When actual VR took root in our minds as an all-encompassing simulacrum is a little fuzzier. As with most technological breakthroughs, the vision likely began with science fiction—specifically Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 short story “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” in which a scientist devises a pair of glasses that can “make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”
Moving beyond stereoscopes and toward those magical glasses took a little more time, however. In the late 1960s, a University of Utah computer science professor named Ivan Sutherland—who had invented Sketchpad, the predecessor of the first graphic computer interface, as an MIT student—created a contraption called the Sword of Damocles.
The name was fitting: The Sword of Damocles was so large it had to be suspended from the ceiling. Nonetheless, it was the first “head-mounted display”; users who had its twin screens attached to their head could look around the room and see a virtual 3D cube hovering in midair. (Because you could also see your real-world surroundings, this was more like AR than VR, but it remains the inspiration for both technologies.)
Sutherland and his colleague David Evans eventually joined the private sector, adapting their work to flight simulator products. The Air Force and NASA were both actively researching head-mounted displays as well, leading to massive helmets that could envelop pilots and astronauts in the illusion of 360-degree space. Inside the helmets, pilots could see a digital simulation of the world outside their plane, with their instruments superimposed in 3D over the display; when they moved their heads the display would shift, reflecting whatever part of the world they were “looking” at.
None of this technology had a true name, though—at least not until the 1980s, when a twenty-something college dropout named Jaron Lanier dubbed it “virtual reality.” (The phrase was first used by French playwright Antonio Artaud in a 1933 essay.) The company Lanier cofounded, VPL Research, created the first official products that could deliver VR: the EyePhone (yup), the DataGlove, and the DataSuit. They delivered a compelling, if graphically primitive, experience, but they were slow, uncomfortable, and—at more than $350,000 for a full setup for two people, including the computer to run it all—prohibitively expensive.
Yet, led by VPL’s promise and fueled by sci-fi writers, VR captured the popular imagination in the first half of the 1990s. If you didn’t read Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, you may have seen the movie Lawnmower Man that same year—a divine piece of schlock that featured VPL’s gear (and was so far removed from the Stephen King short story it purported to adapt that King sued to have his name removed from the poster). It wasn’t just colonizing genre movies or speculative fiction: VR figured prominently in syndicated live-action kiddie fare like VR Troopers, and even popped up in episodes of Murder She Wrote and Mad About You.
In the real world, virtual reality was promised to gamers everywhere. In arcades and malls, Virtuality pods let people play short VR games (remember Dactyl Nightmare?); in living rooms, Nintendo called its 3D videogame system “Virtual Boy,” conveniently ignoring the fact that the headsets delivered headaches rather than actual VR. (The Virtual Boy was discontinued six months after release.) VR proved unable to deliver on its promise, and its cultural presence eventually dried up. Research continued in academia and private-sector labs, but VR simply ceased to exist as a viable consumer technology.
Then the smartphone came along.
Level Up with the Games Newsletter
Sign up for the latest gaming tips, reviews, and features, in your inbox every week.
Phones featured compact high-resolution displays; they contained tiny gyroscopes and accelerometers; they boasted mobile processors that could handle 3D graphics. And all of a sudden, the hardware limitations that stood in the way of VR weren’t a problem anymore.
In 2012, id Software cofounder and virtual-reality aficionado, John Carmack, came to the E3 videogame trade show with a special surprise: He had borrowed a prototype of a headset created by a 19-year-old VR enthusiast named Palmer Luckey and hacked it to run a VR version of the game Doom. Its face was covered with duct tape, and a strap ripped from a pair of Oakley ski goggles was all that held it to your head, but it worked. When people put on the headset, they found themselves surrounded by the 3D graphics they’d normally see on a TV or monitor. They weren’t just playing Doom—they were inside it.
Things happened fast after that. Luckey’s company, Oculus, raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter to produce the headset, which he called the Oculus Rift. In 2014, Facebook purchased Oculus for nearly $3 billion. (“Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the time.)
In 2016, the first wave of dedicated consumer VR headsets arrived, though all three were effectively peripherals rather than full systems: The Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive each connected to high-powered PCs, and the PlayStation VR system ran off a PlayStation 4 game console. In 2018, the first “stand-alone” headsets hit the market. They don’t connect to a computer or depend on your smartphone to supply the display and processing; they’re self-contained, all-in-one devices that make VR truly easy to use for the first time ever.
