The influencer bubble

The instagram influencer bubble is finally popping… well, sort of…

Instagrammer @arii has over 2.6 million followers and Instagram where she posts selfies and portraits in clothing mostly for @fashionnova, a clothing company, one of the most famous and successful Instagram clothing companies out there. When she decided to branch out and make her own line she failed hard and couldn’t sell the minimum 36 shirts required for the firm who would make the shirts. oof.

I decided to take a look at her Instagram and find out more, find out why someone with so many followers could garner so few purchases. 2.6 million followers means a potential yield of 2.6 million sales plus whoever might see the shirts and also seek to purchase them. Obviously that is overblown as most youtube channels with millions of subscribers do not always receive an average viewership matching their sub list per video. @arii receives an average like of 14-50 thousand per post. Videos on Instagram show how many people have viewed said video as well as the likes. Her video posts receive 14-50k+ likes but are viewed by over 300k. That’s .56 of her entire follower list engaging with her content, not counting whoever might have viewed her posts extraneously. Oh, and she gets about 100 comments about per post. I’m pretty we all know people with a couple thousand followers who exceed that per post.

I ran her account through different webpages which measure fake followers and engagement for Instagram pages.

Influencer Marketing Hub gave her a score of 47 out of 100. Her likes to comment ratio was deemed a rating of good, although the company also says “ You should find that any real influencers who work at ensuring their audience is genuine, will attain scores of 80 or above. Anybody who scores poorly would be of little value to your business, and a potential waste of your investment if you were to pay them to promote your product or service. .”

I ran another Instagram account through IMH, fishpuppet, a page dedicated to a screaming. Fishpuppet scored 85 out of 100 with a very engaged audience. It’s visible too. Just a scroll through this page shows a great ratio of likes to views, plenty of comments, and most important you feel as though Fishpuppet genuinely replies to his fanbase. At 256k followers Fishpuppet receives about the same or more comments as Arii, who is more than 5x the followers. His descriptions are brief but reveal some amount of his personal life, a joke, or a question for the audience. Some posts or stories have had polls asking the audience what they would like to see from his page. This gives more for the audience to respond to. But it seems Arii is worried about hearing her audience, she only want to be heard.

According to igaudit.io 58% of her followers are real.

Social Blade tracked her audience growth since her joining of 2015. The graph starts in Sept. 2015 showing 183k followers. 1 month later she gains over 100k. 3 months later in January she gained over 300k followers. From then on she gains about 500k followers every three months until now where she sits at a cozy 2.6 million. Fishpuppets growth seemed more organic, although it was much slower and not as substantial.

So her engagement is bad but why?

Her posts are boring as hell. People just don’t really care. Selfies are the bulk, no the entirety of her content. Posts of her face wearing glasses and a blasé expression sometimes interrupted with a duck face or an imitation no more than a semblance of what she might believe to be a seductive face. She is one of those “I’m not your average girl” types who listens to Billie Eyelash.

Her descriptions are short and wanting of personality as much as she is. I found one post where she stood in a waterfall. Description: First time in waterfall. Real insightful. The following are descriptions picked at random from her account.

June 20: i’m baby

June 1: wknd of my life (heart emoji )

May 27: mondayz

May 14: cozy

She doesn’t respond to her audience. I scrolled through a few post comments and didn’t find any replies. It seems rather than building a community she’s decided to go the route of thinking her shit is so good people will keep coming to see what the dainty white girl scat is composed of.

Who is her viewerbase?

Besides the obvious bots which constitute a large minority young girls are her audience. Horny 14 year old boys it seems too. Aaand some older dudes a little too old to be into the 18 year old instagrammer. I don’t know how the hell anybody could get passed the lack of personality. It’s selfies in locations with girl. That’s all that’s needed to describe her. Physically we could describe her as a semi attractive girl, a 7 with makeup and a 6.9 without.  But that doesn’t stop the blueballed old men I imagine to be wanking off to the girl, maybe scrolling back a little too far, risking the ever lurking Chris Hansen.

On the popping.

The only thing popping are shitty influencers skating by on fake followers and generic posts. There are plenty of Instagrammers out there who have built a community followers on quality content and genuine engagement. There are plenty of accounts out there like Fishpuppet, or accounts based on hiking, such as @Johanna.Hendrickson, adamcharlescheek, or cedric_manoukian.

I suppose there might be some deliberation on what is meant by an influencer. On the broad sense it is anyone on Instagram who identifies as one or who is sponsored. Some five million users identify as an influencer, although most of those are just average joes who put their account into the business setting to view analytics. The genuine creators on Instagram are lumped into this category although they are venn diagrammed with authenticity and actual social capital, just barely coinciding with the @arii’s of the world.

Youtubers have gone to create successful clothing brands; Pewdiepie with Tsuki, and H3H3 with Teddy Fresh. It’s a well deserved fame and creative niche which made these brands work. A vapid thot with zero work ethic will not get thousands to rush to her website. She will get less than 36. She will also show the businesses and companies on the platform that deciding to pick an account with a lot of followers is not a good factor; looking for someone who is well connected, genuine, and has created quality content is the true necessity. People trust influencers. I do. When someone I watch say the young turks, or the daily wire talk about a product, I’m more likely to pay attention than the shit Hulu pushes every five minutes.

It’s companies that are as vapid and apathetic as the influencers who ruin this economy. They do no research, they simply look for big number accounts and have their marketing team send a DM. And on the other end the influencer does not care either. They see a paycheck and they wrap their clean white manicured hand around it and pull. The backpack companies who take time to research influencers are the ones endangered. If it weren’t for the constant flow of brands dealing out money to any popular derelict, they might have gotten away with sliding a few bucks under the table. Now the FTC is underway and they are angry. The Hashtag police are underway and if you don’t report your endorsements you may face penalty. With these astringent rules will come tighter policies from brands under the FTC barrel. We can thank the titty streamers for not reporting their incomes to the IRS, the youtubers for endorsing their own company under the guise of never having played it before, and the Instagram influencers who fail to use the proper #ad #sponsorship hashtags at the behest of the FTC.