SOCIIETY
STOP THE INTERNET
by Olivia Yallop (Scribe £16.99, 280 pp)
Unless you’ve been living the life of a hermit for the past 15 years, you will be at least vaguely aware of Kim Kardashian, the curvaceous American model and billionaire businesswoman who owes her vast wealth to one thing: she is among the world’s most successful social media influencers.
A decade ago, few of us had heard of influencers — those people who, thanks to their expertise or popularity, shape the opinions and buying decisions of their followers. Now they’re everywhere; starring in ad campaigns, walking the red carpet at film premieres and appearing on Strictly. Joe Sugg, who was the first show’s influencer, reached the 2018 final.
Olivia Yallop is a deep dive in the world of influencers on social media. Pictured: U.S. former reality star Kim Kardashian owes much of her billion-dollar fortune to social media
Instead of dreaming of making it big in showbiz — that’s so last century! — many of today’s teens aspire to be an influencer. Often those who’ve made it are so young they’ve never had a proper job, yet on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, they have become a powerful, sought-after marketing tool for businesses wanting to reach young consumers.
As Olivia Yallop comments wryly in her book, which bills itself as a ‘deep dive into the world of influencers’, those who grew up being told off by their parents for spending too much time on Facebook or playing Call Of Duty now find they possess the perfect skills to make a career from being an influencer.
The ‘supersectors’ for influencers are beauty, family life, fashion, health and fitness. What does it take to become one of these influencers?
An agent tells Yallop that the formula for success is a combination of ‘attitude, work ethic, consistency, and creativity’.
This requires dedication. You can’t have a private family life, or a phone-free gathering with your loved ones. Everything is public.
According to one beauty blogger, if she didn’t post for a whole day, she was worried about her followers.
Being an influencer is a lucrative career for the select few. British fashion and beauty influencer Zoella (incidentally the sister of Joe Sugg) has earned more than £5 million since 2009 from merchandise sales, sponsorship and books. Girl Online was her first novel and it sold the most copies.
‘Homefluencer’ Sophie Hinchliffe from Essex, aka Mrs Hinch, started an Instagram account in 2018 to share tips on house cleaning. A string of bestselling books, plus the money she makes from sponsored posts on Instagram and TikTok, now earn her at least £1 million a year.
British fashion and beauty influencer Zoella (pictured) has earned more than £5 million since 2009 from merchandise sales, sponsorship and books
Influencers are even becoming children. The top ‘kidfluencers’ are Vlad and Nikita, Russian brothers whose cheerful, silly videos look like something a proud grandmother might post. Small children love them and the moppets’ YouTube channel has earned the family £47 million through advertising and brand partnerships.
Another influencer subset are ‘junklords’, who specialise in posting prank videos involving outrageous experiments, such as spending 24 hours in a hot tub filled with peanut butter or driving a Lamborghini into a swimming pool. Amazingly, millions of people watch this sort of thing, making small fortunes for the videos’ creators.
Yallop links the rise and fall of the influencer to 2008’s economic crash. This was when many young people started blogs to showcase their talents, as well as using social media.
The most successful influencers, she says, are akin to lifestyle gurus, responding to ‘the emotional needs of an anxious, atomised, alienated generation’.
BREAK THE INTERNET by Olivia Yallop (Scribe £16.99, 280 pp)
People are becoming more mainstream, regardless of how much they laugh at the idea that people can make a lot from making videos about how to clean a bathroom or setting up pranks.
In January this year, the Government paid 42 social media influencers tens of thousands of pounds to promote its Track & Trace programme.
Pope Francis has even got in on the act, posting a message to his 19 million Twitter followers describing the Virgin Mary as ‘the world’s first influencer’.
Yallop doesn’t make enough of the sheer weirdness of many influencers, whose seemingly perfect onscreen lives often hide fairly miserable-sounding existences IRL (‘in real life’), and she is rather too fond of hyperbole: an eyeshadow palette is ‘iconic’, an internet comedy show ‘legendary’.
But she is making a very serious point if we cut through the jargon. The influencer economy had been valued at $500million in 2015; it had reached $10 billion by the end of last year.
Yallop claims that influencers are more than taking selfies and live-streaming the launch event for a new bag.
We are in the middle of ‘a fundamental restructuring of the way that information is disseminated, power is accumulated and culture is produced’.
In the ongoing battle to control the internet, nobody knows the winner.