In 2020 the world of VR is going to be defined by these stand-alone headsets. The tethered-to-a-desktop headsets are still a high-end option for die-hards looking for the highest fidelity experiences possible, but an untethered stand-alone headset delivers on the promise of deeply immersive VR in the way previous tethered versions just haven’t—at least not without spending serious cash on hardware and accessories. The first next-gen stand-alone headsets are starting to hit store shelves already. Oculus released its version, the Oculus Quest, back in May 2019, and HTC is poised to release a modular competitor, the Vive Cosmos Play, later this year.
The Future of VR
What all this is for is a question that doesn’t have a single answer. The easiest but least satisfying response is that it’s for everything. Beyond games and other interactive entertainment, VR shows promising applications for pain relief and PTSD, for education and design, for both telecommuting and office work. Thanks to “embodied presence”—you occupy an avatar in virtual space—social VR is not just more immersive than any digitally mediated communication we’ve ever experienced, but more affecting as well. The experiences we have virtually, from our reactions to our surroundings to the quality of our interactions, are stored and retrieved in our brains like any other experiential memory.
All hail the headset. Or, alternatively, all ignore the headset, because it’s gonna be a dismal failure anyway.
That’s pretty much the conversation around virtual reality (VR), a technology by which computer-aided stimuli create the immersive illusion of being somewhere else—and a topic on which middle ground is about as scarce as affordable housing in Silicon Valley.
VR is either going to upend our lives in a way nothing has since the smartphone, or it’s the technological equivalent of trying to make “fetch” happen. The poles of that debate were established in 2012, when VR first reemerged from obscurity at a videogame trade show; they’ve persisted through Facebook’s $3 billion acquisition of headset maker Oculus in 2014, through years of refinement and improvement, and well into the first and a half generation of consumer hardware.
The truth is likely somewhere in between. But either way, virtual reality represents an extraordinary shift in the way humans experience the digital realm. Computing has always been a mediated experience: People pass information back and forth through screens and keyboards. VR promises to do away with that pesky middle layer altogether. As does VR’s cousin augmented reality (AR), which is sometimes called mixed reality (MR)—not to mention that VR, AR, and MR can all be lumped into the umbrella term XR, for “extended reality.”
VR depends on headsets, while AR is (for now, at least) more commonly experienced through your phone. Got all that? Don’t worry, we’re generally just going to stick with VR for the purposes of this guide. By enveloping you in an artificial world, or bringing virtual objects into your real-world environment, “spatial computing” allows you to interact more intuitively with those objects and information.
Now VR is finally beginning to come of age, having survived the troublesome stages of the famous “hype cycle”—the Peak of Inflated Expectation, even the so-called Trough of Disillusionment. But it’s doing so at a time when people are warier about technology than they’ve ever been. Privacy breaches, internet addiction, toxic online behavior: These ills are all at the forefront of the cultural conversation, and they all have the potential to be amplified many times over by VR and AR. As with the technology itself, “potential” is only one road of many. But, since VR and AR are poised to make significant leaps in the next two years (for real this time!), there’s no better time to engage with their promise and their pitfalls.
The History of VR
The current life cycle of virtual reality may have begun when the earliest prototypes of the Oculus Rift showed up at the E3 videogame trade show in 2012, but it’s been licking at the edges of our collective consciousness for more than a century. The idea of immersing ourselves in 3D environments dates all the way back to the stereoscopes that captivated people’s imaginations in the 19th century. If you present an almost identical image to each eye, your brain will combine them and find depth in their discrepancies; it’s the same mechanism View-Masters used to become a childhood staple.
When actual VR took root in our minds as an all-encompassing simulacrum is a little fuzzier. As with most technological breakthroughs, the vision likely began with science fiction—specifically Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 short story “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” in which a scientist devises a pair of glasses that can “make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”
Moving beyond stereoscopes and toward those magical glasses took a little more time, however. In the late 1960s, a University of Utah computer science professor named Ivan Sutherland—who had invented Sketchpad, the predecessor of the first graphic computer interface, as an MIT student—created a contraption called the Sword of Damocles.
The name was fitting: The Sword of Damocles was so large it had to be suspended from the ceiling. Nonetheless, it was the first “head-mounted display”; users who had its twin screens attached to their head could look around the room and see a virtual 3D cube hovering in midair. (Because you could also see your real-world surroundings, this was more like AR than VR, but it remains the inspiration for both technologies.)
