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.
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
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.