Is the Influencer Ladder Being Pulled up?

[IamInLoveWithBigBrother]

I have a confession to make: I have always wanted to be an influencer - a dude making a living by posting videos about the niche topics that interest him on the internet (Romanian history and politics, books, video games, and so on). Through my life I've had a few attempts at starting a Youtube channel which have proved to be complete and utter failures. I mostly blame myself for this. If real life experiences have taught me something is that I am not the most charismatic individual.

As I am writing this I have started a TikTok page on which I post about right wing literature. As I posted more and more and got more accustomed to the app and its features it became quite clear to me that it intentionally kneecaps your reach unless you are willing to pay. A scummy thing to do, but what do you expect from a Chinese app? At least they are upfront about me.

But what about the rest of the big apps out there? Just because they are not upfront about it this doesn't mean shady things are not going on behind the scenes (botting, seemingly average Joe type of guys suddenly blowing up because they forgot to mention the huge talent agency pushing them forward, etc). A few years ago, at least on Youtube, it seemed like anyone could grind on their channels and, eventually, start making money. But now it seems like unless your video doesn't blow up in 1-3 days then the most you can achieve is 10-20k views per video. Speaking of which, am I the only one weirded out by those videos posted by literal nobodies but with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views in less than a week? The video-essay era was ripe with those types of videos: hours upon hours of shit content in a single video immediately rewarded with millions of views in a few days? How does that work?

Then, as I browsed the forums, I stumbled more and more into e-celeb discussions. On /pol/ I distinctly remember a poster claiming to be a successful youtuber (or at least copy pasting a story about this) informing everyone in the discussions that, at least nowadays, the successful people you see have always been successful, meaning that they come from upper middle class families with money and time to blow on such activities. According to him botting has now become the norm, together with all the shitty and scummy tactics that have once been frowned upon.

Of course, since it was a poster on 4chan, I took the story with a grain of salt. Then, as I was reading the Twitch & Their Competitors thread, I stumbled upon this post from user The Wall of Ambition:

Then you investigate any of these people and find out they were all upper-middle-class trust fund kids whose parents afforded them the time to spend 10 hours a day pumping the algos. No wonder they made it. Oldheads like Asmongold and Destiny are retarded, but at least they had real jobs before they streamed. I can respect that. But the trust-fund e-thots make me crazy. Watching Emiru climb the cock-ladder to fame has been a real treat. A lady who used to talk about dating an 18-year-old when she was 13. That doesn’t happen without shitty parents, so I almost feel bad for her, but I can’t when she becomes old enough to know better and still chooses to live this vapid lifestyle.

So, my question is this: is the influencing ladder being pulled up from the average joe?

 

[Yak-130 Mitten]

Being an influencer means you can do mad blowjobs.

 

[Idiotron]

I have always wanted to be an influencer - a dude making a living by posting videos about the niche topics that interest him on the internet (Romanian history and politics, books, video games, and so on)

That's not what an influencer is.
Influencers tackle popular topics, not niche ones.
You can have a side hobby making videos about niche things that interest you.
You want a career?
You have to either make meme content or topical content.
Later, when you already have enough of an audience, you can start sneaking in your real content in every 4th video and tell your audience that you're "branching out".

 

[Mister Baranavichy]

So, my question is this: is the influencing ladder being pulled up from the average joe?

Homeslice, don't take offence here, but this post reads like a sad unwind cope seesh that makes it sound like what you are going for is money upfront, content second.

1st, you're already appealing to both an overflooded market (politics) and a close to dead one (Romanian history and politics, books, video games, and so on)
And 2nd, you're chasing trends that are not worth it like jumping to tiktok, which in itself is already a meme, as I doubt any long term user remembers the second to last video they scrolled past on their consumption, let alone one regarding politics or the sort.

You're not being held back by "big influencer", you're in an ocean of mostly slop, and if you want to break through to the surface you're going to have to learn how to swim, I.e. create something exceptional, like this guy for instance, if you want to use romania as an example:

Haven't watched it, but the premise looks good, the editing is not bad, it has actual historical value, so on and so forth.

There are alot of astroturffed who's in the industry right now, true, but that doesn't change the fact that if you keep at it and do it with passion, you'll eventually find an audience.

