Journalism facing the influencers boom
The number of digital influencers is skyrocketing on social networks at a much greater pace than expected, a phenomenon that poses a new challenge for journalism, as well as for other areas of human knowledge such as politics, justice, economics and education.
What just over five years ago was a pastime for young people seeking visibility on the internet, has now become a multibillion-dollar business and an occupation that is beginning to change news flows on social media, inevitably affecting the way we deal with information.
In 2018, it was estimated that the number of digital influencers reached approximately 100 million worldwide. Last year, there was a guess about the existence of a billion and a half people using the internet to gain fame and, above all, money by advertising themselves and companies.
The influencer marketing business more than tripled between 2019 and 2024, jumping, according to the company Statista, from a total of 6.5 billion dollars to an expected 24 billion dollars by next December. This is a phenomenon that tends to change not only global retail, but mainly the way we relate to information and access news. In Asia, there is even an ethnographic laboratory on influencer behaviour. The Brazilian company BuzzMonitor claims to have one million registered influencers that it offers to local companies interested in influencer marketing.
Brazilians lead
On the social network Instagram alone, there are 64 million influencers worldwide, according to data from the TrendHero website. Brazil, according to the same source, has 5.4 million people who seek to influence the decisions of followers on the Internet. It’s the country with the largest number of influencers identified as such, surpassing the United States (4.7 million) and India (2.3 million). These are impressive numbers, especially because they reveal the existence of a large and cheap workforce, made up especially of young people eager for notoriety.
By monetizing other people’s advice, influencers tend to exponentially multiply the diversification and volume of information at a much greater intensity than that offered by the current press not to mention the fact that the recommendations they make are conditioned by personal interests and experiences, which inevitably generates a complex situation that challenges the ability of common people to understand reality and take appropriate decisions.
The chaotic multiplication of influencers is becoming increasingly visible on virtual social networks. Public personalities have massively incorporated this form of communication into their daily routine. The phenomenon has also reached schools, where a recent survey showed that 75% of Brazilian students want to be influencers, 64% of them to earn money and 50% admit to dropping out of school to dedicate themselves solely to marketing.
An example of the new rich on the internet is the Minas Gerais native from Nova Lima, Enaldo Lopes de Oliveira Filho, 26 years old, better known online as Enaldinho, followed by 35 million admirers on YouTube and another seven million on Instagram, most of them children and teenagers. He earns an average of US$ 272 thousand monthly, from royalties paid by the networks and from advertising contracts with 150 companies. And it all started in 2012 with films about crazy things with Oreo cookies.
The business of using social networks to influence people has gained fantastic profitability, to the point that many companies are already replacing paid advertising on websites with influencers with thousands and even millions of followers. Marketing via advertising companies is losing space to influencers, who are much cheaper, because there are many of them and they use virtual word-of-mouth as a method of persuasion.
In July this year, the Brazilian TV network SBT hired 43 influencers, euphemistically called ambassadors, to advertise the broadcaster’s programs, following the global trend of using information conveyed by influencers as a business tool.
What we are witnessing is the reduction of the space occupied by the press in the world’s information ecosystems and the gradual increase in the participation of influencers in shaping public opinion. It is a complex process because it does not just involve replacing one medium with another.
The Dilemmas Facing Digital Journalism
There is a very important qualitative transformation underway because in the conventional press, the common citizen had only a marginal participation in the public arena of debate. Today, in the digital age, the so-called citizen communicator (1), of which the influencer is a variant, has become an increasingly present protagonist in the recombination of information (2). The problem is that this participation in the production of knowledge and social capital (3) is currently being overrun by the tendency to use information as a springboard for enrichment.
This puts journalism before a new dilemma: face influencers or help people deal with the information chaos. The traditional press treats influencers as a minor activity, an undesirable by-product of the internet, in reaction to the loss of protagonism on the public debate agenda. It is also a consequence of the worsening migration of advertising to the digital space beyond the control of the great conventional communication empires.
However, for professionals who care about the social function of news, the accelerated growth in the number of digital influencers imposes the need to identify and suggest solutions to the disorientation caused by the avalanche of information on social networks. Journalism is becoming increasingly important and irreplaceable in the role of news curator, that is, the professional capable of serving as a reference in choosing the most reliable information.
This implies a considerable change in relation to the behaviours, rules and values still in force in the profession.
(1) More details about the concept and functions of a ‘citizen communicator’ in my text “Goodbye good citizen, welcome citizen communicator” (https://ccastilho.medium.com/goodbye-good-citizen-welcome-citizen-communicator-535636b30677)
2) Recombination, according to the theory of knowledge, is the process through which new information received by a person is compared with other information that they already have in their memory, and transformed into knowledge. There is no knowledge without information and all decisions are based on a form of knowledge. More details at https://elium.com/blog/understanding-the-differences-between-data-information-and-knowledge/
(3) Social capital, in the sociological sense of the expression, is the set of knowledge accumulated by a given social group. More details at https://elium.com/blog/understanding-the-differences-between-data-information-and-knowledge/
