Very interesting article, which was sent to me by khalwat: https://www.wired.com/story/pricey-w...nstagram-feed/
The article is long, but it's very eye-opening.
If you don't feel like reading it, here's the cliffs:
- Popular users on Instagram now charge a small fortune to promote products, and many of them promote through indirect means, such as leaving the product in plain view in their pics/videos, or by trashing the competition
- One industry now heavily involved with these "influencers" is the makeup/beauty industry, especially smaller/rising brands struggling to get name recognition
- A then-small eyelash company called Lashify was advised to pay $60,000 to an influencer to get promoted. The owner turned it down, thinking it was crazy.
- Instead, in March 2018, Lashify noticed a popular gay/drag queen type Instagrammer, named Manny MUA, taking a moderate interest in their lashes. They quickly sent him a package of their product and a very nice note along with it.
- Manny didn't respond to them, but soon after posted a video, completely trashing Lashify, which basically ruined them. At one point, he said the lashes weren't "cunty" enough for him (lol):
- Lashify attempted to respond to Manny, but did further damage to themselves by writing, "Not everyone wants to look like a drag queen". Then, in an interview, the Lashify owner said, "I don't know what the hell [Manny Mua] thought they were. Honestly, I don't know what he thought they were. But I have to remember, at the end of the day, he can have all the makeup he wants, but he's still a dude." All of this enraged the LGBT community, and the brand Lashify became toxic. Nobody wanted to promote it, and anyone who did promote it was attacked and would back off from doing so.
- Someone put it together that Manny likely bashed Lashify because he was on the payroll of Lashify's prime competitor, as it had been found he was a paid shill of theirs on Instagram. This was publicized and went viral, and suddenly Manny was the one under heavy fire, and the whole paid influencer in the makeup industry thing became a huge discussion on Reddit. As a result, Lashify was seen as a victim, and its profile began to rise again, and now it's popular.
- Manny and other popular Instagrammers also promoted an online psychotherapy company, using their own personal situations and their supposed use of that therapy to get past their issues. Manny, for example, did a whole video about how coming out as gay upset his dad, and how this company's therapy was able to restore his relationship with his father. The touching video no doubt generated a lot of sales for the company, and it was found that other Instagram influencers did similar videos. However, in reality, the company appeared to be crap with loads of consumer complaints, which again made Manny and the other influencers look like heartless shills.
Bottom line: These Instagram influencers are incredibly shady, yet their followers take their word as gospel. They now promote in ways to where it looks like they're not promoting, and they're actually taking money to bash the competition in supposedly unbiased fashion. The prices to do this have gotten ridiculously high, but companies keep paying it, because they are afraid of the consequences of not doing so.
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Originally Posted by OSA
