How do influencers make money? And how much? She'll tell you
(Photo illustration by Parisa Hajizadeh-Amini / Los Angeles Times; Lynette Adkins and Adraint Bereal photos)
Last summer, Lynette Adkins was a fresh college graduate starting a corporate career at Amazon that she thought would be her ticket to financial freedom — the kind that seemed out of reach growing up in her middle-class family.
She lasted only a year.
Today, 23-year-old Adkins earns double as a self-taught content creator what she made at Amazon Web Services marketing cloud products. In a crowded influencer market, she’s carving out a niche by turning the camera on herself in a way few others have: detailing how, exactly, to make good money and a sustainable career from having an online following.
“I never see this kind of information about what people are making … what the true possibilities are as far as profits go when it comes to creating content,” Adkins said in a video posted in July on YouTube, her main moneymaking platform.
In June, when Adkins saw that she made more from her YouTube videos and brand sponsorships than from her 9-to-5 job, she quit Amazon — and documented the whole process for all to see.
"I'm scared to not be making as much money as I'm making from this job," a crying Adkins said in the video, “i quit my job (and filmed everything)." Her next YouTube post became the first of her now-signature budgeting videos — and maybe the moment her college side hustle turned into her new career.
In it, Adkins breaks down her earnings, down to the dollar, to explain why the Amazon job had lost its luster. Of her $14,023 in June income, just $5,300 came from the e-commerce giant. She earned the rest through YouTube, Instagram and other online work.
Gone are the days of the accidental YouTube celebrity — a teenager whose homespun video spontaneously goes viral, landing her a moment in the spotlight. Many influencers set out strategically to make a living from sharing their lives or skills online. Content creators are the fastest-growing type of small business in the U.S.
Gone, too — for the most part — is the misconception that this digital work is the exclusive domain of spoiled or lazy well-to-dos.
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“I'm currently trying to unlearn a lot of things that I grew up learning around work and money,” said Adkins, who grew up in San Antonio and started working at age 15 to ease the financial load on her father, a real estate agent, and her mother, who works for an insurance company.
Adkins’ content also speaks to the themes of discontent that run through Gen-Z-produced social media. Two of her videos denouncing corporate culture went viral earlier this year, one titled “I became the main character and it changed my life,” and the other, “I don’t have a dream job.”
Adkins encourages viewers to detach their self-worth from their jobs. “These corporations will try to make you feel like at home in your work or at your job,” she said in a later interview. “It’s just a source of income. For me, that's all it will ever be.”
Her message hit home for her viewers. In four months, she gained 70,000 YouTube subscribers.
'Point of view'
After connecting with viewers over their unfulfilling white-collar jobs, Adkins offers them a way out. Her budgeting videos, a road map of sorts to becoming an influencer, quickly galvanized a fast-growing audience.
“There's never been a better time, I don't think, to be in the content creation business because the demand is still exploding,” said Robert Kozinets, a professor who studies digital interaction at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The influencer marketing industry will command about $12 billion this year in the U.S. and closer to $30 billion globally, according to research by Kozinets.
On LinkedIn, the share of job postings for roles with the words 'influencer' or 'brand partnerships' through July of this year grew 52% from the same period last year, according to an analysis done by the company for The Times.
On YouTube, the number of U.S. creator channels making at least six figures in revenue was up more than 35% year over year as of December 2020, according to the company.
YouTube’s Partner Program, which pays a set amount of ad revenue per every thousand views a video gets, has shelled out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media companies.
“The easier part is the monetizing, believe it or not,” said Seth Jacobs, a talent manager at Brillstein Entertainment Partners. “The hard part is finding people with a point of view.”
Adkins’ supporters say they are wowed specifically by the amount of personal information she shares.
In her June earnings video, she explains that of her $14,023 take-home pay that month, $8,723 came from her creator work: about $4,700 from sponsorships, $3,599 from YouTube ad revenue, $263 from affiliate marketing and $63 from TikTok.
“I just want to say, you inspire me and we need people like you, with a voice of their own, and content about the things people don't talk about or don't talk about enough,” read one comment on the video, among some 500.
Another: “I absolutely LOVE the transparency! So many people hold this information as a ‘secret’ but this inspires and helps me so much since I have similar aspirations and learn best by being walked through it.”
