Tag Archives: infuencers

When did “Influencer” become a profession?

I recently read a news article about social media “influencers”.  As a matter of fact ti was a couple of articles.  One article was about a business owner that decided to charge “influencers” double what he charges normal people .  And I love his reason for doing it.  First of all, is “influencer” a real job?  I don’t think so.  If you give me the Kardisians as an example of REAL “influencers” then I will give you back prime example of parasites on society.  These so-called “influencers” are nothing more than parasites where they take (including the air they breath) without giving back anything of substance.  Parasites.  And those that follow them and hang on every word they say are ones with empty lives and weak-minded.

I still don’t understand where these social media people get off thinking that they’re important as they think they are.  Take Olivia Jade (college scandel’s Lori Loughlin’s youngest daughter).  Seems like her career path that she chose for herself was being an “influencer”. She got upset with her parents for the college scandal because their indictment caused her to lose her deal with Sephora.  Now she might actually have to work for a living and to actually be productive.
So, what kind of profession is an influencer?  What skills does one have to acquire to become one?  What do influencers have to offer?  As the ice cream owner in the article states, he had gotten sick of the influencers contacting him for free samples of his product.  And we’re not talking about 1 or 2 here,  In the article he references one of the influencers contacting him and expecting 300 samples.  I can see certain companies using the web sites and blogs as a marketing strategy.  It’s called affiliate marketing and generally a web site owner or blogger will apply to the company requesting to get paid for advertising their product.  The company gets to decide if they want their product listed on any given site.  Not the other way around.  The business owner does not mention that he wanted to use this strategy.
The only thing that was missing from the article was that the owner was not threatened with derogatory comments about them from the influencers.  My take from reading the article was here is a guy (ice cream truck owner) busting his chops every day to make a living and he ends up having to deal with the parasites trying to deprive him of his livelihood by trying to convince him that they are so all-important.  He decided to charge “influencers” double ($8 instead of $4) but I think he should have tripled the price for them.  What the hell is the difference?  They didn’t want to pay the regular price.
These “influencers” have very little to offer the general public.  In the future I will be posting details of when I did research on generating an income through a blog.