Sutherland and his colleague David Evans eventually joined the private sector, adapting their work to flight simulator products. The Air Force and NASA were both actively researching head-mounted displays as well, leading to massive helmets that could envelop pilots and astronauts in the illusion of 360-degree space. Inside the helmets, pilots could see a digital simulation of the world outside their plane, with their instruments superimposed in 3D over the display; when they moved their heads the display would shift, reflecting whatever part of the world they were “looking” at.
None of this technology had a true name, though—at least not until the 1980s, when a twenty-something college dropout named Jaron Lanier dubbed it “virtual reality.” (The phrase was first used by French playwright Antonio Artaud in a 1933 essay.) The company Lanier cofounded, VPL Research, created the first official products that could deliver VR: the EyePhone (yup), the DataGlove, and the DataSuit. They delivered a compelling, if graphically primitive, experience, but they were slow, uncomfortable, and—at more than $350,000 for a full setup for two people, including the computer to run it all—prohibitively expensive.
Yet, led by VPL’s promise and fueled by sci-fi writers, VR captured the popular imagination in the first half of the 1990s. If you didn’t read Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, you may have seen the movie Lawnmower Man that same year—a divine piece of schlock that featured VPL’s gear (and was so far removed from the Stephen King short story it purported to adapt that King sued to have his name removed from the poster). It wasn’t just colonizing genre movies or speculative fiction: VR figured prominently in syndicated live-action kiddie fare like VR Troopers, and even popped up in episodes of Murder She Wrote and Mad About You.
In an age of nonstop breaches and hacks, getting a handle on your own digital security matters more than ever. But everyone has their own threat model—a set of concerns unique to themselves. The average smartphone user doesn’t need to know what a Faraday cage is; an NSA contractor probably already has a good grasp of security basics. (Or … do they?) In this guide, we’ve included a few ways to improve your online security posture based on those different levels of risk. These won’t prevent the next megabreach or banish ransomware from the earth. They’re not all-encompassing. But they’ll help get you in the mindset of the types of steps you should be taking based on your particular situation. And they’ll help ensure that the next time you read one of those paralyzing headlines, it doesn’t apply to you.
How To Find Trending Phrases On Merch by Amazon – New Merch Informer Module
December 20, 2019
One of the hardest things to do when you are working on your Merch by Amazon business is find keywords and phrases that are getting in front of the right audience.
Getting in front of the customers that are spending money already is difficult, but finding phrases where you are NOT competing against 10,000 other sellers is even more difficult.
But….
What if it did not have to be?
What if there was a way to find phrases that are just starting to take off and make sales, that you knew of before anyone else? It would be a lot easier to make designs that start making sales quickly right?
Exactly! This is why we released a new module inside of Merch Informer to do EXACTLY this!
The new trending phrases module will show you exactly what keywords or phrases are just starting to trend, so you can do a deep dive into the niche and come up with your own unique sellers to easily get them in front of actual BUYERS on Amazon.
Let’s jump into it!
Finding Trending Phrases on Amazon Merch
The first thing you will need for this method is a Merch Informer account. If you do not have one, go over to our pricing page and pick up a free 3 day trial: https://merchinformer.com/pricing/.
Once you are signed up, go ahead and sign in where you will be presented with the tutorials page.
Now, to get to the new module, you want to go down to the to the keyword cloud in the left hand menu:
The Trending Phrases module is a sub module of the Keyword cloud.
The way the keyword cloud works is that it pulls back the top ONE, TWO, and THREE word keywords/phrases of the BEST selling designs on Merch by Amazon on any given day.
This is super useful to see where the majority of the money is going and to discover new niches if you are brand new.
If you have been selling for a while though, this is not as helpful as it could be.
You see, all of those top shirts are VERY competitive. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of other sellers that are all in those niches with those keywords/phrases and it can be incredibly hard to pull down any sort of rank once you enter it.
The Trending Phrases module fixes this! Go ahead and click on that module and you will be presented with a page that looks like this:
This calendar will allow you to select a date.
We launched this module on December 18th, 2019, so any date previous will not have the information. Going forward though, you will start to be able to find phrases that are JUST starting to take off.
So, lets keep today’s date as an example. Simply select the date on the calendar, and click on the search button:
This shows you one, two, three and four word keywords and phrases that are just starting to trend.