Others are drawn to her nuanced conversations around work and self-worth.
Katherine Berry, one of several creators who made a video inspired by Adkins, called the videos “kind of radical, because you don't see many young professionals talking about this" — how work shouldn't consume one's life.
In addition to making YouTube videos, Berry works in tech sales, a job she said involved 12-hour days until she recently set firmer boundaries around work hours.
(Illustration by Parisa Hajizadeh-Amini / Los Angeles Times; Lynette Adkins photo)
Adkins' content also stands out because the creator economy remains relatively opaque in its inner workings, even to creators. Brand deals are subjective, and it can be difficult for newbies to navigate their early days making money online.
"It's basically like a black box" said Lindsey Lee Lugrin, the chief executive of FYPM, a company whose platform enables creators to reveal their earnings from sponsored posts and review companies they've worked with.
Deconstructing the how-to of influencing has been increasingly trending online, but it remains “a stigmatized/taboo topic (especially for women),” Lugrin, who hasn’t seen Adkins’ content, said in a later email. “So anyone who uses their influence to uplift other creators and help them negotiate higher rates is a hero in my book."
Adkins traces her money savvy back to her teen years, when, watching her parents struggle through the 2008 recession, she started working to support herself.
Many classmates came from wealthier families — they got tickets to the movies and trips to the mall. “Keeping up with that meant I had to work," she said.
When she was in high school, Adkins started watching YouTube videos regularly, mostly by beauty personalities who taught makeup tutorials. But the beauty space, especially, seemed reserved for young, white women.
A few years later, around 2016, she began to notice a shift on YouTube. Instead of videos covering one specific topic, more “lifestyle content” was populating her feed.
Creators started to show more of their everyday lives online: One might post a smokey-eye tutorial, a video about how she decorated her living room, and what she ate that week. Now, a person's multifaceted personality could, and should, be reflected in their content.
This seemed more up her alley.
In January 2018, Adkins made her first video: a tutorial for Black women growing out their natural hair. She mostly saw YouTube as a creative outlet while finishing her business major and as another source of income alongside other jobs.
She got her real estate license to rent apartments to fellow students and worked as a valet and at a call center.
That year, Adkins filmed videos on college life, skin and hair care, and studying abroad. She would film herself with her iPhone, often propped up in a windowsill. Later, her boyfriend would shoot photos of her for her Instagram account.
'I don't dream of labor'
Out of college, Adkins accepted the well-paid role at Amazon Web Services in Austin, which she scored through a networking event for Black college students. She said she didn’t enjoy the job, but needed it, and started to doubt the corporate path just a few months in.
Adkins said her questions about “hustle culture” began in the classroom. In her business courses, she felt like she was training to be an employee, not an entrepreneur.
She started reading Eckhart Tolle. She learned more about Black history and America’s systemic inequities.
“The reason there’s so much inequality in this country is not because there's not enough resources,” she said. “It's because there are enough resources, but people at the top, like the 1%, have kept a majority of the world's resources for themselves. And that's why I started realizing that we can have it all, but there has to be change.”
The killing of George Floyd added a layer of ethical questions to her work — she helped sell AWS’ cloud computing platforms to government agencies, including police departments. “That was a moment when I was really asking myself, what am I actually doing?” she said.
She channeled the angst and uncertainty into her YouTube channel, deciding to focus on growing a following until it was financially viable to leave her day job behind.
She bought herself a tripod, filming wherever she could, which was often in her parking garage. She made her first big camera purchase in March of this year, a $750 Sony ZV-1, marketed specifically to vloggers.
That month, her two videos on rejecting the live-to-work culture blew up. Adkins now has more than 105,000 YouTube subscribers, 22,000 Instagram followers and 101,000 followers on TikTok — making her a so-called micro-influencer on the ascent, someone with a sizable and engaged following but who isn't a big brand personality or household name.
These days, Adkins is focusing her content less on fashion and beauty and more on spirituality and manifestation, taking control of your life and acknowledging the inequities of capitalism.
