Why do successful influencers and creators end their careers?
Less screen time, more creative and business opportunities appeal, as burnout is one of the most discussed issues in the creator community
Emma Chamberlain, a prominent YouTube star with millions of followers, is shifting her focus from social media to entrepreneurship, New York Times reports (From Teen Star to Entrepreneur). Chamberlain, 23, is stepping back from YouTube expressing discomfort with the pressures of online fame.
From Teen Star to Entrepreneur, Gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.
In the Finnish creator industry, locally well-known youtuber Juuso ”Herbalisti” Karikuusi, 30, who has been involved with YouTube content for 17 years, announced he was ending his youtuber career and is looking forward to other pursuits.
A recent case from Sweden, influencer and entrepreneur Linn Ahlborg found the balancing of the roles of an influencer and entrepreneur far from simple (thanks
Why do successful influencers and creators end their careers? Recent research into influencer practices explains these decisions.
The majority of content creators’ working lives are fraught with uncertainty, stress and burnout. This was the key argument in Zoë Glatt’s dissertation The Platformised Creative Worker - An ethnographic study of precarity and inequality in the London influencer industry (2017-2022) (The London School of Economics and Political Science ethesis pdf).
Glatt found that creators are motivated to maintain a high content output for fear of algorithmic invisibility and that burnout is one of the most discussed issues in the creator community.
From a business point of view, becoming an entrepreneur and thereby moving up the value chain to make something you can sell, utilizing your own visibility, instead of merely providing media space for other’s brands, is also economically savvy.
[Post. edited Nov. 18.: removed past event link from the Karikuusi passage; added Swedish Ahlborg example]
Further reading about visibility
There is a substantial body of scholarship into visibility and invisibility. To pick three:
In the article "The Promotional regime of visibility: ambivalence and contradiction in strategies of dominance and resistance," visibility is conceptualized as a structured and disciplined process that promotes specific ways of seeing and showing in the digital communication environment. The authors identify three modalities of visibility within the promotional regime, two of which are particularly interesting in explaining influencer career aspirations: namely, visibility as recognition (being seen); and visibility as transient: a scarce resource that is unstable and fleeting, requiring continuous work to maintain.
Jiménez-Martínez, C., & Edwards, L. (2023). The promotional regime of visibility: Ambivalence and contradiction in strategies of dominance and resistance. Communication and the Public, 8(1), 14-28.
The article "The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media") Brooke Erin Duffy and colleagues found that social media creators experience the precariousness of visibility across three levels: market precarity, influenced by audience tastes and advertiser demands; industry precarity, shaped by the competitive platform ecology; and platform precarity, stemming from changes in platform features and algorithms.
Duffy, B. E., Pinch, A., Sannon, S., & Sawey, M. (2021). The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media. Social Media + Society, 7(2).
In the article "Playing the visibility game," Kelley Cotter explored how Instagram influencers consciously interact with algorithms to gain visibility on the platform. Influencers interpret Instagram's algorithmic rules to strategize their pursuit of influence, informed by broader cultural discourses on authenticity and entrepreneurship.
Cotter, K. (2019). Playing the visibility game: How digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on Instagram. New Media & Society, 21(4), 895–913.