The future of influencers

0:00Angèle Christin:This is Stanford's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. Since we started this podcast eight years ago, it's become an archive of the amazing and impactful work done by my colleagues at Stanford University. In a time when the sheer volume of information available to us can make our heads spin and make it hard to determine what's accurate, I'm proud to be able to bring you experts in law, medicine, engineering, technology, and much more. the most popular career path for most kids in the United States and Canada. Like kids, they don't want to be astronauts. It's amazing. It's amazing.

0:36They don't want to be doctors. They want to be influencers.

0:46Angèle Christin:This is Stanford Engineering is the future of everything. And I'm your host, Russ Altman. You know, we have some amazing episodes coming up and you're not going to want to miss them. So please select follow, press follow so that you get alerted to all the new episodes. That'll make sure that you don't miss the future of anything. Today, Anjel Kristen will tell us that when you're consuming your social media, you might want to follow the money. The people who are making that content have some economic incentives and that could affect what they say. It's the future of influencers. today we're continuing our segment called the future in a minute with Angele I'm going to ask her a few rapid fire questions at the end of our interview and she's going to give me some rapid fire answers also don't forget to follow you don't want to miss any of those amazing upcoming episodes

1:39Angèle Christin:you know social media can be great I use it all the time I follow it for my hobbies Other people use it for professional development, to navigate life changes. They might follow sports. They might like politics or just their favorite celebrities. It's all good. But as you're consuming your social media, you might want to consider that some of the content creators you're listening to both have passion and economic incentives. Some of them, this is their main job. That's fine. That's how they make money. But that could affect what they say and how they say it. Well, Angele Christen is a professor of sociology at Stanford University and an expert about how digital media can influence society and culture.

2:20Angèle Christin:She's going to tell us that she's studied journalism all the way to influencers, and they're different and they have different incentives. Angele, how did you decide to study social media and its cultural impacts as part of a major thrust in your work? It's been a while. Okay, so I started studying journalists in the late 2000s. And then I was really a kind of like economic sociologist kind of person. And I was wondering what happens when the revenues of a given industry, in that case, the news industry, suddenly disappear, right? Which is basically what happened to the media and journalism. With the rise of digital platforms and kind of tech company, a lot of advertising moved to Google, Meta, et cetera, and Facebook, which meant that for kind of newspapers and news websites and traditional media companies, suddenly there was much less money going around.

3:23So that was kind of my first kind of foray into it. And, you know, the angle was really economic. It's like, so yeah, what happens when revenues change and suddenly there is just much less to go around? How do you sustain the kind of extremely costly enterprise that journalism is about with much less money? After a while, though, I really became interested in the cultural aspect of social media and the fact that, you know, social media is not only an economic force. And it's not only about advertising. So advertising is everywhere in the social media game. And we'll certainly come back to that.

3:59pretty soon, but also about what were the kinds of discourses, the kind of cultures, the kind of memes that were emerging on social media, and how did that change how the rest of us, or all of us, were kind of discussing things, accessing information, and communicating with each other. And so that's basically what I've been doing for, yeah, like the past 17 years, so it's been a while.

4:27Angèle Christin:So just to go back to that, what did you conclude about the journalists and their economic stress? And especially as I understand it, you were actually watching this happening. You were watching the rise. So you were in a, I would never call it lucky, but you were in a fortuitous position to be able to observe very closely the response to this big tsunami. And how did they deal with it? And does it have lasting repercussions before we move on to the other topics? Yeah, it really does. And I agree. I mean, I think, you know, talking about the past 15 years, it's not been a happy time for the news industry, generally speaking.

5:06But, you know, personally, I was kind of lucky in the sense that I started kind of doing fieldwork with journalists circa 2009, 2010, which is really when kind of social media platforms took off. So a word about kind of the kind of research I do. I'm a sociologist by training, right? And specifically, I'm an ethnographer. So ethnographers, it's really a method and a way of doing research that goes back to kind of anthropology in the 19th century. Think about, you know, explorers going to remote islands and going to study the culture of the natives, as, you know, it was then called. We've changed the language since then, obviously, and also a lot of the kind of ethical considerations there.

5:51But, you know, that's kind of what I was doing with journalists. So I was spending a lot of time in newsrooms. I was interviewing journalists. I was kind of sitting in the newsrooms with them. I was watching what they were doing on their computers. I was following their stories. I was going on Twitter at the time and on social media with them and really trying to understand how these big transformations were affecting their daily lives and their representations. And so the main findings, well, the first one is really that, you know, big economic transformations and this change in the business model of journalism also come with kind of day to day consequences.

