Name of the Game: The distinction between ‘influencer’ and ‘creator’

Is a let’s player a creator or an influencer? Yes, they are playing someone else’s game. Yet many people prefer to watch their favourite let’s player over playing the game themselves. This indicated to me that the let’s player is creating some value that the game alone did not have.

It may be, for some people, that they want to save money by not buying a game and instead enjoying the story as provided by their favourite let’s player. On the other hand, lots of people like to play the game alongside the let’s player and talk about it with the community. They also donate money to the let’s player directly so it isn’t necessarily about saving money.

I think there is real value in these communities that gets built up around a game or genre of games, especially during the pandemic. Many people who would otherwise not get a lot of socialization in their lives are able to socialize with those in their favourite let’s player and streamer communities.

There are a lot of distinctions that make hard sense in one’s life: between a coral snake and a king snake, or between a car that is parked and a car that is moving.

This is not one of those; no one’s welfare depends on determining whether Marques Brownlee is a creator or an influencer. As such—as a social distinction—it’s bound up in the experiences and values of each person who is trying to make that distinction. So as the article notes, influencers almost always refer to themselves as creators, while their commercial representation invariably refers to them as influencers. The language you use is in part determined by where you stand and what you want.

Product placement is a sneaky form of advertising that degrades the creative value of whatever it's in, because unlike an ad next to an editorial, the advertiser in a placement explicitly alters and by definition limits and demands what the creative content can or cannot include.

There's a word for rock stars who tout products - sellouts. Influencers are basically people whose idea of a great gig is to be popular enough to sell out.

Put another way, creatives get paid for their own ideas, whether by selling work product directly or by ads placed which go with that work. And one way we judge the quality of any art or medium is the degree to which the creators are free from the influence of their advertisers. Influencers, on the other hand, merely mimic creativity as a means to shill for an advertiser.

I'm an art director among other things, and I make ads for a living. In that industry, I'm a "creative"... as are designers I work with. But we're creating on behalf of a commercial enterprise, i.e. we don't have true creative freedom in that realm, or freedom of expression. And neither do influencers. In fact, they have even less than the marketing departments who sponsor them.

So there's a difference, and 'influencer' is disparaging, and the social disdain is well-earned.

They create Social Media-Content. A selfy, a tweet, even a posting in some forum, they all are content. It's usually cheap content, but still content. And better influencers have also some higher quality of content, with a video, stream, a blog-article or podcast.

> only about doing stupid things in front of a camera and getting money from sponsors

Having a job that you can enjoy and have fun seems not the worst thing.