Social Media Entropy

The end is near for peaks and excitement in that segment – and influencers

Photo by zhang kaiyv on Unsplash

Social media, some 10–15 years ago

Influencers, social media coaches, and other celebrities entering a new online platform and boom! — soon they earn millions and are known by everybody on the planet.

We saw this when social media was established, and since then with each new platform. A small group of people managed to gain such a momentum on the platforms, that they sort of outran the system, became more famous than anyone could have imagined.

Each platform can tell their story of superstars. Often, the platform wasn’t seen as a place for earning money, until someone grew to that level. Remember “Gangnam Style”, the K-pop hit by Psy, being the first to reach 1 billion views on YouTube back in 2012¹, showing that the platform offered almost unlimited opportunities for a musician to be seen and listened to — and for earning money, as this one hit brought millions of dollars to Psy, just on this platform.

As Cory Doctorow has described it², there is plenty of evidence that the platform actively have promoted selected content creators in order to produce these superstars, and some of the many hits and likes, etc., they have received on their videos, posts, or whatever that platform excel in, have probably been fake — added by the platform itself to make it look like it is indeed possible to grow almost without limits.

Another hint to the old saying that stars are not born, they are made.

Before social media, we saw a similar development in the movie and music industries, and each of them has benefited significantly from having stars that could act as idols for the audience, creating hype around everything released, and themselves being a trusted customer base for each new movie or album release.

Social media, between then and now

Fans are the best customers, willing to buy not only the product itself, suchs as a music medium or attendance to a concert, or a cinema ticket, they also buy merchandise and consumer products of all kinds in connection with exercising their fan activities.

The loyalty and hype is worth quite some money, as seen by Taylor Swift’s lates world-wide tour called “Era”, generating a revenue of more than $2.2 billion in ticket sales alone.³ Swift is definitely to be seen as a superstar, probably the highest ranking at the moment, and this allows for income from not only concert tickets but also from such as record sales and music streaming, earning an estimated $327 million through Spotify alone during 2024.⁴

The movie industry has its stars as well, with Adam Sandler currently being the actor earning the most in 2024: $73 million.⁵

While we have ben used to seeing such superstart in movies and on the music stage, it has been a surprise to many to see them appearing in social media. After all, social media is all about keeping track of your network, telling them about your new job or that you are going to have a baby, isn’t it? A replacement for sending a letter or a Christmas card, as we would have done in the old days, or, indeed, a replacement for meeting them in a cafe or at social events.

It didn’t take long from social media emerged, until some people had accumulated very large networks there, building up what would later become known as a followership. If you have tens of thousands, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who are eager to read what you write or to watch you go on screen at YouTube, this is worth something for a marketer.

Such as affiliate marketing had already been established in the blogosphere and followed the influencers from there to social media, but additional marketing options appeared with each new technology added, such as video blogs (vlogs), real-time chat, podcasts, or webinars.

There are plenty of opportunities for product placement or mentioning, which by itself can have a value, but books, courses, coaching, etc., can then be sold on top of the popularity.

When the social media platforms discovered how much traffic the influencers could generate, they invented ways of paying for this to happen on exactly their platform. Traffic is valuable for a social medium for a number of reasons, but mainly because it attracts more users (who can be monetised in several ways), it drags attention away from competitors, and it can be sold, in a sense, to advertisers.

To genererate a hype around the possibilites to earn a lot on a platform, this will often offer celebrities to get on-board in an incentivised manner, for instance by paying them a fixed amount for simply being there, or paying them more than others for the time they are active, the texts or videos, they provide, etc.

And if Cory Doctorow is right in his claim mentioned above, that these promoted superstars are even given fake likes and views, that will then increase their earnings even more, and it can quickly become a very good business for a celebrity to be on that platform — which attracts more people with similar ambitions, and some of them will also reach good earnings; attracting even more people.

However, three things will then happen:

1. Too many people want to become rich influencers by the help of the platform; more than the platform economy can sustain

2. The knowledge of this being possible will stop being a good story to tell about, as people get used to hearing it, also from other platforms

3. As time passes, it becomes clear for everyone that only a few really can earn a lot on the platform. All others can try hard but never get to a point that even slightly reminds of the superstars’ earnings

And that is where it starts going downhill for the concept.

Social media, now

The platforms themselves want to start earning money. Often, they have been startups running on investor capital while building up its user count and reputation, but sooner or later, the investors would like to see some money coming in. As the platforms often do not have a very solid business model behind them, other than “a lot of users must be worth something, somehow”, they get desperate in their attemts to find income streams.

The most obvious and easy for them is then to take what their superstars get, both in terms of direct payments — the superstars, and often also all other users on the platform, will see dropping revenues — and the marketing money. If affiliate links and other product references become forbidden, as it happened on several social media platforms, the only way for marketers to keep advertising there will be through the official platform advertisement program.

In other words, the previous earners will earn less, the platform owners will earn more.

