Let’s just take a minute.
If, like me, you follow the Irish influencer scene, you’re probably still reeling from the last month.
The BullshitCallerOuter, the White Moose Café controversy, Terrie McEvoy’s admission that she fixed a competition – it’s been an entertaining ride that speaks volumes about what we consume on social media and who’s providing the content.
Many people who’ve delighted in the drama of the past few weeks have gleefully lauded ‘the downfall of the influencer’; finally a time when the perfect people we see on our phones every day are ‘taken down a peg’.
It’s been a reality check, sure. But the end of influencers? Not at all.
Like it or not, even if the current breed don’t manage to weather this storm, bloggers are here to stay.
I, like many of you, spend hours looking at bloggers, influencers or whatever you like to call them each week. I cut my teeth watching Youtubers while trying to learn how to do makeup when I was younger and graduated to following the Irish scene.
I’m now in a job that’s not dissimilar to what bloggers do for a living – creating content for an audience of young women with the aim that, of everything that’s vying for their attention on social media, that audience will be tempted to look at us.
Anyone in a role like mine will understand that to do what any influencer with a sizeable following has done is incredible.
You’ll say that it’s not work, but you’re wrong. People get sick at the money they make, the lifestyles they lead, but that’s entrepreneurship – plain and simple. They’ve worked and worked to gain a following and to establish themselves as tastemakers and as long as you’re watching, they’ll continue to go on six holidays a year.
Putting Photoshopping and all the other ‘bullshit’ they’ve been called out for aside for just a minute, think about why we might ‘hate’ a certain influencer. If we’re honest, it’s possibly envy, right?
It can feel unfair that someone sits down at home, shows us a lipstick and then picks up cash for it, but the Snapchat clip we see is the result of years of slog. No-one is saying that that’s harder work than being a nurse, a teacher or anything else, but again, that’s just being an entrepreneur.
The fact is, there’s a massive appetite for blogger content in Ireland. Whether you realise it or not, even if you don’t buy a single product, you’re getting something from just following. You might laugh or learn how to contour – or you might just love to hate-watch.
That’s why, when influencers ask us not to follow them if we don’t like them, they’re missing the point. In a twisted, kind of Black Mirror way, they’re still giving you, the hate-watcher, value. It’s a transaction. They give you entertainment and you give them your eyeballs – everyone gets something.
That’s a big part of why they’re not going anywhere. You put them where they are and as long as you spend every idle moment with your head in Instagram, they’ll stay on top.
That doesn’t mean that we, as consumers, don’t have rights. Every minute of time you spend looking at, liking and commenting on an influencer’s content is of monetary value to them and so they’ve a responsibility to us.
All we can ask is that they’re honest with us. If they get something for free, they should say so. If something is sponsored, they should say so. If a photo is heavily edited, they should say so. They should also strike a balance between ads and genuine content and they seriously shouldn’t rig competitions.
There’s a darker side to how an influencer might let down their followers too. The effect that heavily airbrushed images has on our own self-image, especially for younger followers, can’t be underestimated, which is why honesty is so vital.
This last month has been positive, but not in a nasty ‘let the bloggers burn’ way. The Irish influencer scene is a ‘Wild West’-style landscape and that had gone unchecked for too long. The controversy has finally caused us to have a meaningful look at who these people are, what they actually do and how they affect us. But it hasn’t stopped us from following.
So if we think the bloggers won’t bounce back from this, we’re very naïve.
