[HN Gopher] Name of the Game: The distinction between 'influence...
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Name of the Game: The distinction between 'influencer' and
'creator'
Author : laurex
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-07-01 17:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (reallifemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (reallifemag.com)
| username90 wrote:
| The main difference here is that "influencers" needs influence in
| order to create content, because in order to get brand and travel
| deals so they can afford to show of luxury goods they first need
| a following.
|
| Gaming content can however be created by anyone, just start
| recording when you play games and you now create content. Then if
| enough people watch your content you now make enough money to
| live doing this, since it costs you nothing but time to do you
| can reach that point with a very modest amount of income. And
| since it is so easy to start doing it the only thing
| differentiating a top gaming channel from a bottom one is the
| quality of its content.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Are "marketers" and "authors" different things? While there can
| sometimes be some overlap, I think they are.
|
| (There are some people who do both, sure. Always have been
| authors with day jobs in advertising. But they are doing
| different things at different times).
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Both creators and influencers create content, and both creators
| and influencers have influence. But they are completely different
| things.
|
| If you make a sculpture then you're a creator, if you share a
| picture of yourself in front of that sculpture then you're an
| influencer.
|
| Influencer content is defined by being both persona-based and
| touristy, and is about establishing connections between a person
| and things or experiences made by other people.
| II2II wrote:
| I do not agree with the author's arguments.
|
| Creators are typically selling their own creation while
| influencers are using their reputation to sell something other
| than their creation. The relationship between the audience is
| different and it is problematic when an audience member does not
| realize that.
|
| While I am not a particularly good person to comment upon broad
| social perceptions, I also disagree with the assertions of the
| influencer label being gendered. In the world of YouTube, there
| are plenty of men who use their influence to sell something other
| than their own creation. Publishers don't send a game key to a
| "let's play" channel for review purposes just as a test equipment
| manufacturer doesn't send an oscilloscope to an electronics
| channel for review purposes. The intent is to have an influencer
| use their product. It sounds like more than a few of those
| channels are conscious of this distinction in their chase after
| actual sponsorships.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| It's complicated because to sell things, influencers create
| their own content. The videos and photos they post to show off
| the products they're touting, are still videos and photos. They
| still have to be high-quality and engaging pieces of content or
| folks will scroll past and not follow/subscribe/etc.
|
| And they can't just post ads all the time or people won't
| watch. Even the most commercially-oriented influencer is
| posting original content on a schedule to keep their audience
| engaged, whether or not they're fulfilling a sponsorship deal
| at that moment.
|
| Consider that it's a long-standing convention to call a company
| that makes traditional ads (print magazine, network TV, etc) a
| "creative agency." "Creative" and "creator" are terms that have
| been associated with commercial influence for a long time, as
| the article notes.
| II2II wrote:
| I agree that influencers are creators in the generic sense,
| and certainly don't mean to dismiss their creativity or
| skill. That being said, context is important. When creators
| are contrasted to influencers, the context implies that
| motivation is being considered.
| noduerme wrote:
| If only 1% of someone's creative output is product placement,
| the other 99% is rubbish. They don't have creative freedom.
|
| Product placement is a sneaky form of advertising that
| degrades the creative value of whatever it's in, because
| unlike an ad next to an editorial, the advertiser in a
| placement explicitly alters and by definition limits and
| demands what the creative content can or cannot include.
|
| There's a word for rock stars who tout products - sellouts.
| Influencers are basically people whose idea of a great gig is
| to be popular enough to sell out.
|
| Put another way, creatives get paid for their own ideas,
| whether by selling work product directly or by ads placed
| which go with that work. And one way we judge the quality of
| any art or medium is the degree to which the creators are
| free from the influence of their advertisers. Influencers, on
| the other hand, merely mimic creativity as a means to shill
| for an advertiser.
|
| I'm an art director among other things, and I make ads for a
| living. In that industry, I'm a "creative"... as are
| designers I work with. But we're creating on behalf of a
| commercial enterprise, i.e. we don't have true creative
| freedom in that realm, or freedom of expression. And neither
| do influencers. In fact, they have even less than the
| marketing departments who sponsor them.
|
| So there's a difference, and 'influencer' is disparaging, and
| the social disdain is well-earned.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Creators are typically selling their own creation while
| influencers are using their reputation to sell something other
| than their creation.
