Crystal Abidin on Influencers

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin, a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both adult and child and the general pop culture centered on social media, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Abidin offers interviewer David Edmonds a metaphor to understand how her cyber-ethnography and digital anthropology work in practice. “I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We’re not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We’re looking for what’s neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we’re measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study. … [A]s an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don’t always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what’s left behind.”

In this conversation, though, Abidin talks about something very shiny indeed – those professional internet celebrities known collectively as “influencers.” She explains how while the top influencers do generate the paydays seen in popular media, the ecosystem extends down to individuals who are spending their own money in hopes of someday making it big. She also draws a distinction between influencers and creators, and also between influencers and memes.

Abidin also dives into regional differences in influencer culture, using her own detailed analysis of Asia Pacific influencer cultures, to explore regional differences that should be understood when assessing content on global platforms. “[I]f we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who’s not included in them?”

In addition to her role at Curtin, Abidin founded the TikTok Cultures Research Network and is an affiliate researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. She was named an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow for 2019 to 2024. Currently the editor-in-chief of Media International Australia, she has written or edited a number of books that bridge popular concerns with academic rigor, including 2018’s Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online and this year’s Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Lauren Gurrieri and Jenna Drenten),

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: There’s a relatively new type of celebrity, a digital or internet celebrity. A subset of these new celebs are called influencers. They have sizeable followings on social media, on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram and so on. Professor Crystal Abidin grew up in Singapore but now lives in Australia. She directs the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University. Crystal Abidin, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Crystal Abidin: Thank you so much for having me, Dave. Glad to be here.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about influencers.

Abidin: We are, yes.

Edmonds: What is an influencer?

Abidin: So I think for most people, your perception of an influencer is probably a young person who is pretty good looking, swimming in money and then still making money off us online by sharing personal stories. And that is partially true. The more academic, scientific version of this is internet influencers are professional internet celebrities. They are experts who know how to capture and hold our attention primarily by telling stories about their personal lives, and once they capture our attention spans, they use their personal lives as a backdrop to advertise products, services, and these days, even political ideology.

So people come to look to them as role models, as opinion leaders, because we like them for who they are, first, because they’re not mainstream celebrities, and, more importantly, because they feel like you and I — like everyday people that we can relate to.

Edmonds: So how do they make their money? You say they advertise what they’re promoting particular products. What’s their source of revenue?

Abidin: So I started looking at influences in 2008 and traditionally, they made money when advertisers would pay them to endorse products, either through making advertorials, which has a prestige of an advertisement in the guise of an editorial, or through endorsements straight up sponsored ads and Instagram posts, YouTube videos, and the like. But as the industry became so professionalized and so saturated, a lot of these influencers are also making money of licensing deals – so lending their likeness, their namesake, their voiceovers, to a whole range of merchandise lines, sometimes even producing their own products, whether it’s drop shipping, meaning they buy it from third-party sites and slap a label on them, or whether they produce them in house, like a lot of fashion influences do.

But most recently, a lot of social media platforms have introduced something called “creator partnership programs,” which means, as long as your piece of content is eligible for the program and attracts a certain threshold of eyeballs and traffic, the platform pays you for that traffic, because they are ultimately also embedding advertising onto the sidebar, the top bar, the pop up, the pre-video ad onto the content. So, there are multiple streams of revenue that we’re talking about here.

Edmonds: Have you got any idea how much the most successful influencers can earn?

Abidin: For those of us who might just be pedestrians to this line of work, news headlines will tell you something shocking, like the highest-earning YouTuber being a child. He is  Ryan of Ryan Toys Reviews, and he annually brings in revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. And we’re only looking at a child who produces advertorials on YouTube. We’re not even looking at the larger-scale influences, say, the likes of MrBeast, or, for those of us listening, from the UK, the likes of Zoella, her partner, her siblings, an entire empire, where they’ve got multiple streams of branding and revenue streaming in. From my research, the top influencer I know who is in this market has progressed from being a one-man DIY show to running his own influencer firm, grooming and contracting other influences. He was recently listed on NASDAQ, they claim to make about tens to hundreds of millions of dollars across all of their revenue streams every year.

Edmonds: Who’s that?

