Dear (ex) TikTokers, I’ve been an online influencer for 20 years, here’s what to do when your platform disappears
Over the past 20 years as an influencer I have lost my source of income so many times that if you ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll say: “a salaried worker.” I’ve had sponsors who paid $5,000 a post to talk about their product. I had people who paid me $15,000 a speech to talk about online trends. But we’ve also had electricity turned off and run out of food because you can never predict when a source of online income will disappear, and as an influencer it’s almost impossible to get a job — because your brand is too big for someone else’s brand. Here’s what I’ve learned about having a platform pulled out from under me:
You go through a mourning process
I have 100K followers on Twitter but I haven’t been able to log into my account for a year. This is not the first time I’ve been locked out. I was hacked a few years earlier, and I got my account back, but I lost all my tweets. Twitter wasn’t always about news and snark. I gained my followers writing about my kids’ daily lives, like a diary. And I lost it all.
When it comes to Twitter I’ve gone through the five stages of grief:
Denial (I’ll get it back)
Anger (Elon Musk is ruining my life)
Bargaining (maybe I could sue Twitter in small claims court for lost income, and then, when we meet in court, I just ask them to reset my password)
Depression (I’m exhausted and I’m never going to gain an audience again, anywhere)
Acceptance (Am I there? I’m not sure, because I’m still writing about it, right?)
You can be fired with no notice even if you’re self-employed
But I’ve been here before. I used to be one of the most popular writers on Yahoo Finance. (You’re probably thinking: Yahoo?!?!?! Who cares about that? But trust me, this is what people are going to think about TikTok in five years.) I cross posted every weekly Yahoo column on my own blog and once a month my site would go down from traffic overload. Also, Yahoo paid me $2,500 per post, which could support my family.
Then Yahoo fired me with no notice. The reason was that advertisers paid a lot on Yahoo Finance, but I wasn’t finance-y enough for them. Luckily, I had been posting on my own site as well, and I kept doing that, but I lost tons of traffic.
The referrals can stop coming in one fell swoop
So I was nonplussed when I lost all my traffic from Facebook. It was my top referring site and then overnight I got almost no traffic from Facebook. It was because I had a very very good source telling me that Sheryl Sandberg was telling lies about where she was when her husband died. Maybe we’ll never know why she did that, but I have always thought she’s a self-serving opportunist, and I hated her book, which she later hated so I don’t mind losing the Facebook traffic because I was right. But I have to admit I had no idea how much traffic I got from Facebook until I didn’t.
No one really depends on one platform for their livelihood
TikTok, like most platforms, has a low ceiling for how much traffic you can monetize. You don’t get paid for more than 1 million views on TikTok, and the amount of work you need to get 1 million views is huge, so you need to get paid somewhere else to make it worth it. This means that if you had a huge following on TikTok and you didn’t move those people somewhere to monetize them, then you didn’t really have a business on TikTok but rather a dream of TikTok. So maybe you don’t have to mourn so dramatically about the loss.
This is true with me and Twitter as well. Do you know how many sales I’d make when I posted a link to my 100K followers? One or two. So unless I was selling real estate (I’m not) it wasn’t worth it to build up that big a following on Twitter.
Each place you can build a following is like a Katerina Kamprani design to make life less comfortable.
Influencer platforms look like they should be useful, but it’s not like it appears: Everyone has something besides that platform if they’re really supporting themselves.
Being an influencer is the sweat shop labor of our millennium
The platform isn’t the problem. It’s the lifestyle. You mourn the platform loss because you had to work so hard to build a following. You had to post all the time and you compromised your personal life to do it. Either you turned your own life into content, or you gave up having your own life in order to work nonstop. Either way, you’ve sold your life to social media.
There’s a reason the divorce rate is so high for influencers: you can’t be present in your marriage and earning money from commenting on your marriage. And you lose your kids. If you can make money writing about your kids, you’ll lose your kids like you lose a platform, because any sane teen begins refusing to participate in their parent’s online antics. I would know.
Get more meaningful measures of success
I’ve spent the last two years trying to figure out how to write without writing about my kids. It’s been difficult. But what keeps me going is I love to write. And I love to experiment with ways to tell stories. That’s how I started using the Internet and that’s why I’m still here. I’ve started writing flipbooks. I have no idea how I’ll ever make money from them, but they make me happy.
An influencer has to constantly learn new technology, constantly adapt to new platforms, and you lose your audience – many times. The measure of success online is like the measure of success offline: not how much money you make but how well you can cope with setbacks and keep your relationships intact.
Love your quote: “Being an influencer is the sweat shop labor of our millennium”!
I think about this concept all the time when I think about how college athletes recently won the right to earn money like professionals and now they are mostly just becoming influencers. I think maybe they were better off not being able to earn money as college athletes…
It takes an insane amount of privilege to even formulate the idea that a person needs to protected from getting paid for their work. To reminisce about the good old days when college athletes could bring in millions in revenue for their universities while going hungry over school breaks. Because that is the reality for any poor college student surviving on a scholarship.
It’s funny because I think this article was spot on, but then I had to go and read the comments. Every so often you say things that are so incredibly out of touch that I want to scream.
I’m not trying to be an influencer but I do put a lot of time into my blog. I’m always looking for new ways to attract readers. Facebook used to be the only social media platform that was reliable at sending views my way. It took a lot of work to do the shares but the ROI was okay. None of the other social-media platforms sent me enough views to make sharing on them worth it at all. But now even Facebook appears to be throttling linkouts.
