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Influencers Are Being Paid Big Sums To Pitch Products and Thrash Rivals on Instagram and YouTube (wired.com)
"Influencers" are being paid big sums to pitch products on Instagram and YouTube. If you're trying to grow a product on social media, you either fork over cash or pay in another way. This is the murky world of influencing, reports Wired. Brands will pay influencers to position products on their desks, behind them, or anywhere else they can subtly appear on screen. Payouts increase if an influencer tags a brand in a post or includes a link, but silent endorsements are often preferred. An excerpt from the report: The suggestions started early. Months before Lashify had officially launched, one of her investors, who had ties to the cosmetics industry, pulled her aside. He told her to prepare to pay influencers to speak positively about her lashes on YouTube and Instagram. She thought he was being dramatic. He wasn't. Lotti recalls the investor saying that if she wanted Lashify to succeed, quality didn't matter, nor did customer satisfaction -- only influencers. And they didn't come cheap. She was told to expect to shell out $50,000 to $70,000 per influencer just to make her company's name known, an insane amount for a new startup. There was no way around it; that's just how things worked.
(the same brands are also paying people to say this isn't happening)
Next you'll be telling me that celebrities doing product endorsements aren't genuinely enthusiastic about the products and are just doing it for money.
My faith in the purity of ad content is shaken to the core.
This sounds like extortion for the digital era. What's left unsaid, but clearly implied, is that if you don't fork over big money to influences, your product will be trashed.
I was under the impression that this is what influencers do all the time?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am sitting here on my amazingly comfortable B&B Italia sofa, casually reading Slashdot while I enjoy a delicious Jimmy Johns sandwich with a Diet Cherry Pepsi. But I have to say - I simply can’t believe anyone would behave this unethically. From the tip of my Stetson hat to the heels of my Doc Martin shoes, I am 100% convinced that people, left to their own devices, will only recommend products they use and love.
- Typed on my 12.9” iPad Pro
#DeleteChrome
They promoted Beto and he was a know nothing with a drunk driving record. And illiterates who spend most of their time on YouTube and instagram voted for him. He will be presidential material for the undereducated class.
I'd be especially good at the part about trashing bad products. Only problem is I'd probably forget and trash my sponsor's products, too.
Oh, wait. First I'd have to get to the influencer point where more than a few trolls are interested in my babblings.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
She was told to expect to shell out $50,000 to $70,000 per influencer just to make her company's name known, an insane amount for a new startup. There was no way around it
At that kind of rate, knowing you would need at least a few "influencers", what I would do instead is build up my own cadre on influencers - find some kids just starting out YouTube with some makeup sense and make them offers for recording gear and a lot of makeup and vastly less cash.
The idea that you need to pay a series of influencers $80k each comes off as really seeming like a scam. Sure at the top level the elite of YouTube are truly influencers - but at the mid tier where you would pay $80k? I don't think so.
Read this great summary of someone that tried to use middle-tier YouTube celebs to drive sales. It did not work at all. Granted it was a different field but the approach seemed sound given the assumption that YouTube videos really influence people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And what if the influencers are there to deceive voters during elections? What if the money is foreign even? Or sourced from criminal funds for criminal purposes?
Someone paid James Edward O'Keefe III, aka Project Veritas to make fake that fake Acorn video and pay off the lawsuits he lost as a result. This is no small amount.
If you look at FACT, a money laundering front for conservative causes, that's funding everything from fake videos, to astroturfing to "Judicial Crisis Network'... promoting Brett Kavanaugh. ...
It was run by Whitaker, Trump's new pick for DOJ head, and he got paid $900k from it in 9 months alone just before being appointed to Trump's DOJ.
That's a huge money laundering outfit there funding a lot of astroturfing.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbabz9/what-we-know-about-fact-the-conservative-watchdog-that-paid-trumps-ag-dollar12-million
You can't really pretend its a minor thing here. It certainly isn't.
...Lotti recalls the investor saying that if she wanted Lashify to succeed, quality didn't matter, nor did customer satisfaction -- only influencers. And they didn't come cheap. She was told to expect to shell out $50,000 to $70,000 per influencer just to make her company's name known, an insane amount for a new startup. There was no way around it; that's just how things worked.
Welcome to the gig economy. By day, Lyft driver. By night, paid shill for Infowars, Walmart and Monsanto.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
'Money is truth, truth money' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ban all adverting and products from the internet.
Not possible because some ads, and that is mainly what the issue is here, take the form of product placement. Eg, some expert photographer on Youtube is demonstrating composition and exposure. He uses a camera and it is inevitable that you will see or recognise the brand, especially if you have been thinking about buying a camera. So you might conclude that this is the brand you should use, even if the Youtube guy never mentions the brand name.