|
| That's a bit missing the point. Influencers as also creators
| are both doing the same, using the same tactics with the same
| goals. And more and more the differences are becoming blurry,
| as both are doing what the other side is doing. Creators
| advertising other products than their own is not uncommon. And
| Influencers starting to create also high quality-content
| outside of cheap social media-content is also happening quite
| often after they reach a certain point in their career.
|
| We also see very often confusion about who when someone is an
| influencer, when is someone a creator. Because technical
| everyone with reputation is influencing others, and everone is
| creating content when building their reputation via social
| media. And on top, we are specifically talking in context of
| social media with this terms. But they also exist outside of
| social media and predate them.
|
| Maybe, we should start using those terms for what they are and
| accept that people can be both, and not exclusivly one or the
| other.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Maybe, we should start using those terms for what they are
| and accept that people can be both, and not exclusivly one or
| the other.
|
| That seemes self evident to me.
|
| > Influencers as also creators are both doing the same, using
| the same tactics with the same goals. And more and more the
| differences are becoming blurry, as both are doing what the
| other side is doing.
|
| I disagree.
|
| When inluencing, the product is access to their follower and
| the customer is advertisers.
|
| When creating, the product is the content and the customers
| ate the consumers of that content.
|
| These two activities are pretty easily distinguishable and
| just because people do both doesn't make the activities less
| distinct. I think it is important to have both terms
| understood separately because they help understand the
| motivations and incentives behind the content that is being
| consumed.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > When inluencing, the product is access to their follower
| and the customer is advertisers.
|
| > When creating, the product is the content and the
| customers ate the consumers of that content.
|
| With social media-influencer, the content they normally
| create is their live and personality (or the illusion they
| build of them), and this is also the product they sell and
| use to gain reputation. Sponsorings and placements are
| side-products they might sell, not their main-content. They
| can be more profitable then other sources of income, but
| they are not the only income people can have. Though, which
| ways they can utilize for income depends on the platform
| they use.
|
| Ontop, there are also influencers who do not advertize any
| product at all. People who do thinks just for the
| socializing, or the attention, or for some other reason.
|
| > These two activities are pretty easily distinguishable
| and just because people do both doesn't make the activities
| less distinct.
|
| The problem is not the activity, but the classification of
| the person.
|
| > they help understand the motivations
|
| Motivation is irrelevant. Motivation does not even work at
| all in either classification.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You seem to be conflating content and product and using
| "sell" in an overly broad sense.
|
| Understanding the motivations behind media creation is
| critical for navigating biases.
| slightwinder wrote:
| We talk about an industry were people receive money for
| just being themself. At the core of this "profession" the
| content is the product and procuct is the content. There
| is no way to distinguish this.
|
| > Understanding the motivations behind media creation is
| critical for navigating biases.
|
| No, it is for this completly irrelevant, because there is
| no straight path how influencer, creator and the whole
| industry evolved. People come with all kind of motivation
| and grow into all kind of paths and motiations. There is
| no "single truth" here, but a dozen different that just
| happen to lead all to the same result.
| teawrecks wrote:
| If someone both cooks and eats, does that confuse the
| description/roll of each task? I don't think so. We can talk
| about them independently and it doesn't change anything
| appreciably when one person happens to do both.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Which is exactly what I said? We do not talk independently
| about them. You are either influencer or creator, not both.
| chongli wrote:
| _Publishers don 't send a game key to a "let's play" channel
| ... have an influencer use their product._
|
| Is a let's player a creator or an influencer? Yes, they are
| playing someone else's game. Yet many people prefer to watch
| their favourite let's player over playing the game themselves.
| This indicated to me that the let's player is creating some
| value that the game alone did not have.
|
| It may be, for some people, that they want to save money by not
| buying a game and instead enjoying the story as provided by
| their favourite let's player. On the other hand, lots of people
| like to play the game alongside the let's player and talk about
| it with the community. They also donate money to the let's
| player directly so it isn't necessarily about saving money.
|
| I think there is real value in these communities that gets
| built up around a game or genre of games, especially during the
| pandemic. Many people who would otherwise not get a lot of
| socialization in their lives are able to socialize with those
| in their favourite let's player and streamer communities.
| pram wrote:
| Theres a more obvious word for them: entertainer. No need for
| a false dichotomy between 'creator' and 'influencer'
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| This is how I have always thought of the distinction, too.
|
| An influencer is a content creator that specializes in
| sponsored content.