Abidin: This is Mr. JianHao Tan from the YouTube channel Titan Digital Media. He started as one man based in Singapore, and now the entire company runs a plethora of assets, from online web series to in-person stores to merchandise you can buy online, to even talent incubator firms.

Edmonds: I can see it’s a fascinating topic. What first got you into it?

Abidin: There is a very formal answer, which I will give to you. And then there’s also the real tricky, sneaky answer, which I’m happy to share if we are keen. So, the professional answer is that I was consuming a lot of content as a young person growing up in Singapore from around the world, and due to the legacies of British colonialism, Singapore being a very hot tourist destination, a global hub, it was not uncommon for me growing up to consume Singaporean content alongside the likes of content from across Southeast Asia, popularly also from Japan, but also from the UK and the US. And as I started to consume these contents, when social media platforms were on the rise, I wanted to look for something local. I wanted to know what could represent the folks here, folks on the margins, folks in the minority. I discovered that a lot of them were young women, and I thought they were doing really great work, writing about their lives and also talking about very difficult issues, like breakups, pimples, homework, but also depression, suicidality, queerness and coming out. And yet, because they were young women, people often diminished what they did and dismissed them as being just frivolous. So that got me a bit angry, and I wanted to take this very seriously as a science.

Edmonds: Tell me about your research methodology. I’ve seen that you call yourself a digital anthropologist. Now, the old  picture of an anthropologist is somebody who, I don’t know, takes a canoe down the Amazon and immerses themselves in an alien culture by living in it. What does a digital anthropologist do?

Abidin: I am an anthropologist by training, to be a bit more precise, my background training was corroboratively in anthropology, sociology, media studies and communication, and over the course of my research, I’ve also developed expertise in Asian studies and cultural studies. But by and far, I still primarily see myself as an anthropologist because of my methods and the way I see the world. Now, for those folks of the old, the Margaret Mead, so to speak, it may have been a canoe. For me, given that I practice both traditional ethnography as well as digital ethnography, sometimes my canoe is a comfortable plane ride to a different city where I spend months at a time immersed in the culture I study.

To give you an example, in one of my earlier stints of research, I worked for several months as personal assistant to many of these influences, and I was very, very lucky, given that I started quite early when the field was still growing, to have access up close and personal. But there is also a very significant portion of my work that is digital, and these days that canoe is downloading the app, systematically going through it following a very thick and rich schema for how I will surface, locate, identify data that is worthy of study, and then go through proper ethical processes to make sure that I either do so with consent, or I’m able to mitigate the risks if I’m studying publicly available data. So I often joke to people, “Yep, we think anthropologists go to faraway lands and sleep in uncomfortable places and study people of the old.” I still do some of that in my practice, which I really enjoy and love with all my heart, but especially with the pandemic, causing us to be a bit more creative with work. I’ve been pivoting to the digital sphere a bit more and trying to bring a lot of these methods more rigorously into the online space.

Edmonds: You mentioned identifying significant data. What would that be? I can see that an obvious, important statistic would be how many downloads somebody gets, how many eyeballs they are looking at a particular influencer. What else would be relevant for you?

Abidin: So those two criteria might not even be relevant for me. I like to tell people of the metaphor of a Mars rover. I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We’re not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We’re looking for what’s neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we’re measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study.

I feel that it’s easy for people across many other disciplines to look at something that’s already viral, prominent, attracting eyeballs, which is what we alluded to earlier. Dave — volume, traffic going viral. And yes, some of that is worthy of study. But as an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don’t always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what’s left behind. And given my personal ethos as a person of color, who grew up in the Asia Pacific, who speaks multiple languages, etc. I’m always looking for what else I can study, because I have been trained by my habitus, or by my demographic, to see these things that may be missed by other people.

Edmonds: Give me an example.

