Social Media Influencing: A New Type of Career

Social Media Influencing: A New Type of Career

This article relates to Julie Chan Is Dead

As popular social media websites, like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), have grown in the past two decades, their popularity and ubiquity have given rise to a whole new type of career: the "content creator" or "influencer." According to a 2023 study, an estimated 27 million people in the US, or 14% of people aged 16 to 54, are paid content creators; almost half of those people do it full-time, while others do it part-time or as a hobby.

Naturally, a handful of individuals have risen to the top, amassing millions of followers across multiple platforms. Names like MrBeast, Nara Smith, and Alix Earle, while maybe not familiar to older generations, are household names to many Gen Zers and Gen Alphas. The average income of a content creator is $93,000, but that number is skewed by the income of these "macro influencers" (those who have between 100,000 and 1 million followers) and "celebrity influencers" (those with over 1 million followers). A third of content creators, like part-timers and hobbyists, will only see one to two thousand dollars a year from it; the average macro influencer earns $344 thousand.

Many famous influencers post fashion, makeup, and lifestyle content, like the protagonist of Liann Zhang's Julie Chan Is Dead. This content is aspirational for viewers—people who can't afford luxury brands and exotic vacations are able to live vicariously through those who can. And because influencing requires no special pedigree, these creators often assure their followers that they're just normal people like them, who come from modest beginnings and who happened to have picked up a camera one day and changed their life. The casual, chatty way that these influencers often speak directly into the camera creates parasocial relationships—one-sided relationships in which the viewer feels a personal attachment to someone who doesn't know they exist—which are, for the influencers, extremely profitable.

How do influencers make money? The majority is generated through brand deals. Because of influencers' large reach and their personal relationship to their followers, influencing is a unique marketing opportunity for brands to promote their products, either as a one-off ad or as a part of a larger ongoing ad campaign. According to a 2025 study, influencing in 2025 is a $33 billion dollar industry, and has more than tripled in size since 2020. Back in 2017, when influencing was a fairly nascent industry, only 37% of brands allocated part of their marketing budget to influencers; today, $85 percent of brands do. The "influencer economy" is worth approximately $250 million, according to Forbes, and is only expected to grow. Today, with a stagnant minimum wage and cost of living on the rise everywhere, more and more people are turning to online content creation in the hope of becoming one of social media's elite and getting in on this lucrative industry.

Image courtesy of Ivan Samkov.

Filed under Society and Politics

This article relates to Julie Chan Is Dead. It first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.