From Wired authored by Emma Grey Ellis:

“BEING A “SOCIAL media influencer” has nothing to do with the size of your audience or the nature of your work. An influencer used to be someone with a giant, million-plus following to sell things to, but marketers have since expanded the term, piling on prefixes like macro-, micro-, and even nano-influencers, who can have audiences of just 1,000. Influencers aren’t confined to a genre anymore, either. There are still the standard-issue Instagram beauty and lifestyle influencers, but also restaurant influencers, real estate influencers, pet influencers. Really, the only way to guarantee that people will think of your online celebrity as “influence” is to be a woman.

Many men of the internet will fracture their own vertebrae to avoid being called influencers, even when their work—building a brand, getting #sponsored, promoting products and themselves—fits the definition. They prefer terms like “digital content creator” or “content producer” or industry-specific terms like “gamer,” usually because they think of themselves as artists or members of the entertainment industry, and sometimes, as several content creators and their agents have told me, because they just really hate the word influencer. Plenty of women do too, but the way people talk about these creators points to the prevailing assumptions: James Charles is a “male beauty influencer,” while any woman who streams herself playing videogames on Twitch is a “female gamer.” Those phrases may not catch everyone’s eye, but words matter, especially on the internet, and how someone is identified can have a huge impact.”

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