Abidin: To give you an example, most of us would be familiar with the Queen of Pop, Beyoncé. And every time Beyoncé produces a video, it’s always known to have a lot of feminist emblems, symbolism, embedded into her videos. Now it’s a very big trend on YouTube for YouTubers and creators to parody Beyoncé videos. Without the localized context. I could look at any one of these videos from Southeast Asia and go, “Oh, right. They’re just really big fans of her, and they do this very well. They’re switching up some words to their local language. They’re replacing some items in the set their fashion choices with local items.” And that’s that I could just think of it as just a variety of localized parody. But if I’m equipped with the correct lens, if I can read queerness into the scenario. If I know from being an ethnic minority person the significance of this dress, this brooch, this term, then I’m able to tease out exactly how for Beyoncé this might have been a feminist anthem, but for these other parody folks in specific Southeast Asian locations, these might be parodies that actually tell us about political resistance, about reclaiming queer identities, about making space for trans bodies in societies that do not yet accommodate them.

And this is the kind of nuance that gets lost if you don’t have that ethnographic situation. that really close attention to culture, which is why a lot of anthropologists spend prolonged times in the field to familiarize ourselves with this. The most important thing to take away for anthropologists is that context is very important. It’s hard to just study, say, a hashtag in isolation, or a video in isolation. We always need to know where is it from, which time period, from which culture? Why is it significant? So on and so forth.

Edmonds: Tell me about the nature of their celebrity. You mentioned Beyoncé. They’re not as famous as Beyoncé. Do they have a different kind of relationship with the people who absorb their content?

Abidin: I don’t know if they’re not as famous as Beyoncé, Dave. These days, many of these internet celebrities are wildly popular. You know, we go by traditional metrics, seeing how many people watch a Beyoncé video versus a YouTuber’s video, sometimes they manage to rival each other if we look at the amount of mentions, say, headlines in mainstream broadsheets. Oftentimes, these influences also captivate our attention in a whole range of provocative ways that constantly puts them in the limelight. So it’s hard to say that, you know, their fan base or their popularity is not the same. It’s basically two different genres.

Now, for many of these influencers that we read about, we probably only hear about the top 1 percent, those who are successful in the mainstream, and they monetize very well. But there’s also a very long tail of people who are in the middle range. They probably have to support their influencer careers with the side gig. Most of the time it’s related, maybe in modeling, merchandising and PR. Other times it’s completely unrelated, working in a cafe, doing, acting, teaching, and still the even longer-tailed, right at the end, of people who are still in the aspirational stage of life, they might not be making money. They might even be spending money out of pocket to try and break into the industry and are not even breaking even yet, let alone making a profit. So every time someone says an influencer, we tend to only think about the most prominent examples. But taken as a whole industry, there are varieties of success, levels, starting points, end points, and the like.

Edmonds: Beyoncé’s fame is founded on her songwriting ability and her voice. What are the key talents that a successful, famous influencer will have?

Abidin: To answer this more scientifically, we need to take a step back. Remember how earlier on I said influencers are a genre of internet celebrities. Now, internet celebrities are simply these figures who manage to capture our attention online. But anyone who spends time on the internet knows we don’t only give our attention to things we like. We also sometimes can’t help but look at things that are a wreck, things we cannot look away from or even things we hate. You know, we hate watch, we troll them. We just want to see them fail. So, internet celebrity has a whole variety of moralities. It doesn’t mean that you’re just really amazing, beautiful, wonderful celebrities. But influencers are a subset of these internet celebrities who want to pursue our attention, mostly for positive reasons, mostly because they want to monetize the agenda, mostly for long-term, sustained gain.

As opposed to say, memes. They appear on the internet every now and then we recognize them. We don’t know much about them, as opposed to say viral stars. They might be really wildly popular for a day or a week, and then they fade out of our imagination. So influencers are vocational internet celebrities who are in it for the much longer haul, and in order to attract our attention, they usually narrate their lives well, have really, really good parasocial strategies that make us feel like they’re just like the girl next door or our best friend, or they might have a talent or a skill, good acting, great singing, makes us want to tune in and support them. These days, though, given that the industry is so saturated, there are also other more unorthodox skills, the ability to command attention through scandals, staging controversy and still having the thick skin to bounce back each time, being able to bait your followers into following you across contents, posts, multiple platforms, and still retaining their interests despite all of that.

And of course, there is, like really old school values of celebrity, like being sincere, being authentic, being nice, being responsive.

So the strategies for how to be successful in the industry are ever changing because the market is so saturated.

Edmonds: Often celebrities are keen to keep their private lives private, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that most influencers are using their private lives. You talked about narrating their lives, they’re talking about their lives what’s happening to them on a day-to-day basis.