The latter popularized a viral tagline, “I don’t dream of labor,” which dozens of other creators have used in similar videos with their own stories of leaving, or changing their outlook on, competitive jobs. The origins of the movement may be traced back to a Twitter post by a writer, though the use of the phrase surged on YouTube after Adkins’ video. (Adkins doesn’t claim to have coined it.)
In months that she publishes more videos, she notices that her channel gets more attention all around (Adkins said algorithms reward frequent posting). If she’s running low on sponsorships one month, she’ll make more videos for more ad revenue, or seek out more brand deals, the next month.
“I know how I can control each source of income and, like, increase one or the other,” she said.
The paradoxes of Adkins’ story aren’t lost on her. What enabled her to quit her corporate job was talking about her disdain for it online. And with her new career, she’ll quickly admit that she’s still fighting capitalism with capitalism.
Yet she said she feels she has more control over what she puts into the world, and she feels good about that. “I freed myself,” she said, “but there's so much more that I want to do.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Neo-Nazis are still on Facebook. And they're making money
BRUSSELS (AP) — It’s the premier martial arts group in Europe for right-wing extremists. German authorities have twice banned their signature tournament. But Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs, still thrives on Facebook, where organizers maintain multiple pages, as well as on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, draw in recruits and make money through ticket sales and branded merchandise.
The Battle of the Nibelungs — a reference to a classic heroic epic much loved by the Nazis — is one of dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.
All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels, which have gotten over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60% of the profiles were explicitly aimed at making money, displaying prominent links to online shops or photos promoting merchandise.
Click on the big blue “view shop” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a T-shirt that says, “My favorite color is white,” for 20 euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus offers “Refugees not welcome" stickers for just 2.50 euros ($3) and Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves with skull faces for 5.88 euros ($7). The Facebook feed of OPOS Records promotes new music and merchandise, including “True Aggression," “Pride & Dignity,” and “One Family” T-shirts. The brand, which stands for “One People One Struggle,” also links to its online shop from Twitter and Instagram.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and the PBS series FRONTLINE that examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional U.S. and European democracy.
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The people and organizations in CEP's dataset are a who’s who of Germany’s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They are the ones who build the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, the lead researcher on the project. “It’s most likely not the guys I’ve highlighted who will commit violent crimes. They’re too smart. They build the narratives and foster the activities of this milieu where violence then appears.”
CEP said it focused on groups that want to overthrow liberal democratic institutions and norms such as freedom of the press, protection of minorities and universal human dignity, and believe that the white race is under siege and needs to be preserved, with violence if necessary. None has been banned, but almost all have been described in German intelligence reports as extremist, CEP said.
On Facebook the groups seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which is generally illegal in Germany.
By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.
But simply cutting off such groups could have unintended, damaging consequences.
“We don’t want to head down a path where we are telling sites they should remove people based on who they are but not what they do on the site,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Giving platforms wide latitude to sanction organizations deemed undesirable could give repressive governments leverage to eliminate their critics. “That can have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it’s almost always to the disadvantage of marginalized and powerless people.”
German authorities banned the Battle of the Nibelungs event in 2019, on the grounds that it was not actually about sports, but instead was grooming fighters with combat skills for political struggle.
In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to stream the event online — using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. A few weeks before the planned event, however, over a hundred black-clad police in balaclavas broke up a gathering at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where fights were being filmed for the broadcast, and hauled off the boxing ring, according to local media reports.
The Battle of the Nibelungs is a “central point of contact” for right-wing extremists, according to German government intelligence reports. The organization has been explicit about its political goals — namely to fight against the “rotting” liberal democratic order — and has drawn adherents from across Europe as well as the United States.
Members of a California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, and its founder, Robert Rundo, have attended the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018 at least four Rise Above members were arrested on rioting charges for taking their combat training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A number of Battle of Nibelungs alums have landed in prison, including for manslaughter, assault and attacks on migrants.
National Socialism Today, which describes itself as a “magazine by nationalists for nationalists” has praised Battle of the Nibelungs and other groups for fostering a will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their readiness for combat.”
But there are no references to professionalized, anti-government violence on the group’s social media feeds. Instead, it’s positioned as a health-conscious lifestyle brand, which sells branded tea mugs and shoulder bags.