I have a theory that all people who have a lot of traffic online got it from doing something offline. This is true for me, and I really can’t think of anyone where it’s an exception — people who don’t build from an offline presence are too vulnerable to algorithms.
I’m curious what you think of cupofjo.com . She’s one of the few bloggers from the noughts that seems to be going strong. And as far as I can tell, her offline ventures (and even her substack) aren’t nearly as successful as her blog.
She looks like Pioneer Woman to me: an online magazine with a group of people writing and curating content for that site. What I really wonder about is writing about her kids. I don’t think people will do that for much longer. Kids don’t like it. (I would know.) And it also projects a poverty mindset that a mom can’t support a family without farming her kids’ lives. It didn’t used to be, but it definitely is now, and this is a great example of the terrain constantly changing in ways we can’t predict.
Penelope
Hi. Really interesting piece. swimming in all that moolah.
Forgive me, but looks like you noticed the typo CHERYL SANDBERG
which is actually SHERYL SANDBERG.
I attribute this to me losing my mind. Or getting old. I just CANNOT believe I made this mistake when I’ve been ranting about how much I don’t like her for a decade. When you dislike someone this much you do not misspell their name.
Penny,
Thanks for the heads up about platform impermanence.
I loved your flipbook by the way. You told so much in an off the cuff (seeming) kind of way. How do you create them?
Peace,
D
Thank you! I love the flip books so much. I draw the pictures with my finger in freeform on my phone. And I did the lettering on paper and pen. Then I move it to Canva to put it into a flipbook format. Just writing about the process makes me so happy. Obsession is such a comfortable place for me.
While I haven’t thought about it for years, I remember that post you wrote about Dave Goldberg’s death. I remember thinking how callous it was, considering death by suicide is the last ditch effort of someone in the grip of depression.
I wonder if this is a case of, ‘when we know better, we do better’. If his death had happened today, would you still so quickly and heavy-handedly insist it was suicide, or could you find it in yourself to be more empathetic?
Warning: tirade incoming.
Would I do the same thing again? Yes. For sure. At the time, I was driven by the frustration that women who work full time and have kids completely delude themselves about how they’re managing everything (I know, I did it). Sheryl’s suspect behavior after the death — refusing to say where she was, refusing to say the cause of death or why he was even in that location — still seems to me to be an extension of her deeply engrained practice of lying to everyone about how she is parenting and working at the same time. Lying and misleading is nothing to her. Not even when her husband dies.
Since then I have even more insight into why I’m right :)
I coached one of her nannies, Sheryl wrote a book about how “Leaning In” isn’t all that great, and the Nobel Prize was awarded for research showing *no one* can physically or emotionally work and raise children at the same time. So I had another chance I’d go even harder.
I am having less and less patience for people saying they are working a full-time job and taking care of their children at the same time. With just a little digging it’s clear that either they’re doing everything poorly or they’re not doing what they’re saying they’re doing.
I suppose this is your way of showing empathy for what you consider to be the greater good, rather than an individual.
That’s a great way of seeing it. I hadn’t seen it that way before you saying it.
I do that all the time, really. Thank you for seeing that. It’s that double-sided sword of austic empathy. The thing is, even though I know autistic empathy is strongly social rather than individual, I wouldn’t want to change it. I love having social empathy so much even though I hate when people think I don’t care becuase I FEEL like I care so much.
what do you think of Laura Vanderkam of “I know how she does it”? I am a huge fan and she and the women she’s studied seem to do it all.
I think the most important part of your question is what is “do it all”. Laura does not make enough money to support her family. She does writing on the side. Her husband makes a ton of money as a McKinsey partner.
A lot of times we think someone has a great career because we think we would like it. But we don’t see that they actually cut way back on their career in order to take care of family. Laura used to be a focal point of the tech industry and she is no longer that. For her, she took a huge step back.
An easier way to see this is mothers who are doctors. They almost all work part-time. To women who are not working, being a part-time doctor seems great. But to a woman who went through medical school, the disrespect part-time doctors get from their collegues is too much and they usually quit altogether.
So “having it all” means the person whose life it is thinks they have it all. Which no woman does. Laura took a huge step down, doctors take a huge step down, having it all doesn’t mean taking a huge step down in your career.
Penelope
In his memoir, comedian George Carlin said what a revelation it was to learn not to measure success by how many laughs he got. So he could start joking about things he cared about. (He’s on Youtube)
Except for having dreams of monetizing, I think it can be useful to think of other measures of success than number of readers. What measures? Beats me. But I know that writing that is literature, and art that is cutting edge, will never get many viewers… I noticed years ago that computer nerds don’t link to short literature poems, not even to classic Ogden Nash:
I think that I shall never see,
a billboard lovelier than a tree.
In fact, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
I’m older millennial. This read was so validating for me. I have lost friends who have become successful instagram influencers. One of them just had a child and it appears online that things are great (I know they are not)! The preformativity of influencers frustrates me. I find myself trying to find ways to explain to my 19-year-old niece how a lot of posts aren’t authentic. It feels like an uphill hike.
I also loved reading the comment section, because I also got to read this line: “I am having less and less patience for people saying they are working a full-time job and taking care of their children at the same time. With just a little digging it’s clear that either they’re doing everything poorly or they’re not doing what they’re saying they’re doing.”
I would love to read more posts about your take on influencers!
“how well you can cope with setbacks and keep your relationships intact.”
OMG. The last words are so perfect they stand on feet of their own. This is the essence of Life.
Truly, the measure of life, well-lived and deeply loved is in the relationships we’ve kept intact through the toughest of setbacks. No tragedy greater tests the mettle more.