Abidin: Yeah. So there are two things to think about here. The first, if we talk about influencers, those who strictly build their following and fan base based on narrating their lives, we need to think about life cycles. In the early stage, when you’re just studying up, you do need to divulge a little more than usual, maybe sometimes even be provocative, talk about a divorce, a separation, sexuality, in order to attract an audience. And right around mid-stage, when you’ve already established a good and strong audience, that’s probably where you can start to taper down a little bit more, be selective about what you want to share. Now those who are at the later stage of their careers, the elite, it is actually more beneficial for them to withhold this information because fans — very enthusiastic, excited fans — will do the sleuthing and the jigsaw puzzling and the detective work on your behalf. So all you need to do is either post a cryptic picture or a cryptic Instagram caption, and your fans who have followed you for a long time can decipher from there what you’re revealing about your marital status, engagement, a forthcoming baby, a breakup and the like. It really depends on where you are in the scale.

Now the second thing to consider is whether you’re an influencer or a creator. I reckon most of us who are listening to this for the first time finding out about influencers are also aware of a lot of folks on the likes of YouTube and TikTok who are not so much, known for their personal lives, but known for the content they put out. And these are creators. We know them primarily for the content they generate, whether it’s flying videos, skits, talking, hit news, commentary, singing, dancing, talents. And because these platforms reward and monetize the creators by traffic, these creators don’t have to rely on the personal stories and their personal branding to attract endorsements. So for that folk, for the creators, they don’t nearly as much need to divulge so much about their private lives. It’s not as relevant as it is for the influencer cohort.

Edmonds: You’re from Singapore. Are there influencers in particular Asian markets who are very strong, but in local areas, in Korea, in Taiwan or Singapore? Are there influencers who make it, but just in a kind of micro market or in a national market?

Abidin: Yes, I was born in Singapore. I spent a lovely 20 years there. Growing up, I immigrated to Australia, but my research has brought me on several stints to live in the Nordic countries for a while, and I travel frequently across the Asia Pacific to study many markets. I would say that there are a lot of these influencers who are popular at the local scale, within small communities, within their countries, and possibly regionally. If you’re looking specifically at the Asia Pacific region, this is completely understandable because of the diversity of languages. Say, for instance, a lot of the big Thai influencers are humongous and ginormous in their fields, but they only operate in Thai, which might be enough, given that the market size is quite big.

But if I were to say, take the example of the Nordic countries, because of the cultural homophily across the markets, many of these creators might produce content in both their local language, but also English, the unifying language of the region, and so they can appeal at once to the local country market as well as the region. And we do certainly see a lot of this happening across Asia. Think about the homophily across East Asia, where Japanese, Korean and Chinese influencers mutually attract the same types of audiences, either by fashion choices, esthetics or politics, about gender. Think about the more Islamic countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, who also mutually have shared values. So their influencers, despite not speaking the exact same type of Malay language, can appeal to various markets. And I think that’s the brilliance of thinking about influencer markets as a region, rather than its individual countries.

Edmonds: Tell me about an interesting influencer that you’ve studied or are currently following.

Abidin: I have a book coming out later this year called Child Influencers, how children become entangled with social media fame. And my most favorite case study is a YouTube channel from Thailand, comprising four young girls. They’re called the Silk Route. The four girls of the Silk Route are basically cover artists; whenever a big K-pop video does well, usually from a girl group, one of the brothers of the sister acts as choreographer, camera person, editor, producer, manager, all rolled into one, and he produces these really wonderful cover videos of these K-pop originals, down to the exact detail, but with a local twist. So in a scene where, say, four K-pop girls from the band BLACKPINK may be standing on a structure that resembles the colosseum. For the four Thai girls, they’re standing in the backdrop of a village with a wooden hut in the back. Where a BLACKPINK member might be wearing a tiara that’s glittering and shining, one of the Silk Route girls might be wearing a literal head lamp turned on, just to emphasize how shiny and bright all of that is. There are so many of these references that you’ll understand to be localized, also adjusted for the setting of a Thai village, also adjusted to be accessible items given the class and the demographic of the four girls. I find it equal parts entertaining, wonderful, but given a bit more understanding about the Thai context, you can see these subtle elements, either comparing the levels of consumerism, or being very creative about the emblems and the symbolism embedded in the original versus the local version.

