Click Farms and Influencer Houses
The 2010s have seen the rise in popularity of the internet influencer. There are now thousands of people making a career out of social media, living lives that seem picture-perfect and free from the restraints of a 9–5 (Abidin, 2018). Whilst this idealistic self-representation of their lives garners social issues, this seems like a dream job, resulting in an oversaturated market.
So how does one stand out from the crowd? And how do brands select which influencers to work with?
Brands typically choose who they want to work with based on numbers- ‘The market value of an Influencer is usually proportionate to the number of followers they have’ (Abidin, 2018, pg. 79). In the present day, influencers are almost two a penny, causing aspiring influencers to look for shortcuts to followers. ‘Click Farms’ were born, allowing people to purchase Instagram followers and likes, generated by bots. Not only is this fraudulent but has various ethical issues regarding regulations and working conditions in these businesses, often found in Asia (Lindquist, 2018). These grew in popularity, resulting in Instagram ‘purging’ their platform of all suspected bot accounts in 2014 (Lee, 2014). Influencers feared their authenticity would be jeopardised if they lost followers, leading to a trend of posting your losses publicly to have total transparency and trust with their audience (Abidin, 2018).
Instagram went on to change the feed algorithm from chronological, stating that it would be “ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most” (Instagram, 2016). This led many influencers to find ways to ‘game the system’ or ‘playing the visibility game’ (Cotter, 2019, pg. 896) to maintain their relevancy and their brand partnerships.
One way of doing this is through influencer ‘pods’ (Thompson, 2017) where they will network friendships with other influencers. These pods will post photos/ videos together, ‘livestream’ together and interact with one another’s content in the hopes that their colleague’s followers will migrate to their page and follow them too. This has now gone a step even further, progressing from ‘pods’ of friends to creator houses. A group of influencers will move into a mansion together to aid their online growth by creating content together, this proves quite lucrative. This business model was popularised in the last two years after the platform ‘TikTok’ took the world by storm and people saw the successes of the ‘Hype House’ and influencers like Charlie D’Amelio and Addison Rae (Windheim, 2020).
Thanks for reading.
PurpleBlogs
References
Abidin, C. (2018). Internet celebrity. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
Cotter, K. (2019). Playing the visibility game: How digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on Instagram. New Media & Society, 21(4), 895–913.
Instagram (2016) See the moments you care about first. Available at: https://instagram-press.com/blog/2016/03/15/see-the-moments-you-care-about-first/ (accessed 8th January 2021).
Lee, D. (2014). Instagram deletes millions of accounts in spam purge. Retrieved 8 January 2021, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30548463
Lindquist, J. (2018). Illicit Economies of the Internet: Click Farming in Indonesia and Beyond In Francheschini et al. (Ed), Dog Days (pp. 232–235). Anu Press.
Thompson, R. (2017). The Instagram “pods” using likes to fight the new algorithm. Mashable. Retrieved from https://mashable. com/2017/04/19/instagram-pods-bloggers/# Fpbazhgifiqn.
Windheim, G. (2020). The Ultimate TikTok Houses List. Retrieved 9 January 2021, from https://www.kapwing.com/resources/tiktok-houses-list/#:~:text=TikTok%20houses%20are%20literal%20houses,Clout%20House%20appeared%20years%20before.