 

[We Are The Witches]

It is difficult to make it big, specially on YouTube nowadays, so in that sense yes, you already need to have some "clout" or appeal, keep in mind that there's already a million people discussing almost every topic unless it's niche, but if it's niche and you cover it, it will naturally be more difficult for you to grow a sizeable audience.

It is not impossible though, but you will need consistency, quality, dedication, and marketing in order to increase your chances.

What gets views are cat/dog videos, perverted stuff, memes and all that low tier garbage, in general. There are also strategies for how you manage your content, like maybe one channel could be dedicated to videogames (which will cater to certain audience), and other to history (will appeal to other audience).

The Venn diagram of people who would be interested in Romanian history and videogames, for one channel, may be too undesirable.

You need to take into consideration all the variables here, which are many, and requires to know exactly what type of content you'll make, your perseverance with it/future plans, how you want to manage it, your delivery, your editing, your format, etc, with the info you provided we don't really know how it could potentially go, it's a shot in the dark, but I already can tell you that unless you're exceptional in the good sense, you won't be an "influencer" by covering Romanian history & politics.

 

[the rat]

Why don't you influence yourself to death.

 

[Private Tag Reporter]

It sounds like you want the upsides of being famous with none of the downsides of doing the work.

If you aren't already in love with producing videos or streaming just for the hobby/passion of it, then why would you want to do that as a job? What's stopping you from making videos now other than being dopamine broken by line go up like every other social media addict in western society?

 

[Pee Cola]

I see a pink triangle in OP's future.

If OP is unaware of what the pink triangle means, it's a symbol that marks out who the biggest influencers are on the Farms. I realise this isn't a mainstream social media platform, but you gotta start somewhere.

 

[WonderWino]

The Venn diagram of people who would be interested in Romanian history and videogames, for one channel, may be too undesirable.

The venn diagram for that one is probably just a picture of vee, which speaks for itself what the audience would be like

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Are thete any small platforms that are not slop/can reach an audience/are not just copies of yt relying on larger channels linking specific videos?

 

[PaleTay]

It's mostly true, the bots seem more prevalent in the smaller profiles. Most of the ones I know either grew up rich or sell courses to "get rich".

 

[Rei is Shit.]

the successful people you see have always been successful, meaning that they come from upper middle class families with money and time to blow on such activities.

This is how things have always worked. You can't make it into any creative sektur without having tons of time to pursue it, both for practical reasons of honing ones craft as well as having time to network. If you aren't born into money your only real option is to grift welfare or sell illicit drugs.

See this for a good how to, although its focused on the music industry the general outline works for just about anything; https://archive.org/details/TheManualHowToHaveANumber1TheEasyWay

 

[NoReturn]

Influencers aren't real. To "make it" you have to sell out. That's what gets you into the tier where you can do it for a living.

 

[Neodanthril]

on the one hand yes, the ladder has been pulled up. all the channels that are big now started over a decade ago and either put an insane amount of work in to game youtubes algorithims to maximize viewer reach ( mr beast) or got insanely lucky and just happened to live a lifestyle that was advantageous to channel growth at the time they did it (pewdiepie and markiplier). and all of these people now have agencies that prevent their channels from being wiped due to copyright strikes. now to get anywhere you have to not have your channel wiped before getting picked up by an agency. also youtube has not made money for people doing anything other than algo chasing since like 2018. all the medium sized channels i used to follow pretty much stopped producing content for youtube and do as much as they can on twitch because the pay to work ratio is better.
on the other hand this post is accurate

It sounds like you want the upsides of being famous with none of the downsides of doing the work.

If you aren't already in love with producing videos or streaming just for the hobby/passion of it, then why would you want to do that as a job? What's stopping you from making videos now other than being dopamine broken by line go up like every other social media addict in western society?

and also you want to make a specific type of content and want it to blow up, instead of following popular trends that blow up.

 

[grasshoppermustard]

Too late! I think by 2030 AI influencers will dominate and even if we know they're AI, we won't care as they will be superior to human influencers. Now would be the worst time to start because most of the current crop are gonna get rugged hard by AI.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You need to be obscenely lucky to make it, and even then the lifestyle would probably cause you to die young either from stress or doing retarded things for clout.

 

[BongoMongo]

OP please either neck yourself or reevaluate your shitty goals.

You'll never make it. Nobody is interested. Your "interests" are obviously autism related and despite what your mom told you, you're not that special and fascinating and nobody cares enough for you to make a living from it.

Get a proper job.