Edmonds: That sounds both intriguing and entertaining, but it also sounds like it’s a novelty. And of course, novelties, in due time, wear off.

Adibin: These girls have been around for a good six years now. You are absolutely right. Novelty will always run out. Things will reinvent and change. But there will always be a core group who has been here for these varieties of content, who will stay if you do your craft well and you stay true to yourself, rather than, quote, unquote, sell out and try out other genres, there will be that core group. But more importantly, for influencers, if we go back to the idea of personal branding and relating to their fans, these girls do a lot of work behind the scenes. They respond to fan comments. They react to their videos alongside the BLACKPINK original, you literally get to see them grow up and be excited about developing confidence on screen. People comment about how in their very first video, they still looked a bit shy and meek, given that they were primary schoolers, and now as early high schoolers, they look so confident and really coming into themselves. So there is an investment in this longitudinal narrative of their growth, as well, which makes people come in for the long haul alongside the pedestrians who might dip in and out.

I guess what I’m trying to say is the most important thing for influencers is to recognize that they have a community — your community as a baseline place, a baseline expectation for how you should respond to them. And this is very much unlike creators or viral stars, who are mostly needing to pander to what the flavor of the day or flavor of the hour is. So their strategies are quite different then.

Edmonds: Everything evolves very rapidly in the digital world. Is it possible to identify where the world of influencers is heading, what the trends are?

Adibin: The real answer is no, but that would make for a very boring response. Dave. The more nuanced answer is yes, but there is not one single answer. Because the market is so diverse, we could be projecting different, say cultural trends or economic curves, based on genre, based on platform, based on country market. And I find it really difficult to just talk about where the overall direction of the industry is going.

I think this has become very, very relevant in the forefront of many people’s minds in the last two years, when there’s been a lot of argument, debate and struggle over the ownership of TikTok. TikTok is a really wonderful and really rich platform that has a lot of young people and these days middle-aged people on the app, but because of the struggles over its ownership and its ban, we begin to realize that there are some implicit Chinese values or Chinese policies built into the platform. We also see that while an entire segment, the US TikTokers, were banned from the platform for a short period of time and in history, entire countries like India or markets like Hong Kong were removed from access to the app. There were many other markets that still continued. In the 15 or 20 hours or so that the Americans were banned from TikTok, there was this wonderful flourishing of cultures known as EuroTok, CommonwealthTok, GlobalTok, some of them even just called themselves WorldTok, InternationalTok, meaning the Americans are not here. We finally get to discover other cultures, other than the US. And it really gave people this really strong sense that there’s so much out there, if we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who’s not included in them?

Edmonds: Final question, you’ve been immersed in the world of influencers for quite a long time now. Are you ever tempted to become an influencer yourself?

Abidin: Everybody asks me this, Dave, I have no idea why. Ever since I’ve had children, people have also been asking me, “Are you going to turn your children into influencers?” My short answer is always no, it’s too much work, and then people laugh. But you know what? I really mean it. It’s true. There’s a lot that goes into this. In several research papers of mine, I talk about the notion of ‘tacit labor.’ You know, it’s when you become so rehearsed and so good at doing something and you’re so natural people forget it actually took years of hard work. You know, you don’t just get good selfie angles overnight, Dave, you don’t just turn on the camera and effortlessly relate and refer to your audience without stuttering. You don’t just know how to put on makeup and a pretty dress in half an hour and go to an event. I can tell you all that for sure, because in shadowing these influencers during my research, believe me, I tried, and despite being a woman myself who’s supposed to have all these knowledges, it’s hard work.

Take on top of that, needing to know how fast the landscape is changing, learning the next platform, knowing what you can say and can’t, knowing how to respond to backlash, and then also the precarity of it all. Will this last? Can I do this into my 40s? My 50s? Will I be overexposed? I just think the mental load of all of this is way too much, and I prefer studying these people than becoming one of them, because, frankly, their jobs are not easy.

Edmonds: Well, you’re obviously very good at what you do, so I’m happy you’re going to stick to your discipline. Crystal Abidin, thank you very much indeed.

Abidin: Thank you so much for having me.