Here is my own bit of product placement. You rarely or never see Pentax cameras being used to demonstrate general photography on Youtube, and if one is explicitly reviewed it is marked down for bullshit reasons (like deliberately setting a lower resolution for the image quality test - you need to be an expert to realise what they are doing). It is mostly Canon or Sony, and sometimes Nikon that you see demonstrated. It's a reason why Pentax are significantly less buck for the same bang as Canon etc because they don't pay for this shit, or any other advertising at all that I've seen.
/|\ Found the Pentax shill!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
they're good an making you believe they're something they're not. It's kind of their thing. It's why we get so many actors in politics (and why they tend to be among the worst). Their job is literally to make you believe something that is not true...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You're not reading enough Jordan Peterson. What women want (from their male romantic partners) is competence. Women generally favour a particular competence signal: societal attention / societal approval (if the attention signal is large enough, the approval half of the signal is irrelevant). Commanding the center of societal attention is a universal proxy for power. All forms of wealth command attention: conspicuous wealth, foolish wealth, (mostly) concealed wealth, grasping wealth, tight-fisted wealth. You will never sleep alone (nor without one hand on your pocket book).
Celebrity is almost by definition a top-drawer competence proxy.
For some reason, one of our core social heuristics is to emulate role models (those with power) by aping their behaviours, even the cynical behaviours we know they put on merely to exploit the unwashed.
I think the problem here is that a celebrity figure's ability to get away with these cynical behaviours in plain sight amplifies the power signal more than enough to compensate for the blowback signal of self-interested disgust at overlord overreach. (The balance likely depends on your own self-esteem curve.)
Then there's this other problem: a part of our brain is wired to presume that the mass behaviour of a billion people with low self-esteem filters can never be wrong.
Most people have more power than they realize. The problem is that you can't directly witness the loops of cause and effect.
If more people possessed explanatory depth—discussed at length in The Knowledge Illusion (2017) by Steven Sloman—it wouldn't be possible for know-nothing influencers to hijack commercial success.
From the corporate side, given a choice between customer A with explanatory depth, and customer B without explanatory depth, you might do fine with customer A in a B2B setting, but you definitely want customer B in a B2C setting.
Given enough power, you can actually shift the balance in the population at large from type A dominance to type B dominance, as Apple has done so successfully since introducing the first iPhone (Apple was long attempting to ride this dragon, and nearly bankrupt itself in a fire while doing so, but then the rewards were spectacular once the dragon finally took flight).
I've been reading review after review about how the 2018 Mac mini basically appeals to no-one with any vestige of explanatory depth, except under the general category of "well, if it's sufficiently inconvenient to escape the Apple tent altogether, this is the cheapest way to cling to the outskirts, and might even qualify as a reasonable purchase if your work load particularly needs compute, but never pushes a pixel at an animated frame rate; or you've got some kind of weird office aesthetic where having a shiny little recycled aluminum box with all kinds of crap hanging off the back on short and expensive interconnects is your idea of a glamorous rat's nest".
The Apple product literature doesn't even supply anyone with explanatory depth so much as a Bathroom Reader of Mac mini technical disclosure. I had to find some obscure enthusiast forum and wade through a hundred Comments of Dreck to find out that the 128 GB SSD option has half the write throughput of the 256 GB SSD option (with another increment at 512 GB, but not nearly so substantial, especially at the GIANT cost increment).
There's no online block diagram at even the highest level of the T2 chip. There's a block diagram of the marketing department's view of Alpine Ridge from about three years ago, that does as much to confuse as to reveal. Silicon vendors like Newark sell some of the older Intel TB3 parts, but not a single one of these listings comes w
That was my thought exactly! Nothing new under the sun.
But I admitted it :-)
Time to stop calling them "influencers" and call them what they really are, pitch whores.
It's not that your product will be trashed, usually it will just languish in obscurity for a long time and won't have the "hyper growth" venture backers demand. Don't want to deal with it? Then don't get venture backers, and try to grow organically.
It is a longer, more difficult path for sure - but it is the path ALMOST EVERY BUSINESS used to have to take before the web existed because television commercials were the only way to reach a national audience, and they were, as a result, very expensive and pretty much restricted only to major established brands.
Without national exposure, you will have to - guess what - grow organically, by doing legwork in one region, becoming a success, moving to other regions based on that success, etc.
This is how business USED to work. But that pace of growth is too slow for modern venture companies who want a 10x improvement on their investment within 5 years.