Focus on the social media influencers

Who's popular?

"Figures  4  and  5  can  be  seen  as  a  macro-manifestation  of  the  ‘rich-get-richer’  phenomenon,which  has  been  extensively  researched  already  at  the  individual  video  level,  pointing  at  ‘previous views’  being  highly  relevant  to  predict  ‘future  views’  (Borghol  et  al.,  2012;  Cha  et  al.,  2009;  Crane and  Sornette,  2008;  Szabo  and  Huberman,  2010).  Taken  to  the  aggregate  level  of  channel  popularity,  this  raises  questions  as  to  whether  it  is  possible  at  all  for  younger  channels  to  attract  any relevant  viewership"1.
Essentially, this translates into "Social Influencers that have built a following over time are likely to capture more of the new views than a new entrant".

"The  odds  of  Comedy,  Entertainment,  How  To  &  Style  and  Gaming  to  make  it  to  the  top  3%have  always  been  better  than  average.  In  2016,  however,  News  &  Politics  stands  out  with  a  10.9% chance.  The  chances  of  Sports,  Education,  Nonprofits  &  Activism  and  People  &  Blogs  are  consistently  worse  than  average.  Success  probabilities  appear  to  be  generally  insensitive  to  potentially biased  API  responses  (see  subsection  ‘Sampling  details  and  biases’);  by  and  large,  Table  8  can  be regarded  as  giving  a  fair  answer  to  the  question  of  whether  a  certain  category  improves  or  deteriorates  the  chances  to  become  successful.  Three  exceptions  to  this  are  Gaming,  which  goes  down to  nearly  3% in  the  reduced  data  set,  and  How  To  &  Style  and  News  &  Politics,  which  seem  to  have even  better  chances  to  become  successful."1

How much money do influencers make?

• "According to a decade-long study by a professor at the Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, 96.5 percent of YouTubers don’t make enough annual ad revenue to reach the U.S. federal poverty line."
  "According to the Financial Times, 'an influencer with 100,000 followers on Instagram can charge around £2,000 per picture (approximately $2,700), while celebrity influencers with between four million and 20 million followers can charge £5,000-£13,000 ($6,700-$17,500).'”
  (2018)
  https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/how-much-do-influencers-make/
• "Many famous social media stars are too visible to have “real” jobs, but too broke not to."
  "I’m 27 years old and have been building an online following for 10 years, beginning with a popular Livejournal I wrote in high school. A couple of years ago, after moving to Los Angeles, I made the transition from freelance writing to creating online video. The channel I have with my best friend Allison Raskin, Just Between Us, has more than half a million subscribers and a hungry fan base. We’re a two-person video creation machine. When we’re not producing and starring in a comedy sketch and advice show, we’re writing the episodes, dealing with business contracts and deals, and running our company Gallison, LLC, which we registered officially about a month ago.
  And yet, despite this success, we’re just barely scraping by. Allison and I make money from ads that play before our videos, freelance writing and acting gigs, and brand deals on YouTube and Instagram. But it’s not enough to live, and its influx is unpredictable. Our channel exists in that YouTube no-man’s-land: Brands think we’re too small to sponsor, but fans think we’re too big for donations. I’ve never had more than a couple thousand dollars in my bank account at once. My Instagram account has 340,000 followers, but I’ve never made $340,000 in my life collectively."
  https://splinternews.com/get-rich-or-die-vlogging-the-sad-economics-of-internet-1793853578
• A handful of stars make quite a bit of money.
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2016/12/05/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-2016-pewdiepie-remains-no-1-with-15-million/#96302f877132
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/04/10/earning-power-heres-how-much-top-influencers-can-make-on-instagram-and-youtube/#3ba7d7de24db
• YouTuber Tech Lead made about USD $5,000 for 1,000,000 views
  https://youtu.be/PZsEU-T1Gmg?t=110
• This YouTuber assesses that it is about $2,000 on average:
  https://youtu.be/do1VLjNg6AE?t=51

My own experience with www.HongKongHikes.com

With my hiking blog which I started to help people but turned out to be quite popular with 70k/100k hits a month has just recently started to pay out something.

As of May 2019, I make about $0.75 USD a day from the EZoic network. I turned-off AdSense which paid out about 5 cents a month! (Google doesn't share ad revenues it seems). And through sponsorship and won popularity contests, maybe add the equivalent of another $0.50 a day.
So, just barely enough to beat what is considered the world's absolute poverty level! :-)

I'm happy I don't have to make a living from my Web presence nor do I plan on doing so...

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If travel influencers were HONEST - https://youtu.be/wnI8TA8XCt4