| username90 wrote:
| Or aims to do it. Most influencers doesn't get a lot of
| sponsors and therefore can't afford to travel/buy lots of
| fashion required to maintain the lifestyle influencer
| audiences wants to see.
| noduerme wrote:
| But they were influenced into trying.
| Animats wrote:
| Huh? It's the difference between Marketing and Production.
| SuboptimalEng wrote:
| People can create content (blogs, videos, software, etc.) to gain
| influence.
|
| Not all "creators" are influencers because not everyone can make
| good enough content to achieve influence in their respective
| domain.
|
| This can be easily brought over to the tech domain. You can
| consider tech leads/VP's to be 'influencers'. They likely created
| successful products that allowed them to gain influence among
| their peers and rise the ranks.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This is a great article because it tries to look into not just
| what the distinction is between "creator" and "influencer," but
| also _why_ anyone cares about that distinction.
|
| There are a lot of distinctions that make hard sense in one's
| life: between a coral snake and a king snake, or between a car
| that is parked and a car that is moving.
|
| This is not one of those; no one's welfare depends on determining
| whether Marques Brownlee is a creator or an influencer. As such--
| as a social distinction--it's bound up in the experiences and
| values of each person who is trying to make that distinction. So
| as the article notes, influencers almost always refer to
| themselves as creators, while their commercial representation
| invariably refers to them as influencers. The language you use is
| in part determined by where you stand and what you want.
| quattrofan wrote:
| Influencers are useless parasites, they don't "create" anything
| if value.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The original meaning of 'influencer' isn't a stand-alone
| occupation or job title. It was meant to be anyone who has
| rapport with a specific demographic and a significant enough
| following that they can, literally, influence a significant
| number of people.
|
| Paul Graham, for example, has a large audience of people who read
| his essays and Tweets. If he publishes an essay, it hits the
| front page of Hacker News and is widely read. Not everyone
| consumes his writings blindly or without debate, but the debate
| furthers engagement with his material and is therefore a net
| expansion of his influence. Paul Graham is an influencer.
|
| Some degree of content creation, from Tweets to Instagram content
| to essays or Substacks, is necessary to engage an audience to
| receive the influence. That's why influencers and content
| creators are one in the same, as the article highlights:
|
| > In many ways, the distinction between influencer and creator is
| the product of longstanding critical divisions between art (seen
| as organically created) and mass culture (seen as manufactured
| and dangerous). Influencer suggests a mode of distracting and
| sedating the public, creating generations of docile consumers.
| Creator reaches into a different tradition.
|
| The modern definition of 'influencer' has deviated to become
| pejorative. In many contexts, such as Hacker News, it has become
| an insult that means someone doesn't produce valuable content,
| but rather presents a fake front through social media in order to
| sell things to their uninformed followers. It's not a good look,
| which is why people only use the term influencer to describe
| people they dislike, or people that they don't personally follow.
|
| Few people would admit that Paul Graham or the Substacks they
| subscribe to or their Twitter follows are also influencers,
| because we don't like to think of ourselves as being able to be
| influenced. However, by the original meaning of influencer that's
| exactly what they are.
|
| The term 'influencer' now has too many negative connotations to
| be useful any more in public conversation as anything other than
| an insult or dismissal. It's still useful in the context of
| discussing PR or advertising, but it's on my list of terms to
| simply avoid due to how it might be received.
| j4yav wrote:
| Aren't influencers simply popular people who are willing to sell
| their audience to advertisers? Some of them are content creators,
| others are popular for other reasons. But it isn't really a job
| description or title.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Agreed, except that we're starting to see people put
| "influencer" as their job title. I see this especially on TV
| shows now. So while they might be creators, or might just be
| wannabe celebrities, they're self-identifying as "influencers".
| j4yav wrote:
| I've seen that but still just personally read it as "by the
| way contact me if you want me to sell something to my fans"
| more than that they have some specific responsibility.
| ystrickler wrote:
| FWIW I think (but not 100%) that it was us at Kickstarter who
| first used the word "creator" the way it's used now.
|
| At the time we were trying to decide how to describe all the
| different kinds of people who would be making projects --
| artists, writers, filmmakers, coders, chefs. What do you call all
| of these people? There was no clear term, but in the course of
| brainstorming "Creator" really stood out as being the best at
| encompassing many different kinds of creative people. We launched
| with that as our term in 2009.
|
| A year later I remember YouTube starting to use it too. I can't
| say for sure we were the absolute first, but I do remember when
| we decided to use it that it wasn't being used elsewhere.