6:30So concretely, what I saw is that in newsrooms at the time, and I was focusing particularly on web newsrooms, right? So kind of where journalists kind of publish kind of news articles online. They started paying a lot of attention to social media metrics and to what users were doing when they came to their website, how much time they were spending on each story, how they came to the stories, right? Did they find them through Facebook or Twitter? Or did they Google them? Or did they arrive on the homepage of the website? All of this is basically conveyed to extremely granular dashboards and software programs to web journalists.

7:13And what was really interesting at the time is what I saw is that a lot of journalists were kind of obsessed with these metrics, right? they kept on talking about you know who is coming to the website which article is the most popular which article is underperforming which one is going viral on x and x platform and what was fascinating there is that you know perhaps unsurprisingly since from 2026 but again this was 2009 2010 the kind of articles that were getting a lot of traction and a lot of traffic online were not the most prestigious articles that journalists had been trained and socialized into thinking that was the important stuff of journalism.

7:55So concretely, you know, for traditional journalists, international news, politics, and let's say culture and the arts, right? These are the most prestigious kind of rubrics and sections in newspapers that, you know, it's kind of always been that way. I mean, since the 19th century. Take a guess. Was that what was the most popular online?

8:21Angèle Christin:Well, maybe it was popular culture and celebrities. Yeah. So basically sex, scandals, celebrities. There you go. There you go. And also like cat memes, right? Like kind of cute memes that, you know, would just like make people chuckle. At the time, it was like, you know, there was grumpy cat, which was like this cat that had a super grumpy face with like a little hat, you know, things like that. listicles uh just 10 best burger places in the bay area like that kind of stuff right now these were trained journalists these weren't people these weren't people who aspired to be influencers as the as because that wasn't even a word yet so these were all trained they were all trained journalists most of them had either gone to journalism school or had done like multiple kind of internships and kind of really kind of you know gone up the ladder of kind of newsrooms in order to become full-time journalists.

9:16And so I think that for them, it was like a real kind of, I mean, a tsunami, right? In the sense that suddenly there were these two different ways of kind of evaluating what was good journalism. There was a traditional way, which was about getting the respect of your peers, of your superiors, of the editor-in-chief, getting someone at another kind of newsroom saying like, wow, I read your story, I love your work. Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer Prizes, exactly. Like, right, this kind of traditional journalistic editorial way. And that was one thing. But then there was also this other kind of criteria, right, which was traffic and what kinds of articles were popular online.

10:00And this was completely different. And so basically what you could see in newsrooms is people kind of moving back and forth between these two kind of axes of success and just being like, so wait, which one? What does it mean? I worked for like a month on the story, but no one clicked on it. Is it a good story or a bad story? Vice versa. I just did like a quick fun piece on what Rihanna was wearing at the Oscars. I mean, I'm making this up, right? And that went viral because it was fun. It was light. It was about Rihanna and it really captured the zeitgeist of the moment, right? So how do you do?

10:39And then on top of it, they were editors-in-chief. And so editors-in-chief, the thing is, well, they have to both put out content that's of quite quality, but they also have to ensure the economic bottom line of the publication. And for the economic bottom line of the publication, they have to have enough traffic numbers. At the time, the main metric was the number of unique visitors per month, right? So it was the number of unique people who came to the website every month. That's what advertisers were looking at. That's what everybody was looking at. And so, you know, editors were also kind of stuck in like, well, I don't want, we don't want to do only celebrity stuff or sex and lifestyle.

11:19But at the same time, we have to maintain a number of unique visitors. So how do we kind of, and so what I saw is that depending on the newsroom, people landed on very different strategies. So some editors were like, okay, you know what? This is a business at the end of the day we have to best to make the business work and so we're gonna really go deep on the metrics we are gonna put traffic targets for every single visitor for every single journalist we are gonna have leaderboards like big dashboards in the newsrooms with metrics kind of real-time metrics changing kind of all the time so that writers feel like as a competition and the angst right numbers go down i mean as an academic i think you can imagine if we did that with citation numbers It would be like an absolute nightmare.

12:06Angèle Christin:And to some degree, to some degree we do. And to some degree we do, but not in real time. Yeah, not in real time. And it doesn't, our job doesn't depend on it. And it's not the only idea. But again, I mean, I think there are many fascinating parallels with academia, but that's, I guess, a bit inside baseball. And so, you know, some newsrooms went full in on that. And, you know, often what happened in those cases is that journalists were just like, this is not what I trained for. I mean, again, I'm, you know, I want to write good stories. I'm really struck because in the olden days, when you bought a newspaper or a magazine, you bought the whole thing.

12:41Angèle Christin:So, of course, you could turn to the page with the celebrities and stuff, but there was also the front page with the national news. And the editors didn't have even access, probably, to exactly what people were buying it and why. But with this kind of disarticulation and more fine grain reporting, now people can pick and choose and they don't always, you know, choose what we would think would be like perhaps the best for them. I don't want to be paternalistic, but not the thing that they thought they were doing. And so I can see how it would be very disruptive. And this was, was it both money, but also the dopamine?

