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Tag: Influencer

Riding Along The Wave

Forbes is double-dipping in ad-revenue by publishing about Kylie Jenner. First they made the entire world read the headlines that Kylie is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

Months later they published that Kylie and her family lied about her billionaire status and that she is not yet a billionaire. Instead, she’s worth only 900 million.

I don’t know about you, but I see no difference in being a billionaire or being worth 900 million. If she’s worth 900 million, she will be a billionaire in 1 or 2 years.

Instead I thought of something else when I read the news. I thought that an instagram influencer is (nearly) worth a billion dollars. She’s built this empire using Instagram, a Shopify store, and by private labeling products.

I also thought that Facebook only paid a billion dollars for Instagram while today an Instagram influencer is worth a billion dollars.

I also thought about TikTok posting 17 billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and over 3 billion dollars in profits. And the fact that they have over 1.5 billion monthly active users, more than Instagram as well as Snapchat.

I thought about gaming influencers/streamers who are making tens of millions of dollars per month using Twitch, YouTube, etc.

I thought about influencer marketing. I thought about riding along the wave of a powerful platform such as TikTok.

And I thought how being early in riding that wave can make you a millionaire or even a billionaire.

I have known, met or spoken to 100s of influencers till date who were early in riding the wave on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok etc. I know a large majority of them are worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you saw a platform taking off, figured it early, and cringed instead of taking advantage, it was your loss and it will continue to be.

What Is Ad Blindness & How To Deal With It

As the consumers continue to get forced to see ads on all platforms, they subconsciously or consciously stop seeing them. They learn to spot where the ads are and what the ads are and show no interest in interacting with them.

As early as in my childhood, we would often switch channels as soon as the ads came. In hindsight we couldn’t have seen anything more meaningful in those 5 minutes on a different channel, we just liked avoiding ads.

On Youtube, we’re all hoping to click the skip ad before the button is even there. I have actually spent sometime looking into a way to block YouTube ads or a script that could skip ad before the skip button.

On Facebook, where we spend most of our ad money, the ads that look like ads have constantly been under a decline. Instead the ads that look like native content do not just perform better, but are also rewarded by Facebook by lower advertising costs.

If you advertise on Facebook/Instagram and unable to get results, it’s likely the creatives. The single biggest driver of your results are your creatives and your audiences are showing blindness to the ad-content just as the humans have continued to do ever since the advent of advertising.

If you have not already moved to UGC (user generated content), you immediately should. The reason why the whole world goes bananas about the influencers is because the ads fit in natively. The best part about UGCs is that not only you’re going to make more money with your ads, the creative costs will also go down significantly as you can now shoot your ads with iPhone and a couple of creators.