In a world of the digital age, the young generation have found a way to manipulate the media and turn doing essentially nothing into their job. Young people are now making more money than doctors and entrepreneurs and gaining more fame than movie stars by filming their lives and putting it online, gaining a large following, and in turn, being approached by companies willing to pay them to advertise their product. Smart or self involved?
These teens and early twenties are walking around taking photos of their new $100,000 cars that they are buying and chanel bags they ‘treat’ themselves to. But how are they affording it? Well, research shows, that these stars are raking in at least $1000 a day, if not more, just in paid advertisements alone. As well as this, they are also receiving revenue on ads placed within their videos on YouTube provided by Adsense, which they are repeatedly getting paid for per view, forever. That's right, if the video they made 3 years ago is still getting views, they are still getting paid for it. And if you thought 2 million followers were too many for these rising stars, they are taking over the big screens. They are popping up left right and center, knocking hard working actors out of the way and making big hollywood films of their own, automatically taking a large following with them. Not only are they taking over the big screens, they are writing novels and books about their lives which instantly rise to the highest selling books in the country in which they reside as well as surrounding countries. Internet personalities always claim that they cannot truly say how much money they make for legal reasons. Thus , I have done some digging of my own and am about to reveal to you the real figures these people are raking in ….. when I emailed the ‘managers’ of said personalities and enquired about how much they charge for ads, this is the response I got.. “Hi Naakaree, we have many influencers on hand, our most expensive is $2K per instagram post and our cheapest is $1500 per post”.
These days it seems anyone can start a YouTube channel and gain subscribers , but is this a smart route to take? Will they have a secure income if the internet suddenly implodes?
When our grandparents and even our parents were growing up, working on farms, or in offices, even owning their own business was the way to make money. Fast forward twenty or so years and you come to my generation, Generation Y, the twenty somethings, we grew up playing outside with sticks and tires and then technology started to get introduced. Lucky for us Y generation however, we still remember and appreciate a day without technology. Unfortunately for the latest generation being born into Generation Z, the current teens, they have not been so lucky.
In 2005 Youtube was created. This was followed by Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and any other form of Social Media you can think of. While Youtube came about as a way for people to express themselves on the internet, it fast became a viral way to make easy money. Now if we look at Youtube and other Social media sites in 2017, it looks as though every man and his dog has caught on. If we look at instagram, you can see all sorts of people using the platform to make money by posing with different variations of products that companies had paid them to pose with and pretend they love. These ‘posers’ now have a name, and that name is ‘Social Media influencer’. Social Media influencers get paid more than your parents do in one year in one month.
Social media ‘Influencers’ get invited to large trips overseas in which are fully paid for by companies just in hopes that the company will get some sort of exposure by the influencer. While these trips, especially trips held by beauty companies used to be reserved for magazine editors and the likes, are given to the internet's most famous.
If this doesn't sound like a dream job yet, Social media influences also get sent hundreds of gifts a day from various brands, in which they show on their ‘Youtube channels’ and often brag about or complain about because they didn't get enough or they didn’t like how they were packaged. And what advice do these influencers give to their following about how they themselves can receive such gifts? Their advice is to work hard and not give up on their dreams. So when it comes down to the way our new age is going, are these influencers clever or shallow?
