Some time last year, I did a bit of a binge read on the Influencer Industry (and I rounded up my thoughts in this post) so when I saw The Influencer Industry, I couldn’t resist picking it up.

While a bit more academic than the other influencer-focused books that I read, The Influencer Industry provided a look at the history of influencers in the USA, beginning from its formative years in the late 2000s to the current stage (though probably before the debut of the BeReal app, since the chapter on “The Cost of Being Real” missed a chance to make a pun on that briefly viral social media platform).

According to Hund, the influencer industry took off with the advent of personal blogging during the 2008 recession. There are several factors at play – one was the unstable job market that made cultivating a personal brand seem like a good idea, another is the technological factors that made having a personal blog easy to an average internet user, and a third would be the shift towards independent work. Out of this mix of factors rose the first influencers, who used to be those who had successful blogs (before transitioning to various platforms). As Hund puts it:

“The influencer industry’s core business is continually reassessing, redefining, and revaluing authenticity. Authenticity is the quality that makes one more person more influential than another, even if they have similar metrics.”

I’ll be honest, this definition of authenticity was a bit too vague for me. And that is the point. At the end of the book, Hund writes that “Authenticity means different things to different people. Is it being open about all your likes and dislikes or being “positive”? Is it about sharing a lifestyle rather than specialising in one content genre? […] All this criteria are relevant for different people and at different times. As such, what becomes significant is the ecosystem that renders this definitional slipperiness possible.” In other words, we/scholars don’t know what authenticity is but we recognise it when we see it.

To me, the book never reckons with the necessity of the influencer industry (though it does say it wasn’t deterministic), instead opting mostly to treat it as a phenomenon that has happened and probably will continue. The focus here is on analysing the industry and how it has shifted. Some points that caught my attention included:

One, how seeking attention is a core activity of the digital age because economies run on scarcity and in an age where information is abundant, it’s attention that is scarce.

Second, the idea that “The influencer industry quantifies, ranks, and commodified those who self-identify as workers (such as professional Instagrammers) as well as casual users who do not.” This point caught my attention because so many people whose hobby is on the internet (basically all book bloggers/bloggers/anyone who has a social media account) does feel the impact of the algorithm, whether for good or for bad. I’ve seen posts on why you should have a hobby that can make you money, which I think is a result of this commodification of the self we present online (I tried to find the post for the sake of this post, but unfortunately, I no longer can).

Third, Hund made clear the weird dynamic where “advertisers and marketers have to come up with countless ways to humanise brands, from hosting parties to engaging in social activism. At the same time, cultivating a personal brand becomes increasingly critical to professional success, particularly in the digital economy.” This is, essentially, a world where a company wants to be your best friend and your best friend wants to be seen like a company. I find this very topsy-turvey and I think it’s clear that this is a result of an ecosystem where the focus is on selling things to social media users, and to keep selling to them whether they need it or not.

Fourth, I thought the way Hund looked at the relationships between influencers, their audiences, and their gatekeepers was interesting. She pointed out that “[i]n reflecting on their creative process and their audiences role in them, then, influencers ultimately described a situation of continual negotiation between creativity and strategy.” And not only that – things meant to stablise the influencer industry “shifted power away from influencers to those who constructed the new means of amplifying it“, tilting the balance of power away from the influencers to the gatekeepers. Combined with the nebulous definition of “authenticity” from earlier, what I understood from this point is that in trying to maintain their influencer career, influencers must now balance the interests of the companies that pay them and the audience that the companies want to reach by staying “authentic”.

All this sounds like a herculean task for the influencer, let alone the regular users of social media, who must now navigate a platform whose algorithms are geared to pushing posts that make the platforms money, who may feel a connection with someone who doesn’t know them, and who may not even notice when a post is sponsored or when it’s an unfiltered piece of content. It all sounds more than a bit dystopian to me, and Hund hasn’t even had to cover the darker side of influencing that Get Rich or Lie Trying covers.

If you’re in America and you’re interested in the influencer industry, this book may interest you. It’s not really a tell-all type of book but I think if you’re interested in the market dynamics behind the influencer industry and how they worked to propel it to where it is today, you’ll enjoy the analysis that Hund has put together.