7 ms·

Name of the Game: The distinction between ‘influencer’ and ‘creator’

66 points by laurex 5y ago

okamiueru 5y ago
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 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tremon 5y ago
  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.
- swinglock 5y ago
  Influencers work in advertising.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  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.
quattrofan 5y ago
Influencers are useless parasites, they don't "create" anything if value.
j4yav 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
Darmody 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  > 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.
Alex3917 5y ago
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.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
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.
II2II 5y ago
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.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
  This is how I have always thought of the distinction, too. An influencer is a content creator that specializes in sponsored content.
  - username90 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      But they were influenced into trying.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  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.
exizt88 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
SuboptimalEng 5y ago
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.
username90 5y ago
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 5y ago
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).
snowwrestler 5y ago
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.
PaulHoule 5y ago
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.
Animats 5y ago
Huh? It's the difference between Marketing and Production.
ystrickler 5y ago
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.
misterchrister 5y ago
Wow, not a whole lot of appreciation within this thread of the fact that “influencer management” is an actual thing in the year 2021. Creation is an act generally based on personal decision or a passion to share work. Influencers are managed just as smoothly as social media feeds now.

66 points by laurex 5y ago

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 5y ago
[deleted]
tremon 5y ago
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.
swinglock 5y ago
Influencers work in advertising.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
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.

quattrofan 5y ago

Influencers are useless parasites, they don't "create" anything if value.

j4yav 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

Darmody 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
> 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.

Alex3917 5y ago

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.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

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.

II2II 5y ago

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.

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
This is how I have always thought of the distinction, too. An influencer is a content creator that specializes in sponsored content.
- username90 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    But they were influenced into trying.
snowwrestler 5y ago
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.

exizt88 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

SuboptimalEng 5y ago

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.

username90 5y ago

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 5y ago

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).

snowwrestler 5y ago

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.

PaulHoule 5y ago

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.

Animats 5y ago

Huh? It's the difference between Marketing and Production.

ystrickler 5y ago

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.

misterchrister 5y ago

Wow, not a whole lot of appreciation within this thread of the fact that “influencer management” is an actual thing in the year 2021. Creation is an act generally based on personal decision or a passion to share work. Influencers are managed just as smoothly as social media feeds now.