
Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job - prostoalex
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/posting-instagram-sponsored-content-is-the-new-summer-job/568108/?single_page=true
======
ArtWomb
Can't really believe I'm recommending this here. But for a peek into the world
of creative kids who move to LA to launch their budding empires on social
media. Check out the Paris Hilton reality show "Hollywood Love Story" on
Viceland. It's dark and dystopian. Not a celebration of facile overnight fame
at all. There seems to be a distinct "peak" around the 50K followers mark,
where no matter how hard you try, you never get past a local maximum of
saturation.

This looks like a great series by Atlantic editors and will read at length
when I get a moment. But I'd say most creators and influencers are well aware
of the demands required to scale a personal brand. For a vlogger to get a free
Lull mattress and feature it in a five minute segment is a win-win situation.
Cash equivalent is ~$1K or less. They still have to make rent.

On the other hand, upside of popular social media presence is opportunity.
From getting representation at a modeling or acting agency, to art students
just out of school getting that first gallery show or sale. It can be
considered de rigeur.

~~~
vvpan
And so Hacker News gets hooked on a Paris Hilton reality show.

------
IkmoIkmo
Basically everyone had summer jobs. But how many kids in a class of 30 will
have a profile with 20k followers? I'd guess one at best, likely less.
(average)

I know a ton of teachers and am friends with a bunch of people with monetised
channels like these, but it's really not like a summer job. Virtually everyone
had a summer job at some point, but in a class of 30 you'd be hard pressed to
find a kid with a profile of 10-20k users. Usually it's like 5-10 kids in a
school of 500-1000 who've got some instagram side hustle going on.

Otherwise nice article though, things have definitely changed and as long as
parents keep an eye out I think it's a pretty cool development.

On the other hand, I'd question the extent to which kids will say no to crappy
brands that offer money, whereas in my experience most serious channels by
young adults will often not recommend bad products they don't believe in. If
you look at all the insta feeds they're all basically clones of each other
anyway, kind of low-quality reviews and just all about advertising,
promotions, chances to win something etc. Seems like a pure money-grab,
whereas young adults tend to build more of an experience, mention products
they don't profit from, offer more varied content. I'm honestly a bit
surprised at the amount of followers they got, but then you can wonder how
much is real.

Honestly can't blame them, when I was a kid I always had some silly side
hustle too. I just wanted to buy games, candy, fireworks and a football haha,
quality wasn't the nr 1 priority.

~~~
usrusr
More like the new school band then I guess. Few people actually got on stage
or even just into the rehearsal room, but in the late 20th century, hardly
anybody made it through school not fantasizing about it in some form.

The slope to a marketable Instagram feed is far more gentle, there are no
major hurdles to take except for lack of success (which never stopped school
bands either)

------
css
> Negotiation usually takes place entirely over Instagram direct message, and
> teens rarely sign formal contracts

This is not always the case, however. There are entire marketing agencies
setup for exactly this. We use Social Native [0], which allows us to pay
people to post editorialized content.

Very few (if any) people follow the FCC rules [1] that tag the posts as #ad.
It is a really shady market; nearly everything in social media marketing is
astroturfed like this.

[0] [https://www.socialnative.com/](https://www.socialnative.com/)

[1] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
releases/2013/03/ftc-s...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-
releases/2013/03/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines)

~~~
hk__2
>> Negotiation usually takes place entirely over Instagram direct message, and
teens rarely sign formal contracts

> This is not true. There are entire marketing agencies setup for exactly
> this.

Does the fact that there are marketing agencies negate the point that it
"usually" takes place like this, though?

~~~
css
That's entirely fair. I corrected the main comment.

------
zakum1
How sustainable is this before it starts to destroy trust and integrity in the
friendships between these kids. As an adult, I would not like my friends to be
promoting products to me rather than expressing their real preferences and
insights. How much more toxic is this in teenage years when relationship
skills are being formed?

~~~
bilbo0s
They are not promoting to their friends. Most have different accounts for
talking to friends. The accounts with 8 thousand, or 20 thousand, or 50
thousand followers are obviously not all close friends. They are people
following the child's internet persona.

~~~
ionforce
But what if you're a crappy social media maven and you HAVE conflated your
fake friends and real friends?