13:18Angèle Christin:Because I'm sure the journalists, when they get a big viral posting, in addition to knowing that it might make some money for the organization, they must have gotten like just a high from knowing that millions of people were looking at their posts. A hundred percent. So two things about what you just said. Excellent point. So, you know, I think the first thing which, you know, many people have asked me about that research is like, well, is this new? I mean, economic pressures on journalism and the media have always existed. This is just the latest wave of it. But my answer is like, yeah, sure, there are parallels.

13:49And in fact, you can find like kind of, you know, memoirs from editors in the 19th century making like, oh, you know, yeah, you have to give the audience what they want. You know what I mean? And often that means kind of celebrity stuff and lifestyle stuff. But, you know, we use it to kind of cross subsidize the serious stuff. And so, you know, it's kind of OK. I think that it's exactly what you're talking about. The big difference for me is what in kind of digital studies we call the unbundling. of content, right? And the fact that like with newspapers, it was a bundle, like everything was bundled together.

14:21You wrote a newspaper and in it, there were lots of things. And as you say, like most of the time, I mean, they did like, you know, audience studies and marketing studies, but you know, it was pretty kind of superficial at the end of the day. People mostly didn't remember anything, you know, and anyway, like editors were not really looking at it because they're like, I am kind of too busy. What happens with digital technologies is that suddenly, yeah, you can access individual articles kind of on one by one case basis, right? So that's the first thing. And second, you have metrics for every single article and not even every single article, every single paragraph in the article.

14:57So some of the metrics are about like how people scroll down. And what you find to the distress of journalists is that A, the average time on any given news article is around five like seconds, like even less than five seconds. So that's like number one. Right. And second, like most people look at the first paragraph and then they leave the page. Right. So it's like a journalist is like always this kind of like super distressing kind of realization. But so. So, yeah. So I think that that was really kind of the main the main kind of transformations. And that's the point about the dopamine high is so right.

15:32I mean, I think at the end, that's kind of a big argument in my book. metrics at work journalism and the contested meaning of algorithms which i published with princeton university press in 2020 which is that you know at the end of the day journalists are communicators they want their stuff to be read like i mean and i i have a lot of empathy for that as a writer as a professor as a researcher i want my stuff to be read and so for them getting high traffic numbers was not just market pressures it was also oh my gosh i am the queen of the world you know what i mean like i'm on top of it everybody's reading me i like you know i'm going viral it's kind of exhilarating experience and so absolutely it also makes you feel really good and also you're kind of the top dog in the newsroom everybody's like oh my gosh like how did

16:21Angèle Christin:you do that this is so cool we have to be like her we have to be like okay well this is a beautiful segue i'm glad we went there because this actually segues beautifully into your more recent i think book on influencers and social media, because maybe some of those journalists grew up to be influencers, whether they like it or not. So tell me about the kind of perspective and conceit of this newer work where you're looking at, and it's very interesting, and of course, I did a little bit of research about it, kind of a three-way dance that is happening right now in social media. Absolutely. Yeah.

16:57So in a way, it was really a natural continuation of my work on journalists, right? As a journalist, it was this kind of established institutions that were kind of slowly, I mean, I don't want to say collapsing because there is still, I mean, you know, journalists are doing incredibly important work and, you know, they have been transforming in a variety of ways. And I'm happy to talk more about that. But, you know, it was really about these established institutions kind of facing the wave of digital media, right? And how were they kind of reacting to it? Then influencers, it was, well, the other side of the picture, which is like, well, what is a new media ecosystem that has emerged on top of social media platforms, right?

17:37Social media platforms that weren't around 15 years ago, basically. So what does, and now, you know, influencer careers are the most popular career path for most kids in the United States and Canada. Like kids, they don't want to be astronauts. It's amazing.

17:55Angèle Christin:It's amazing. They don't want to be doctors. They want to be influencers. I was visiting Cuba about eight years ago and a little Cuban boy, he was 10 or 11. I said, what do you want to do when you grow up? He said, I want to be a YouTube influencer. It's the first time in any language anybody had ever said that to me. And I nearly fell off my chair. I had to check with the parents exactly what he meant. And then it was just amazing. So influencer is definitely a thing. And it's actually very high on the wish list of lots of young people. Absolutely. And more than that, I mean, when you look at the numbers of people who are declaring self-identifying as influencers or content creators, it's astonishing.