“Exploring nature. Enjoying home!” gushes one Facebook post above a photo of a musclebound guy on a mountaintop wearing Resistend-branded sportswear, one of the Nibelung tournament’s sponsors. All the men in the photos are pumped and white, and they are portrayed enjoying wholesome activities such as long runs and alpine treks.
Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise – who has been convicted of incitement to hatred and called “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the German state of Thuringia — also maintains multiple pages.
Frank Kraemer, who the German government has described as a “right-wing extremist musician,” uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and his Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books as well as sports nutrition products and "vaccine rebel” T-shirts for girls.
Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise and Kraemer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Facebook told AP it employs 350 people whose primary job is to counter terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this reporting.
“We ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission, or are engaged in violence,” said a company spokesperson, who added that Facebook had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in Germany. The spokesperson said the company had removed over 6 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally between April and June and is working to move even faster.
Google said it has no interest in giving visibility to hateful content on YouTube and was looking into the accounts identified in this reporting. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold spike in the number of channels and videos removed.
Twitter says it’s committed to ensuring that public conversation is “safe and healthy” on its platform and that it doesn’t tolerate violent extremist groups. “Threatening or promoting violent extremism is against our rules,” a spokesperson told AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this reporting.
Robert Claus, who wrote a book on the extreme right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in CEP’s data set are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Europe.” One of the founders of the Battle of the Nibelungs, for example, is part of the violent Hammerskin network and another early supporter, the Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been barred from entering the European Union for ten years, he said.
Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms would potentially limit their access to new audiences, but it could also drive them deeper underground, making it more difficult to monitor their activities, he said.
“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Prohibiting those accounts would interrupt their contact with their audience, but the key figures and their ideology won’t be gone.”
Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert in Germany’s far-right music scene who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said there’s a danger that the apparently harmless appearance of Germany’s right-wing music heavyweights on Facebook and Twitter, which they mostly use to promote their brands, could help normalize the image of extremists.
Extreme right concerts in Germany were drawing around 2 million euros ($2.3 million) a year in revenue before the coronavirus pandemic, he estimated, not counting sales of CDs and branded merchandise. He said kicking extremist music groups off Facebook is unlikely to hit sales too hard, as there are other platforms they can turn to, like Telegram and Gab, to reach their followers. “Right-wing extremists aren’t stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.
None of these groups’ activity on mainstream platforms is obviously illegal, though it may violate Facebook guidelines that bar “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook says it doesn’t allow praise or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bars people and groups that adhere to such “hate ideologies.”
Last week, Facebook removed almost 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-lockdown Querdenken movement, under a new “social harm” policy, which targets groups that spread misinformation or incite violence but didn’t fit into the platform’s existing categories of bad actors.
But how these evolving rules will be applied remains murky and contested.
“If you do something wrong on the platform, it’s easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to just throw someone out because of their ideology. That would be more difficult with respect to human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who used to work for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also contributed to CEP’s report. “It’s a foundation of our Western society and human rights that our legal regimes do not sanction an idea, an ideology, a thought.”
In the meantime, there’s news from the folks at the Battle of the Nibelungs. “Starting today you can also dress your smallest ones with us,” reads a June post on their Facebook feed. The new line of kids wear includes a shell-pink T-shirt for girls, priced at 13.90 euros ($16). A child pictured wearing the boy version, in black, already has boxing gloves on.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
How do the Duggars make their money?
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar.Without Counting On, the Duggar family has to switch things up. Pic credit: TLC
As the new normal sets in for the Duggar family, followers are interested in how the Duggars are making their money without the reality show income they have had for decades.
It’s been a few months since TLC canceled Counting On, and as the dust settles, there are questions about how the siblings will sustain their families and how the parents will continue living their lifestyle.
With the reality TV money gone, other plans have come to light. While the family was filming, some of the spouses had other jobs as well.
Most of the Duggar sisters married men who worked or went to school. The Duggar brothers had a career or trade that was separate from filming.
These are some of the ways the Duggars make their money now that the reality TV avenue has been closed off.
YouTube revenue
This appears to be the way that several of the Duggar siblings are going.
Jessa Duggar has been working on building her channel for a few years. She filmed all of the family events that couldn’t be shown on the network because Josh Duggar attended functions.
