The influencer recession

In the late 2010s, influencing looked like a dream job: get rich by having fun with friends and being yourself. More than half of Gen Z told surveyors they wanted to do it for a living. But that dream has soured. As New York Magazine writer Rebecca Jennings puts it, we are now in the midst of an "influencer recession"—a moment when the average middle-class creator is finding it much harder to make a living, even as the total amount of content and attention online keeps growing.

What happened to the middle-class influencer

The problem is straightforward: too much competition. Influencers today are not just competing against each other. They are competing against the world's biggest pop stars, movie studios, and podcasts, all of whom pay armies of people to clip and distribute their content across social media platforms. "There's really no way to break through the noise unless you are doing something really out of the box," Jennings explains, "which a lot of times means rage baiting or making such amazing content that no one can possibly compete with it." AI has made things worse by flooding feeds with "mountains of slop" that creators must push through just to be seen.