In social media, what is considered famous?

The Gabby Petito story has me wondering what exactly makes a person famous or meriting that label for new stories?

My daughter has 150,000 Tik Tok followers. She walks freely everywhere and is never recognized. I would not expect her to. A family friend has over 50,000 Insta followers and she makes over $100,000 from her craft and DIY stuff, but I would barely consider her famous because she has been featured in Town and Country.

I read a national story a few months back about a “famous” Tik Tok person passing away. They had 50,000 followers. Petito’s YouTube has 12,000 followers. That’s not a lot.

So what is famous?

 

Go ask some kids and then get off their lawns.

 

Or ask media outlets not to bait click someone’s life.

It’s like calling Cecil Exum a Tarheel great.

 

It's a fame that older Americans will never recognize. But if you get a lot of followers on social media, whether Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, the money rolls in and a certain segment knows you but you can live your life out loud because most people don't recognize you.

 

I think in this case "famous" is mostly a writing crutch. In the Gabby Petito situation it means "there were some people who knew who she was."

I used to work with an anchor who added "popular" as a descriptor for virtually everything. It almost never made sense.

There are certainly social media figures who are famous that people above a certain age are completely unfamiliar with. Ever heard of Markiplier? My wife took our youngest to VidCon and when Markiplier walked through a hall it was like the Beatles in 1964. His net worth is supposedly around $35 million (and while I'm always skeptical of numbers like that, he just bought Donald Glover's house). But he has 29 million YouTube subscribers, not 12,000.

 

Petito was working on gaining the numbers to become an influencer or Youtube star, but was still far from achieving critical mass.

 

It’s odd because in the past a small following meant a regional celebrity. But that’s not the case with Insta or Tik Tok. It’s more specific.

 

I have 88 followers on Instagram. How can I get some of that money?

 

What’s Olive doing these days?

 

I think the answer is it’s all relative. In the world of young people driving around in vans, she/they likely had a big following. It’s akin to the 10th best quarterback in the NFL being more famous than the best center or when a cable show is hailed as being huge but has less viewers than a second-tier CBS show.

Gauging social media influence is fickle. My local paper did a story on the biggest local social media influencers a few months back. They went totally by followers. They ended up with five local people who had big social media accounts, but no one knew who they were locally. The reason? These people do things (parkour, workouts, mommy stuff) that are mass appeal and get clicks from all over, but locally quasi irrelevant.

It comes back to me to the days when sportswriters would refer to any former player as a “former star.” And that gets to this story. As the media is trying to explain who she was, her social media status was her calling card. She doesn’t seem to have went to college or have a career of any kind save being on social media. It reminds of when two of my former high school classmates died (separately) a few years after graduation. They were both labeled as former Podunk High football stars. They weren’t, but they were 19/20 years old and that was the closest thing they had to a story and our head coach was willing to talk about them in the newspaper.

 

I'm acquainted with a bona fide social influencer. She has 24 million followers on Instagram. She's fabulously wealthy and works hard producing content for her advertisers. It's really not relative. There are levels out there where these people are absolutely huge, with massive numbers of followers. With 100,000 or so, you're just dipping your toe in and may be making some cash, but not real bank.

 

I truly don't get how these people are making the money they do being social media influencers, not from a curmudgeon point of view but maybe from the point of view of someone who has never been particularly susceptible to opinion leaders. I do get that it's just like any other advertising.
Unless you are a young, fit person who posts pictures of themselves mostly naked doing fun things, how do you get to the level that some people do?
Case in point: I bought something this week after seeing it online. I bought it because I'd been looking at making the purchase anyway and was made aware of a huge sale, not because Katie Jo Perkytits told me I had to have one.