They get tons of views but it's more difficult to know how much of that translates into sales, but this has long been a problem with advertising. There was recently an influencer who tried to sell her own line of shirts directly and went on an angry rant because of low sales despite having a large number of followers.
A lot of what is going on just looks, for instance, like "musicians talking about their tools" (selling guitar pedals) or "hikers talking about how they got the weight down to do a through hike" (selling fancy bags) or "how to bunny hop a mountain bike" (selling $6k bikes).
I can feel its pull on me: especially around the bike, as I would like to be off the ground more but don't -really- wanna drop twice what I paid for my first car on one.
The entire industry of cryptocurrency scams would evaporate without, for example, complicit scammers shilling dogecoin on Twitter. That's an influencer.
It depends on the actual definition of "influencer" (I mean, I certainly don't follow vapid TV or YouTube celebrities), but I do listen. In the niches I follow on YouTube, I certainly pay attention to the channels I enjoy and sometimes buy the products they recommend.
Absolutely - it’s no coincidence that brands throw brand deals at them. It works better than classic ads if the ad is effectively narrated by someone you’ve got a parasocial relationship with
