal followings, but it's a general pattern I've observed.

There's also, depending on what they are influencing, a lot of in-kind payment like free travel / electronics / makeup / clothing or whatever they are promoting/"reviewing".

Most of the stats I've seen is that influencing is actually about 75% female, partially because the ad metrics show women respond to it more strongly. So its unfortunate they mostly highlighted men in the article.

> Most of these domains show power law like earnings. 13% making $100K or more is actually fairly healthy and way more than I expected.

Exactly.

Seems like a way better shot at wealth for most people than professional sports.

There's probably many other professions like real estate agent that follow a similar pattern.

I can't find a public link to the 2023 report, but the 2022 report is linked below and it has some more information. It is based on a survey of 2000 "creators." It says that from their sample: "Over 35% of the creators surveyed have been building an audience for over four years and earn over $50k annually."

https://neoreach.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Creator-Earn...

Perhaps some of the people who get into this thought of it (mistakenly) as a job specialization that doesn't have a power-law distribution in income, such as a dentist or a software engineer.

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