You are probably very aware that blogging isn't what the cool kids are doing these days. And that my particular blog is way past its prime, with a lot less regular updates, and a lot less readers. Even I these days spend more time as a content consumer on Twitch and YouTube than on blogs. But fundamentally blogging a decade ago and creating YouTube content today has a lot of similarities. I could say that at the time I was an "influencer", long before that word was even invented, and probably at a much smaller scale. But when I watch some of the things that go on at these new social media platforms, I am happy that I got out of the "influencer" business.

Admittedly, the increase in scale has had some positive consequences for today's influencers. Especially in monetary terms. Some of the people I follow on these platforms do that as a full-time job. And while I question the wisdom of that to some extent, e.g. due to the fact that Twitch doesn't have a pension plan, I do admit that it must be nice to make a living by talking about the stuff you love.

But the downside of the increased scale is an increased entanglement with the brands you inevitably end up representing or promoting. Me, I never was big enough to cause Blizzard any trouble. I once got "press" access to a Blizzard convention, but in general I wasn't on the radar of Blizzard marketing, and it didn't matter what I wrote about them on my blog. If you are a YouTuber with a million subscribers, marketing departments look at you differently, and not all of that attention is positive. The current controversy on YouTube is about exactly such a case, a YouTuber with a million subscribers, who got dropped from the Nintendo Brand Ambassador program, presumably because Nintendo thought that he wasn't a good fit with their brand. They probably imagine their customers to be younger and more innocent.

When this year I was using YouTube to research Roll20, I came upon a bunch of older videos with a similar problem on a smaller scale. Roll20 had pissed off a lot of YouTubers with successful channels about role-playing, because it had told them that they didn't want the people promoting their brand to be white heterosexual males. One can see the "woke" attitude that would lead to such a decision, but Dungeons & Dragons isn't exactly a hobby for which the audience is a great example of gender equality. Sure, we are way past the "girls don't play D&D" meme. But I am member of a role-playing club, there is no discrimination against female membership, but white heterosexual males clearly make up the large majority of the membership. It wouldn't be unreasonable to accept that demographics of the influencers match the demographics of the audience, instead of trying to enforce some arbitrary diversity criteria. Being discriminated against because of the color of your skin is bad, regardless of what exactly that color is.

Fundamentally the problem is that influencers often just "happen". Somebody decides to talk about a game or game company, his channel takes off, and suddenly he is "internet famous". But of course the game company didn't choose the person. They might offer him freebies or add him to some sort of marketing program, but they don't really control him. So there is a risk that an influencer is seen as representing a brand, and then somehow goes off the rails. Google "pewdiepie on a bridge" for an example, which probably caused the marketing team of PUBG to have a collective heart attack, even if he wasn't particularly attached to just that brand. You end up with brands trying to keep their influencers at arm's length, because they are seen as a risk as much as they are seen as an asset.