Let’s dive in and find a great niche just from this data on the fly.
Looking through the list, I was checking the four word trending phrases first. This is what popped out to me:
The numbers beside each keyword show the number of designs that have a sales rank that is moving lower (meaning they are making more sales). This looks like it might be an interesting sub niche in the step father niche, so lets explore it further!
First, I copied that keyword and moved it over to the product search. I searched for that phrase and made sure to check the “search in title only” box.
Click on search and wait for it to bring back the results.
Right away, I see that this niche could be profitable to move into. There are VERY few designs up!
and then on the right hand side of the same screen, I already have a list of the most used keywords that I could use for my own unique design if I went into this niche:
Right off the bat, this is looking like a good niche!
From there, scroll down to check out the results that are already in front of the right audience and selling!
You notice that the best selling design for that keyword is a very low BSR and is doing well, but it has 19 reviews.
I am looking to see that at least THREE of the top selling designs are actually selling and in this case it looks like they are.
Further, the two other designs that are selling do not have any reviews yet and the designs are different.
Look through all the results that are displayed and ask yourself one question:
“Can I make a unique design in this niche?”
If the answer is yes, this is the perfect niche to go into!
There are not many results at all, the top results ARE selling and are trending in the right direction for sales (which is why it shows up in the trending phrases module), and there are reviews for at least 1 design which means people are liking the product.
If you can enter the niche with a unique design of your own, you should be able to get in front of the EXACT same audience and start seeing the royalties flow into your account.
Remember you may not make 100 sales a day in this niche, but it would be a good foundation to include an evergreen design (one that sells year round).
International Trending Phrases
The trending phrases module is helpful for the USA, but is ALSO works very very well in the other marketplaces that you can sell on.
To use this, simply pick a date like you would have before, and select either the United States, United Kingdom, or Germany.
As you can see in this screenshot, we have selected Germany.
The United Kingdom and German markets are still very untapped for Merch by Amazon so this could be an easy opportunity to go through and find even more keywords to design specifically for those platforms!
Wrapping It Up
This about finishes up the new trending phrases module that we just released. The way I have been using this the past few weeks while playing with it is an easy way to find hot niches without much competition. You can do that all by following the techniques above and just doing some research on what pops up.
After all, wouldn’t you rather go into niches where you can make sales and not compete with 10,000 other sellers? I would!
Over the last five years, influencer marketing has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, with brands large and small coming to view the practice as a less ham-fisted way to hawk their products. In the early days, brands that sent an influencer free products or offered to pay them a small commission in exchange for their consideration would often receive a shoutout or casual promotion. But as more and more companies came to see the practice as an invaluable marketing tool, the power balance flipped, and influencers began to command significantly higher fees for each post, mention, or product placement.
That didn’t slow down advertisers’ thirst for an effective way to covertly raise the profile of their brand in the eyes of consumers. Average payment rates only continued to soar, especially after influencers started to retain agents and managers. Today, influencers are all over social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Tumblr, and Snapchat, and sponsored content has become so ubiquitous that some platforms, like Instagram, now have built-in tools to help influencers disclose and promote their paid partnerships in Stories or feed posts.
The digital marketplace model pioneered by PayPerPost is booming, with thousands of companies now vying to play matchmaker between brands and content creators to craft the perfect #ad. Grapevine and Famebit are two of the most popular. Famebit, which connects YouTubers and Instagram users with sizable followings to companies interested in sponsored content, took off in 2016 after it was purchased by YouTube. The company has since integrated Famebit into its platform, making it easier for content creators looking to monetize their YouTube accounts to find an ad campaign that aligns with their interests. It seems like only a matter of time before Instagram attempts something similar.
On YouTube and Instagram, product placement deals are now common, as are the use of affiliate marketing links and sponsored coupon codes. Popular YouTuber Sanders Kennedy, who chronicles drama in the influencer world, told WIRED that a brand once offered him a couple thousand dollars to place a beverage on his desk while filming a video. A 2018 WIRED investigation into the influencer marketing industry found that payouts increase if the influencer tags or shouts out the brand specifically, but covert endorsements are often preferred.