18:36It's like more than 200 million people say that they are content creators. Now, it doesn't mean that they're all making money with it. It doesn't mean that, you know, it's a self, like that it's a full-time job. But, you know, that's a lot of people. imagine 200 million cable channels, basically, kind of broadcasting content, because that's kind of what it is, right? So that kind of emerged pretty organically. And then for the past six years, I've been doing, well, the same kind of things that I was doing with journalists, except that I did it with content creators. Now, what's interesting about content creators and about kind of my own kind of study of them is that all of it is online.

19:16So compared to journalists where I was kind of hanging out in newsrooms, going on lunch breaks, going on coffee breaks, and just like hanging out in the newsroom, for content creators, I ended up doing all of my fieldwork kind of online. So part of it is like kind of situational COVID-19, right? Yes, yes, yes. What was happening at that time, because that's when I started, kind of like 2019, 2020, is that that was boom time for influencers. Everybody was at home. We were all stuck on our screens. And that's when like kind of the number of followers, the number of users, the watch type, like all of that was just like crazy growing, right?

20:01So for all of them, they were like, okay, all the brand deals are coming in because that's also when brands were like, well, we're not going to advertise in the streets. No one's in the streets, right? No one's driving around. So we're going to advertise online. We're going to advertise on social media. We're going to advertise with influencers. And so suddenly all of those numbers were also growing. So it was like basically like a gold rush for them. And that's exactly when I came in. And so, again, I feel like I kind of got lucky there that, like, I arrived right when, like, things were exploding for so many, so many, so many creators.

20:33And I ended up kind of spending, yeah, like, doing a lot of interviews, working with an agent. So I became an unpaid intern. So the other interns were, like, 18 years old. They were much better than me. I was the old intern who, like, doesn't know what she's doing. Wow. I helped an agent who was representing influencers. and kind of negotiating deals for them. I did kind of a quantitative study of how much influencers were paid. Anyway, I did kind of all of these things. And of course, like analyzing their content as well.

21:05Angèle Christin:This is the Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Angele Christen next.

21:23Angèle Christin:Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman and I'm speaking with Angel Christin. In the last segment, we got a fascinating story about how Angel witnessed the transition of journalism from the pre-social media to the social media days and the pressures that put on newsrooms everywhere to both attract viewers, readers, and provide high quality content. That evolved into the current state of social media influencers. And so in this segment, I'm going to ask her to give us a deep dive in what makes influencers tick, especially economically. Don't forget, at the end of this segment, we'll have the future in a minute where I'll ask Angele some rapid fire questions and she'll give me some quick answers.

22:04Angèle Christin:It's the future in a minute. So, Angele, you were saying that you started your work during the pandemic and that you could do a lot of the research online. And I just wanted to ask to start out, did you feel a need to embed yourself with these influencers where they were sitting when the camera or the or the videotape or whatever wasn't on do you feel like you could get a good sense of that ethnography because you know you're trained you like to watch people I'm sure there's all kinds of non-verbal cues blah blah blah so tell me about that decision part of it I'm sure was related to the pandemic and what you had to do I mean I think that's that's the main answer so let me tell you I I wish I could have kind of embedded myself in person with creators.

22:46I think that, and you know, I think as this kind of classically trained kind of sociologist, it's like, yes, everything happens like off camera. That's when like a lot of the tough choices are made. Like, you know, that's when like things really kind of hit kind of tough questions. At the time it was lockdown. I just couldn't get out. So, you know, I ended up kind of not doing it. And basically kind of that changed my research question in turn, which is classing in kind of the kind of interpretive social sciences, where you're like, well, you collect some kind of data. In that case, it was all online.

23:20And so I ended up kind of focusing more on kind of the economic incentives, first of all. And second, the ways in which the kind of structures of social media shapes the relationships between influencers and audiences, right? So in a way, instead of kind of really looking deep down at kind of what's happening behind the scenes, I ended up looking more at like, okay, structurally, what's going on with social media production?

23:49Angèle Christin:So, you know, not perfect, but it is what it is. It's a great answer. So tell me about these three players and how you came to understand them and what it means for all of us. Okay. So the first thing I want to say is that, you know, influencers, it's such a fascinating job, right? because most of the people I interviewed, I interviewed more than 100 of them, they came into social media not really wanting to make money. I mean, at first, the stories that came up were stories of passion, right? I call it the passion principle in the book. It's like they wanted to help others the way they had been helped.

24:25They wanted to share their expertise. They wanted to document their life journey. They wanted to do all of these things that weren't tied to compensation really. But then they started making money. And, you know, and I'll talk a bit more about this in a second. But then they were like, oh, well, you know, I don't love my job. My day job is OK, but it's just a job. I could be an entrepreneur. I could build my own kind of personal brand, my own company based on social media. And that was so attractive for so many of them that they went full in. Now, the reality of social media careers is unfortunately not that great, right?