From the fall festival to Christmas sweater parties, Jessa made sure to capture it all. She struck it big when she released the birth of her fourth child, Fern Elliana, on YouTube. It was a three-part series and garnered well over a million views.
Jedidiah Duggar and Katelyn Nakatsu are building their YouTube channel, adding their wedding view and their pregnancy announcement documentation. They drew a crowd with those, which could eventually turn into something like Jessa has built.
Jill Duggar has also built up her YouTube channel. She had done several Q&A sessions with her husband, Derick Dillard. They revealed their issues with the Duggars and why they left Counting On in 2017, which opened up even more questions. They also use the channel for vacation videos, excursions, and other activities Jill thinks will draw attention.
Joy-Anna Duggar has also used YouTube and did it to do some documenting with her pregnancy with Evelyn. There were rumors that she and Austin Forsyth were planning to leave Counting On, which is why she released her gender reveal and other pregnancy-related content.
Real estate
Realtors in the Duggar family are growing. Michelle Duggar is a licensed realtor, and so are her Joseph and Jeremiah Duggar.
This has played a massive role in attaining properties to buy and sell, flipping for profit to keep the money flowing. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are the two original realtors.
Joseph joined his parents next, and then Jeremiah was the most recent family member to add the realtor license to his resume. It has been just a little under a year since he was licensed.
Flipping houses
Buying low and selling high has been a good strategy for Jim Bob Duggar. He has owned several homes, acres of land, and other things throughout his lifetime. Several of his children have bought houses from him for cheap, including Justin Duggar.
He has renovated mansions and trailers and virtually everything in between. They can buy and sell within the family, with the realtor being a family member and the seller also being a Duggar.
Joy-Anna is interested in renovations, as are several of her brothers and even big sister, Jana Duggar. They have all built things and totally ripped everything out. Joy-Anna is currently working on an RV, and some of the other siblings have built decks, redone bathrooms, and other odd jobs that sometimes appear on social media.
Paid partnerships/sponsored content
Advertising for businesses gives social media influencers an income stream. The number of followers you have across various platforms helps garner attention on specific products.
The Duggar women and in-laws have cashed in on this a bit. Jessa Duggar is often seen pushing products and handing out discount codes. Abbie Grace Burnett, Kendra Caldwell, Jill Duggar, and Jana Duggar have all done something like this on their Instagram stories.
Jinger Duggar has worked to build her own brand, as partnerships don’t appear to work for her. Even though she has distanced herself from her family in Arkansas, she can’t seem to shake the beliefs her parents have and the effect they have on the real world. She lost a partnership with Fonuts after there was a huge pushback when they announced she would have her own flavored donut.
Building a brand
Out of all of the Duggar siblings, Jinger Duggar has worked the hardest on this aspect. She wrote books with her sisters, played music with her siblings, and more.
Taking her follower numbers and turning that into an income stream is exactly what Jinger did. She and Jeremy Vuolo released a book earlier this year, hosted a podcast, and even have a home goods line. The Hope We Hold is what they chose to use, and now, that has become what they are attached to.
There has been somewhat of a rebrand happening and a pause in the podcasting, but it looks like things are getting back on track for the couple.
Careers
Obviously, some of the Duggar family members hold traditional jobs. Real estate flipping, being a realtor, and owning your own business are just some of the jobs the Duggars hold.
Several of the Duggar brothers worked at the car lot at one point or another. Working for Jim Bob is highly attractive for the boys, so they typically stick with him.
John-David Duggar is all in with MEDIC Corps. They do emergency responses to natural disasters, and he is also a pilot. He isn’t the only one either. Jeremiah Duggar also has his pilot license and has helped with gender reveals for the family.
Austin Forsyth owns his own construction business and has no affiliation with the Duggars at all. He works for himself and supports his family.
Abbie Grace Burnett worked as a nurse before getting married. She has not practiced since moving to Arkansas, but that doesn’t mean she won’t go back to it.
Jeremy Vuolo is a pastor in California. While he is still working on it, there is a connection to this church. Jinger was recently baptized there, signaling it is an important part of their journey.
Even though Counting On is gone, there are still plenty of ways to keep the income flowing into their lives. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have set themselves up pretty well, and it seems that Jinger Duggar isn’t far behind them in the life she is building for herself.
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