Influencers like Luka Sabbat, a model-turned-actor with two million followers on Instagram, can charge upwards of $40,000 to promote products in story and feed posts.The cost of a single promotional photo posted by Instagram influencer with a million followers starts at $10,000. YouTube is more expensive. A video from a YouTuber with 3 million subscribers will cost at least $40,000. Influencers charge up to $10,000 to $30,000 more to post a negative review of a company’s competitor, the investigation found.
Influencer payout rates have risen so quickly that advertisers that used to be some of the industry’s biggest advocates now feel priced out of the market. Marlena Stell, a popular beauty influencer and entrepreneur, relied on influencers to promote her cult cosmetics brand Makeup Geek since its launch in 2011. However, she cut back on the practice in 2018, telling WIRED that content creators had begun to regularly demand $50,000 to $60,000 per video.
These prices are a function of the fact that, online, value is quantifiable. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The worth of an idea, person, movement, or meme is based on how many likes, views, clicks, and shares it has. An idea expressed in a tweet that garners thousands of likes seems inherently more valuable and widely accepted than one with four. An Instagram user with tens of thousands of followers is assumed to have an audience of that many real people, and a YouTube video with millions of views is thought to have captured the attention of millions of actual viewers. But those interactions can easily be bought.
That an influencer’s potential earnings are directly linked to their reach has come as a major boon for fake engagement marketplaces, where key metrics like followers, views, and likes can be purchased anonymously online for cheap. As the influencer marketing industry grows increasingly overheated, with more and more brands getting onboard each quarter, the problems posed by rampant engagement fraud have only worsened. According to cybersecurity firm Cheq, influencer marketing fraud is projected to cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019 alone.
Which, of course, has led to the rise of influencer fraud detectors. Some companies rely on human investigators to suss out fake or inflated accounts, while others use proprietary programs designed to spot signs of fakery, but it’s largely a cat and mouse game. One of the simplest tricks used by industry experts to tell whether an Instagram influencer padded their stats—comparing the amount of likes per post to the influencer’s follower count—won’t be possible if Instagram goes ahead with its plans to do away with public like counts. (Instagram, for its credit, hopes that getting rid of like counts will disincentivize fake engagement peddling more generally, but that seems unlikely.)
That didn’t slow down advertisers’ thirst for an effective way to covertly raise the profile of their brand in the eyes of consumers. Average payment rates only continued to soar, especially after influencers started to retain agents and managers. Today, influencers are all over social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Tumblr, and Snapchat, and sponsored content has become so ubiquitous that some platforms, like Instagram, now have built-in tools to help influencers disclose and promote their paid partnerships in Stories or feed posts.
The digital marketplace model pioneered by PayPerPost is booming, with thousands of companies now vying to play matchmaker between brands and content creators to craft the perfect #ad. Grapevine and Famebit are two of the most popular. Famebit, which connects YouTubers and Instagram users with sizable followings to companies interested in sponsored content, took off in 2016 after it was purchased by YouTube. The company has since integrated Famebit into its platform, making it easier for content creators looking to monetize their YouTube accounts to find an ad campaign that aligns with their interests. It seems like only a matter of time before Instagram attempts something similar.
On YouTube and Instagram, product placement deals are now common, as are the use of affiliate marketing links and sponsored coupon codes. Popular YouTuber Sanders Kennedy, who chronicles drama in the influencer world, told WIRED that a brand once offered him a couple thousand dollars to place a beverage on his desk while filming a video. A 2018 WIRED investigation into the influencer marketing industry found that payouts increase if the influencer tags or shouts out the brand specifically, but covert endorsements are often preferred.
Influencers like Luka Sabbat, a model-turned-actor with two million followers on Instagram, can charge upwards of $40,000 to promote products in story and feed posts.The cost of a single promotional photo posted by Instagram influencer with a million followers starts at $10,000. YouTube is more expensive. A video from a YouTuber with 3 million subscribers will cost at least $40,000. Influencers charge up to $10,000 to $30,000 more to post a negative review of a company’s competitor, the investigation found.
Influencer payout rates have risen so quickly that advertisers that used to be some of the industry’s biggest advocates now feel priced out of the market. Marlena Stell, a popular beauty influencer and entrepreneur, relied on influencers to promote her cult cosmetics brand Makeup Geek since its launch in 2011. However, she cut back on the practice in 2018, telling WIRED that content creators had begun to regularly demand $50,000 to $60,000 per video.