As long as new platforms are being introduced, for new investor money, the top influencers will be able to shop around, taking their followers with them to a new platform, then again, and again. But what we are seeing now is that the market seems to be full, there isn’t really room for more big platforms. Also, the most solid of the old platforms have grown so big that it is difficult for new ones to compete about marketing money, as the marketers will get access to many more viewers of their ads and product placement on the old plaforms than the new ones. Another aspect is the one of monopolisation, where, currently, a few big companies control the big platforms and are eager to buy any upcoming new platform, to get that competitor out of the market.

So, few new platforms appear, the superstars no longer have any place to go next, meaning that any platform they are on can reduce the superstars’ benefits of being there, and the whole concept is falling apart.

The platforms are either young and idealistic, as it looks today, trying to avoid doing like the old platforms — they will not pay influencers, and they will not show ads. Meaning that they only have a value for being able to “spread the word” of whatever you want to have the word spread about. News outlets enjoy this, hoping that they can attract viewers to their own websites, and politicians and other non-economic people with an interest in announcing things will like it too. But not so much the influencers.

Or they are the old ones, that have become increasingly eager to earn money, gradually removing all benefits for the users, adding features and restrictions mainly on the basis of what they expect to be able to earn money on. It means paid memberships options, versus everything for free previously, more advertising, less control by the users of what contents they see, a stricter policy on who can be allowed to post and how much (for instance by quaranteening users with too much activity), and more of such things that a superstar influencer cannot work with.

This leaves us with a social media landscape that is flattening, with no exciting new things appearing, because everything has been invented already in that space, and with no superstars, no opportunities for making money, no influencers, no nothing.

Such a landscape becomes dull and users will start leaving it.

Photo by Hanna Schwichtenberg on Unsplash

Social media, next

While it is perfectly possible that some of the new players in the field could add incentives for influencers, it will just be for a while, and then these platforms will develop in the same way as the old ones. Simply because the nature of running such a platform is one with costs, and hence, must also be with earnings.

We will see more of what is already there: the sales of user data, more advertising, less control by the users.

As there is today a very large silent user base on social media — some studies point at up to 98% of the users never doing anything actively, they are only looking (that’s all they ever do there: like they watch TV, they also watch social media), or “lurking”, as some have called it⁶ — there is also a big potential for commercialising this group of people, while the existing active user base of maybe 2% of the users is somewhat less interesting from that perspective.

So, definitely we should expect efforts done to make money on the 98% more than the 2%. Meaning, that everything the currently active users like on the platforms is prone to be changed if it doesn’t match the needs for capturing the attention of the 98%.

During the years, cable TV and similar passive watching mechanisms have been popular, and as we also see a reduced attention span, probably caused by the eternal stress situation and FOMA (fear of missing out) that makes it difficult for people to justify for themselves that they spend long time — as long as a feature movie — on anything, it is likely that social media, where these people already are present, will develop into mechanisms that push out short-form media.

There will be a focus on keeping people online for as long as possible, which the current endless scrolling mechanism is already ensuring, and as TikTok and YouTube have proved, there is a will amongst users of such a platform to watch one after another of short, low-quality videos, for hours.

Writing is popular now, with self-publishing services making it possible for anyone to dream about becoming a published writer, but reading isn’t equally popular. Many people today will not read any books at all, others will read simple life-guides and other texts that are as close to streaming contents as possible, with fewer requirements to reading skills, speed, and completeness (many life-guides can be read partly, with the same resulting value as if they were read in full).

The existing social media see some popularity in newsletters and similar short-forms that provide exactly life-guide contents.

It is possible that some of the influencers, who today live from selling such contents, could become fixed providers of it, making it part of a new social media concept. Not as explosive careers with millions earned per month, but as every other popular contents provider on TV or the Internet, with earnings more in line with typical salaries.

When the IT business was new, it was often compared with the Wild West, with nothing done by any rules, everything being a wild shot, and then, at times, someone managed to hit something. That business has matured now. It is no longer reasonable to hope for a megahit like Microsoft or Apple when starting anything new in the IT business — instead, new starters may survive long enough and thrive well enough for the bigger companies to want to buy them, or they will quickly close again.

In effect, there is an almost fixed number of big IT companies, and a modest amount of startups, in a setup that from the outside looks very stable. No real competition exists, and prices are set as the big players want them.

Social media seems to go that way too. The wild escapades, big earnings, big potentials, are all things from the past. The same counts for the feeling of community, of “we” creating something — indeed, the word “creator” will probably not be used much in the future. Influencers are no longer needed to build a platform of users, as these will come in the same way as they do on cable TV and similar forever-subscribe platforms.

It’s time to cash in. From now on, social media is strictly business.

1. See for instance Billboard: Oppa! Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ Video Hits 5 Billion Views on YouTube

2. Wired: The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

3. According to Los Angeles Times: Still in her record-breaking era: Taylor Swift tour smashes record with $2-billion revenue

4. According to RouteNote Blog: How much money have the top 10 artists earned on Spotify in 2024?

5. According to GeeksforGeeks: Top 10 Highest Paid Actors In The World: From Adam Sandler to Ben Affleck (Complete List)

6. See for instance Animalz: Write for the Lurkers