Two Indicators: the influencer industry

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? An astronaut, a doctor or maybe a famous athlete? Today one of the most popular responses to that question is influencer – content creators who grow their following on Tik Tok, Instagram and YouTube and monetize that content to make it their full-time job.

In a lot of ways influencing can seem like the dream job - the filters, the followers, the free stuff. But on the internet, rarely is anything as it appears. From hate comments and sneaky contracts to prejudice and discrimination, influencers face a number of hurdles in their chosen careers.

This week we're bringing you two stories from our daily show The Indicator on the promise and perils of the multi-billion dollar influencer industry.

This episode was produced by Corey Bridges and Janet Lee. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Katherine Silva. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and Dylan Sloan. Emily Kinslow was the podcast coordinator for this series. Viet Le is The Indicator's senior producer. Kate Concannon edits the show. Our acting executive producer is Jess Jiang.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:06.0	Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. This is Planet Money and today we are going to be-
0:11.0	Wait, what are you doing? That's not our normal intro.
0:14.0	Oh, sorry Adrienne. Okay, I'm gonna start over.
0:17.0	Get ready with me as I host Planet Money from NPR.
0:22.0	Okay, wait, what has gotten into you?
0:24.0	You know, I've been watching all these YouTube videos and Instagram reels and TikToks.
0:29.0	I think I've started to talk like a professional influencer.
0:32.0	Ah, okay, well that makes sense because over on the indicator, we've been doing this deep dive into the world of influencers.
0:40.0	Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Adrienne Ma.
0:43.0	And I'm Whalen Wong.
0:44.0	Influencers are a multi-billion dollar industry.
0:48.0	And on today's show, we're bringing you two episodes from the indicators recent series on this rising industry.
0:54.0	First, Deerian would deny look into the reality of trying to make money in this business, and Deerian gets a fashion influencer makeover.
1:02.0	Then we look at the potential downsides of a career in influencing.
1:06.0	That's coming up after our hashtag ad break.
1:09.0	If you survey Americans, unions are more popular than they've been in half a century.
1:23.0	And workers themselves seem increasingly amped to join one.
1:26.0	Where a lot of this energy has come from is just people after COVID being like,
1:30.0	I just don't trust my employer to treat me well, I want a union.
1:35.0	Our workers may want to join a union, but when you look at the numbers, union membership as a percentage of the overall workforce is still declining.
1:43.0	They're signs of life, but if this takes off, we're at the very beginning.
	...

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