Free products, not wages, often constitute influencer compensation
Evidence
If one accepts the constant drive to work, one may be “paid” in a few free products—obviously not the same as a wage. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, alongside “an ever-growing class of people who have leveraged their social media clout to travel the world, frequently in luxury,” who are courted by businesses directly, there is also an overwhelming growth of “D-list” influencers who request the same treatment. Kate Jones, manager at a luxury retreat in the Maldives reports, “Everyone with a Facebook [account] these days is an influencer… . These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all-inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” Many hotels now have a standard influencer request form and contract. Even for the influencers who make the cut and receive free goods—at Jones’s luxury retreat, it’s 10 percent of applicants—it’s rarely clear when the next job may come or the next brand will call. Influencers often see their work, and the comped amenities that their work provides them, as their primary labor and pay, although they may face controversy for demanding even this noncash compensation. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 15
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Direct material for the reader’s labor theory of value analysis: the commodity realized is attention/labor paid in comped goods, not cash — a barter-like surplus that platforms and brands extract.
Related
- Influencer compensation commonly takes the form of comped goods rather than wages (similarity 0.95)
- Influencers are simultaneously product, producer, worker, and commodity (similarity 0.79)
- Wealthy bloggers willing to work for free justify devaluation of that labor (similarity 0.79)
- Influencer followers double as unpaid product test subjects (similarity 0.78)