i’m fed up. i open tiktok and out of every three videos, two are ads. and i don’t mean the advertising tiktok serves you, but the sponsored content from people who make content: collaborations, promotions, brands. an important clarification before i go on: this is not a criticism of creators, and least of all the small ones. if someone with five hundred followers lands a collaboration, i’m happy for them; i hope it excites them, i hope it helps.
within the disgust i feel for the infinite scroll — i’ve said it before —, there is one thing i do like: following small accounts. a thousand, five thousand, twenty thousand followers, i don’t care; anything under ten thousand. i like it because it’s people making genuine content, trying to contribute something, putting in the work. and yes, in part i’m talking about myself, as a small account trying to make something educational that people enjoy.
why do i do it? to learn. i love learning. ancient rome, history, is becoming a passion of mine. and it might surprise you: i’m a science guy. at school history left me cold, it was all rote memorisation; i liked maths. but suddenly something woke up in me, and i want to learn more. i make the content to learn, myself. that a community has formed around it — people who follow, who comment, who value the work, because this is work — is wonderful.
and yes, i share the usual criticism: there are giant influencers who don’t edit their videos, who surely don’t even write their own scripts, who post a story and earn ten thousand euros. it’s staggering that someone can make a video putting together a burger king meal and earn, in a single year, more than many doctors make in five or ten. it’s madness, i agree. but that’s not my point.
what floors me is something else: small accounts, with five hundred, a thousand, two thousand followers, doing collaborations and ads. and here i’m mixing two things, i’ll admit. on one hand, those small accounts doing ads; on the other, the kind of content the huge creators make. because you follow the big ones because you know them, not because they offer anything: it’s today’s celebrity gossip, they tell you about their day, their dances, their life. if your cousin or my grandmother made that same content, you wouldn’t watch it. and that’s fine, they’re public figures, they move a lot of people, hats off to them. but alongside them you have someone with five hundred followers who pours themselves into a cracking video, superbly edited, on a gorgeous topic, and it stalls at two thousand views, or doesn’t even reach a thousand. and i don’t get it.
a video someone poured themselves into stalls at a thousand views; four bits of rubbish with a couple of dances rack up millions.
but the underlying point i’m getting at is this: how far have we come for it to be worth a brand’s while to go looking for a tiny account? some niche guy or girl, with two thousand followers, who’s maybe posted two hundred videos and hasn’t grown any further because they stayed in their niche, or because of the algorithm, or whatever. to what point of extreme consumerism have we come for that follower to be worth the brand’s while? that’s where i was going.
that an account with three million followers runs an ad, i understand: it has an audience, it’s advertising of the old kind. it used to be television, a football match, the hoardings around a pitch. a stadium of a hundred thousand people has its leds changing, advertising nike, adidas, coca-cola. and if you go to your village pitch there are no leds: there are four plastic banners for bar pepito and bar manolo. it has its logic: big fish, small fish, the more mass the better.
but now i see very small accounts advertising brands that aren’t so small. what do they get out of it? do they get paid? are they given product? how does it work, and why? and i know it’s easy for me to say this, being a bigger account; it can be read as envy, as if i wanted those collaborations too. it’s exactly the opposite. total respect for those accounts: they’re the ones i like, the ones i think add something, one of the few reasons it’s worth scrolling now and then. and i wish they had more of them, i wish they could make a living that way.
when a brand reaches out to you and you have a thousand followers, your power over it is nil. you’re its hostage.
what stirs me is something else. this is such a huge dictatorship of the brands that, when one reaches out to you and you have a thousand followers, your power over it is nil. you’re its hostage. they’ll do whatever they want with you. and there, for me, lies the problem. unconsciously, in my head, all of this rings with one word: credibility. loss of credibility. because that brand doesn’t need you at all; you, on the other hand, may not need it either, but it suits you nicely. and once they’ve reached out to you, how are you not going to try to keep them happy?
and that’s the trap. what made those accounts valuable — their own soul, their genuineness, the one thing that set them apart — is exactly what erodes in exchange for a promo. i don’t hold it against anyone: i wish they could make a living that way. i just wonder how far we’ve come for it to be worth going after the very last follower.