| exizt88 wrote:
| I think the problem that many HN readers don't understand is that
| influencers have a really hard time monetizing the content they
| are making. If you're a lifestyle or a travel blogger you don't
| really have any easily available way to monetize other than brand
| advertising. If the value that you provide is entertainment in
| the form of beautiful visuals of aspirational lifestyle you can't
| really package that in a Substack newsletter or even a Patreon
| donation drive. That's a huge unsolved problem waiting to be
| solved.
| username90 wrote:
| The fashion and travel industries are much bigger than the
| gaming industry, their content is way easier to monetize. The
| only reason gaming works at all is that it is so ridiculously
| cheap to do.
|
| So there is no way to "solve" this, the people who wants to be
| influencers wants to live a top 0.1% lifestyle traveling and
| testing new fashion everyday, that just isn't feasible for
| everyone who wants to try. The nerd dream of sitting at home
| all day playing games is so much easier to reach, which is why
| you can see so many people playing games for a living, not
| because it is easier to make money do it.
| okamiueru wrote:
| Maybe I'm just old enough to have missed the influencer trend, so
| I don't appreciate it or "get it".
|
| However, as I understand it, and also agree on, the label
| "influencer" as a classifier of occupation, is sort of
| meaningless. Although I don't appreciate it, and accept that this
| isn't for me, it's just a form of entertainment. The content
| created by influencers just tends to be more specific to the
| experiences of that person, rather than some insight or knowledge
| imparted by that person.
|
| This whole dissertation of an article could be reduced to the
| following: "Influencer" is a subset of "content creator".
|
| To which I would add that "influencer" is a nice subset, because
| it makes it very clear that I will find little of interest or
| value.
| [deleted]
| swinglock wrote:
| Influencers work in advertising.
| tremon wrote:
| The term "influencer" is basically the full-time equivalent of
| celebrity endorsements. Marketing has known for ages that your
| product sells easier if a relatable/revered face is promoting
| it.
|
| An influencer, then, is someone who made their entire career
| about becoming famous enough to sell endorsements for a living.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| An influencer is an "attention warehouse/market".
|
| As a creator, you simply cannot churn out consistent quality
| content at a constant pace. Even the biggest and richest
| companies release new products erratically like at most once a
| month. Without influencers, customers would have to somehow
| subscribe to every single creator and curate all the content
| they produce personally. Very impractical for most people.
|
| That's where the influencer fits in. They "maintain" a
| population of potential customers by collecting various
| creators' products and pushing them to the audience _over
| time._ If 10 products launch within the same genre at once, the
| influencer will introduce the products to their audience one at
| a time, over time, from best to worst.
|
| They also provide a feedback loop. Like a community manager.
| You, as a creator, can check the top rated comments on the
| influencer's publication to see what the audience thinks of
| your product. It's all gathered, filtered and ranked for your
| convenience.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I told a friend that I wanted to be an "influencer for the 3M
| corporation" because I do a lot of projects with adhesives; he
| told me I should start the 4M corporation... I might just settle
| for being Paste-Pot Pete.
| Darmody wrote:
| An influencer is someone that influences people, usually
| teenagers.
|
| Influencers and creators are not mutually exclusive. You can be
| both. That said, most influencers I know don't create anything
| and most kids who want to be influencers are not thinking about
| creating something of value, only about doing stupid things in
| front of a camera and getting money from sponsors.
|
| An influencer, not so long ago, advertised some sports drink by
| saying it was better than water because water doesn't hydrate
| you. Then she went on a rant about how she doesn't want to use a
| mask and will refuse the vaccine. Make sure your kids don't
| follow every stupid influencer out there.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| It's the modern era, we have science. Influencers are modern
| day priests who sell potential happiness.
|
| It's best to teach people not to Trust humans, we have
| misaligned incentives and can be incorrect.
|
| The alternative is using objective quality metrics and science.
|
| I dream of a future where marketing is taboo because it
| exploits human psychology.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > That said, most influencers I know don't create anything
|
| They create Social Media-Content. A selfy, a tweet, even a
| posting in some forum, they all are content. It's usually cheap
| content, but still content. And better influencers have also
| some higher quality of content, with a video, stream, a blog-
| article or podcast.
|
| > only about doing stupid things in front of a camera and
| getting money from sponsors
|
| Having a job that you can enjoy and have fun seems not the
| worst thing.
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