These prices are a function of the fact that, online, value is quantifiable. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The worth of an idea, person, movement, or meme is based on how many likes, views, clicks, and shares it has. An idea expressed in a tweet that garners thousands of likes seems inherently more valuable and widely accepted than one with four. An Instagram user with tens of thousands of followers is assumed to have an audience of that many real people, and a YouTube video with millions of views is thought to have captured the attention of millions of actual viewers. But those interactions can easily be bought.
That an influencer’s potential earnings are directly linked to their reach has come as a major boon for fake engagement marketplaces, where key metrics like followers, views, and likes can be purchased anonymously online for cheap. As the influencer marketing industry grows increasingly overheated, with more and more brands getting onboard each quarter, the problems posed by rampant engagement fraud have only worsened. According to cybersecurity firm Cheq, influencer marketing fraud is projected to cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019 alone.
Which, of course, has led to the rise of influencer fraud detectors. Some companies rely on human investigators to suss out fake or inflated accounts, while others use proprietary programs designed to spot signs of fakery, but it’s largely a cat and mouse game. One of the simplest tricks used by industry experts to tell whether an Instagram influencer padded their stats—comparing the amount of likes per post to the influencer’s follower count—won’t be possible if Instagram goes ahead with its plans to do away with public like counts. (Instagram, for its credit, hopes that getting rid of like counts will disincentivize fake engagement peddling more generally, but that seems unlikely.)
A return to a less quantifiable era of influence may seem like a loss, but if anything it’s the opposite. Trust, ultimately, is unquantifiable. And perhaps in the absence of futile attempts to assess it, gooey amorphous authenticity will reign once more.
Learn More
Inside the Pricey War to Influence Your Instagram Feed When Sahara Lotti started her lash extensions company, Lashify, in 2017, she didn’t know what she was getting herself into. It wasn’t making and selling fake lashes that stumped her—she was more than prepared for that—but rather the bizarre and shadowy industry that seemed to envelop her. In interviews, more than a dozen people involved in influencer marketing expressed concerns over the ethics of the burgeoning industry, where brands routinely shell out well over $60,000 in exchange for one video review—or upwards of $85,000 to publicly disparage a competitor’s product.
When Influencers Switch Platforms—and Bare It All On Instagram, an influencer is helping sell products, essentially to add a degree of cool to, say, sunglasses or dietary supplements. On OnlyFans, influencers are themselves the product. Partnerships and #sponcon can lead to considerable paydays, but there now exists an additional source of revenue with the rise of bare-all subscription fandom. In front of a camera, and sometimes with multiple partners, they are no longer just influencers but digital sex deities.
Fighting Instagram’s $1.3 Billion Problem—Fake Followers As influencers strive for ever-higher engagement numbers, the battle between fake followers and fake-follower-detection tools is turning into an arms race. Not being rubes, influencer economy participants know that signing a contract isn’t enough to certify continuous truthfulness. Online tricks evolve like Pokémon, though, and fake followers are getting much harder to identify.
Colleges Need Influencers, but Do Influencers Need College? Colleges try to leverage the social media savvy of their students with “social media ambassador” programs that help them advertise to prospective new students, raise the schools’ profiles, and educate their current students about school programs. And for some influencers, college can be a windfall, landing them brand deals to market dorm furnishings, Victoria’s Secret underwear, and tooth-straightening solutions to their fellow students. For others, college just gets in the way of their real passion.
Byeeeee, Logan Paul: Brands Prefer ‘Micro Influencers’ Now Endorsements are no longer the sole domain of the broadly popular megawatt star. Instead, companies want to work with the smaller, more niche internet personalities they’re calling “micro influencers”—generally speaking, people with followings of about 50,000. Limiting the scope of a potential scandal is only one of the benefits of working with a micro influencer. Analysts argue that micro influencers’ intimate, engaged communities are more likely to trust and buy what the influencer recommends.
YouTube and Pinterest Influencers Almost Never Disclose Marketing Relationships Research from Princeton University indicates that the vast majority of affiliate marketing relationships go undisclosed by influencers on platforms like YouTube and Pinterest. The vast majority of disclosures that the Princeton researchers did find don’t even abide by FTC guidelines. In 2013, the agency began requiring that affiliate links embedded within product reviews include a disclosure.
Last updated December 3, 2019.
Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides.
A disclosure: WIRED uses affiliate links. There aren’t any in this article, but when you buy something using the retail links in our product reviews, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.
