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[Peter DeLegge]

On EusebioRZ said

Some additional suggestions for the page of YouTube channels

Dan Worrall https://www.youtube.com/@DanWorrall

Sonic Scoop https://www.youtube.com/@SonicScoop

Paul Third https://www.youtube.com/@PaulThird

Venus Theory https://www.youtube.com/@VenusTheory

Praise Tracks https://www.youtube.com/@PraiseTracks

Guy Michelmore https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkSpaceEducation

Alice Efe https://www.youtube.com/@Alice-Efe

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THE TL;DR VERSION

I have thought of some of those. I know a couple of those guys from having interacted with them. I’m pretty iffy about including pure influencers — that is, people whose claim to fame isn’t in their accomplishments in the industry, but is creating and selling the trust that people have in them based on Youtube videos.

THE LONGER VERSION
I have been reluctant to put up pure influencer channels. And I’ll share this. Several years ago, one of those popular influencers in that group was asking developers for $15,000 minimum in order to do a “review” of their sample libraries. Now, I like the guy, and we’ve had very positive interactions, but influencer marketing is a shady business with, I’ll just be candid, terrible ethics. It is all about gaining and selling people’s trust to the highest bidder and creating the false impression that the influencers are unbiased. It’s a con game. And the big underlying premise of this site is to give a voice to uncompensated regular users of virtual and physical gear, so people can be less reliant on influencers. I don’t know ethically, if I want this site to be a promotion channel for that when one of the compelling reasons I created the site was in response to some very unethical practices of a developer who bought a popular forum and to the rise of influencer marketing. Consider that I made my name — globally — by managing, writing, and speaking about digital marketing and ethics in marketing. And that writing came out of my actual personal ethics. I wrote what I believed in when it came to ethics. It went viral without my expecting it to. But the reason for my writing was that I truly believe strongly in what I wrote about.

So, I ‘m trying to make this site the response to influencers who are shilling products who make a lot of money from doing that shilling. I am perplexed on this area, because I realize how popular these influencers are probably with this community and I want to make this section really useful for everyone. A potential compromise might be putting up a disclaimer, describing how influencer marketing — and influencers work, differentiating them from legitimate journalist reviews. Just to give an idea of the differences;  if you compare that to journalists to influencers, a journalist doing a review:

(1) Generally doesn’t keep the reviewed product as their own property after a review. [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(2) isn’t paid by the company that has the product to be reviewed. [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(3)  Isn’t incentivized to do favorable reviews. Influencers — if popular — will ask for money from developers to review their product, then they will commonly use affiliate marketing links. The result is, the influencer makes more money the higher the sales of the reviewed product. . [CONFLICT OF INTEREST.]
(4.) Doesn’t derive income from the companies whose products are being reviewed, so the journalist doesn’t have to worry about giving a bad review; an influencer does. A bad review means the gravy train of free products, related payment from the developer, the prospect of doing paid promos for the developer (a very common in lnfuencer pitch to brands — they almost all do this pitch).

So maybe the solution is that I do a page and call it “Influencer Videos” and put a disclaimer before it that states those things. Granted, it doesn’t make influencers like me, but it educates users about the business of influencer marketing so that they can watch these videos with a good degree of understanding of the bias.

Sorry, I realize you didn’t want an article on the ethics of influencer marketing, and you did exactly what I asked for. I’m just being totally candid about my values, why I did this site, and the concerns I have about promoting an industry that is less than ethical. Again, I mostly chose channels of well established experts who started YouTube channels, not solopreneurs who started a YouTube channel to make money from brands. Yes, both groups make money from brands, but I find the experts are significantly more reliable than the pure influencers.

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