What if you had no real friends at all...

~~~
wmeredith
Then you likely learn a tough lesson. This is called growing up.

------
nickthegreek
While I'm not a big fan of marketing/ad model it is neat to see kids 13-15 be
able to do something to make some money. At 13 I was buying candy like
WarHeads in bulk and selling them to other kids on the bus to make a 5x
return. I wasn't able to get a real job until I was 15 and even then, I had to
really hustle and find a retail company that was willing to take a chance on
me.

------
tsumnia
I don't see anything wrong with this - we're still so new in social media
(it's only a couple decades old), so its constantly evolving no different than
the "wild west" Internet days.

The only concern I have is the experience they are earning. In a "traditional"
summer job (car wash, manual labor, cashier, etc.), you gained experience in
something I'd call "grit" \- harsh work conditions, people yelling at you,
etc.

Being an Instagram model or YouTuber still deals with its share of internet
trolls, but are people learning to handle when things "won't go their way"? I
don't think that's the term I'm looking for, but just the overall "not
enjoying the work" part of, well... work!

My concerns are because people are failure-averse, we hate negativity. A
YouTuber/Instragammer can simply not read the comments, or selectively filter
the comments. Are they getting the same "grit" experience as the more
traditional work environments I mentioned above?

EDIT: As you'll see in my responses to comments - what about non-person
"grit"? Does being an Instragram model or YouTuber develop the grit to push
through the annoying/boring/tedious/stressful parts of making money? When you
a digging ditches, you don't exactly get to "ignore" the negative parts of the
job. When learning, you don't get to "ignore" the struggle of not
understanding something. Grit or perseverance (pick which one you like
better), is a necessary skill that more physical jobs teach. Being the center
of some social network clique, does not.

~~~
CJefferson
They are getting a much grittier experience. No-one ever came to me at my
summer job and told me to kill myself, or that I was too ugly to rape.

~~~
tsumnia
As I've said elsewhere, what about non-customer interaction activities? I grew
up digging ditches for my family's business. I WILL say shoveling clay in the
summer in North Carolina humidity is a much grittier experience than reading
someone's comment on the internet I don't know verbally attacking me.

~~~
1996
If it provides so much value for the kid, why stop here?

I think we should start torture camps for spoiled children - shoveling clay in
North Carolina summer, shoveling snow in Alaska winter, and so on! That will
teach them!!

If it is so good, parents will certainly pay good money to put their kids in
the best torture camp!

~~~
tsumnia
Slippery slope fallacy aside since that is advocating we go back to a time
before child labor laws, yes. The hard work involved is my point. This doesn't
have to be physical labor, see my error handling example in learning computer
science. K-12 also refers to what I'm advocating as "productive struggle", and
I'm not sure being an advertisement teaches this skill.

------
radoslawc
Shouldn't all those shilling posts include disclaimer: 'Includes paid
promotion'? Sometimes you can see it on YouTube videos, but I haven't seen it
anywhere on Instagram so far.

Also this situation reminds me about this 'marketing' strategy some companies
do, that they are hiring salesmen on some easy-to-break contracts with sole
purpose them selling product (most of the time it's some financial bs or
insurances) to friends and family, then when their sales drop - fire them.

~~~
wmeredith
FTC says they have to be hashtagged as #ad. No one cares though.

------
mattbierner
Rather specific question: does anyone have experience working with a college
student who organically promoted service or product on their physical campus?
If so, how did you find them initially and how successful was the effort?

This is about validating/bootstraping an idea that requires a set of users in
the same physical and social space, and as I have no confidence in myself or
my direct friends being able to create the right seed culture for this, I’m
trying to find a person within an existing community (like at a university)
who can. To be clear, I’m not looking for like a one off, Tupperware party
style infleuncer, but almost like a social evangelist for the product who can
stick with it for a few months and who can also tell me why the product sucks

~~~
louisswiss
Tinder and red bull are really good at this. In Europe they're called campus
ambassadors.

~~~
obscurantist
In America they're called brand ambassadors.

