Influencers, it’s fair to say, don’t enjoy a good press, said Elle Hunt in New Scientist. Since the word took on a new meaning in the mid-2010s – standing for those paid by brands to endorse their products online – it has been “tied to an image of a young woman hawking dubious diet teas to boost her currency on social media”.
Yallop, a digital strategist, is an ideal guide to this “bizarre and chaotic” world, said Eleanor Margolis in The Guardian. Many of her chapters are “gonzo dispatches” – from an “influencer bootcamp” she attends, or “a VIP influencer party with a ‘million follower’ policy”. Yet her book also considers broad themes such as “the commodification of the self, and the increasingly blurred line between leisure and work”.
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Top influencers earn astonishing sums, said James Bloodworth in The Times. PewDiePie (above), a Swedish YouTuber best known for films of himself playing video games, pulls in around $8m a month. That’s modest compared with ten-year-old “kidfluencer” Ryan Kaji – the highest-paid YouTuber of 2020 – who raked in $29.5m from advertising and $200m from merchandise for his “unboxing videos”, or toy reviews.
But such cases, Yallop reminds us, are very rare: few online content creators become wealthy, and most are prey to the same problems – low pay and a lack of job security – that “immiserate others working in the creative industries”. Refreshingly free of the “usual sneering anti-influencer condescension”, Break the Internet is “persuasive and well-written”.
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