------
elektor
Very interesting article! I wonder what the ROI on these ads are considering
two things: 1) the ability to buy lots of fake followers and 2) teens having
very little spending money.

~~~
louisswiss
You can expect to lose money on the first posts (weeding out the fakes,
building a relationship, shipping product etc) but once you find someone who
works well, it's easy to get a great ROI from future posts with them.

To give you a rough idea, I run a small ecommerce jewellery store as a side
project and a post by a micro influencer (<1000 followers) netted us over
$3000 in orders. We just gave her $89 worth of jewellery.

That's obviously an exception, but you can definitely build up a network of
trusted partners who can get you 5-10x returns pretty consistently.

~~~
somebodynew
Do people browse Instagram as a shopping experience or are those impulse
purchases?

~~~
aspaceman
Very impulse driven. People usually browse Instagram casually like people
browse HN - for general tips, interesting videos and content, and the
lifestyle of people they are interested in.

So if you can get someone people look at every day to promote one of your
products, and it happens that the person is looking for new shoes / jewelry /
style, you can convert those into purchases.

------
PunchTornado
It is beyond me why companies pay for this. A user with 10k followers is
nothing, you can get 90% of them to be bots. Really hard to figure it out if a
network is from bots or real individuals.

Also, if it is about girls, then 90% of the users are guys wanting to see some
ass and boobs. What do companies get from such a target audience? They don't
wear bikinis and don't care in which hotel the girls are staying...

------
Kiro
How can they just pay them like that? What about taxes and social security
fees? I doubt the kids have their own company.

~~~
PunchTornado
exactly. I don't know about US but in Euro you always have to submit an
invoice, pay VAT. These companies and individuals should be prosecuted.

~~~
louisswiss
That's just not true. There are lots of countries in Europe *yes, and Euro
zone) where you don't have to collect VAT if you sell under a certain amount
of revenue per year.

I'm not saying that everyone involved in the activities you're describing are
doing it 100% by the book. Far from it probably. But that isn't an excuse to
just blatantly spread misinformation.

~~~
PunchTornado
For example in UK, you don't have to pay VAT if you make under 80.000 or
something like that. But, you still have to register as a company or sole
trader with HMRC and say that you are involved in an economic activity.

And you still have to submit invoices. I doubt that any of these people send
invoices through instagram messages...

------
louisswiss
I work in the space and the real trouble is that it's so easy to build a
'fake' profile (including on platform engagement and follower ratios etc) that
sure, you might only be paying $20 per post, but only 10% of posts will
deliver anything approaching value for money.

The good news is you can then build up a relationship with the 'good'
influencers over time, but it's still a lot of work. And once an influencer
reaches a certain level of fame, they are basically bought out by the big
brands with contracts and serious money to throw around.

Another big problem is that it's still really hard (impossible) to track 'the
good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it seems organic and there's
no transactional gift voucher or discount code shared with the influencer's
audience.

We actually got so fed up of this that we decided to turn it on its head and
are working on [a tool]([https://postperk.com](https://postperk.com)) to help
brands turn their customers into Instagram influencers instead. It's pretty
early days, but I'd be happy to throw out a free month or so to any HN readers
who are interested in trying it out.

~~~
gowld
Is your comment 'the good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it seems
organic and there's no transactional gift voucher or discount code shared with
the influencer's audience ?

> I'd be happy to throw out a free month

Oh, guess not.

~~~
louisswiss
> Is your comment 'the good kind' of word of mouth advertising - where it
> seems organic and there's no transactional gift voucher or discount code
> shared with the influencer's audience ?

Hey, it's just a free month (we don't offer that anywhere else) - we're
currently going through the advisor track of YC Startup School and if we can
help anyone out there (for free) in return for some feedback, we're happy to
do so.

I should probably have made it clear that I meant 'the good kind' from the
brand's point of view. Sorry.

------
CPLX
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m
with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to
you!”

------
dvtrn
Baudrillard was right.

------
m1573rp34130dy
...Do any of you still get reams of paper junkmail on your doorstep or a
mailbox crammed so full of kruft that the real post office complains about not
being able to deliver mail?... So now that its gone digital, how do we chase
junk mail carriers away with a lawn sprinkler anymore?

~~~
soperj
Spam filters?

~~~
m1573rp34130dy
...but i dont want to put a lock on my mail box, i want the spam carrier to
get wet and destroy the rest of the junk mail so it doesnt bother me again or
anyone else for the rest of the day...

