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...

Related content

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

Salaire médian et moyen au Canada, en 2005

I have been looking for the median individual income for a while and found it on CANSIM while doing some other research.

Je cherchais ces séries sur CANSIM depuis un bout de temps. Voici:




Source: Statistics Canada, Table 2020411 & 1110008

1% GST reduction, a mistake... which can be repaired

It was predictable; the Harper government announced that the 1% GST reduction would become effective as of January 2008. Even though this policy is widely regarded as less desirable than an equivalent income tax reduction, it would be hard to blame the Conservatives for it as it was one of their electoral pledges.

So, in the hope that the electorate will think about it twice before voting for such a policy next time, here is the most elegantly simple explanation that I could find. It is coming from Greg Mankiw, economics professor at Harvard University (http://www.blogger.com/profile/18161221774770492266)

« If we are looking at the decision to work today in order to consume today, consumption and income taxes have similar effects. Both discourage work effort.

Consider, however, another margin of adjustment: Work today in order to save and consume in the future. Let's continue with Daniel's example of a 50 percent tax rate. Suppose that the interest rate is 7 percent, so $1 saved today becomes $2 in 10 years.

With income tax: 1 hr work --> $16 pre-tax --> $8 post-tax --> $16 of savings in 10 years --->$4 more in income taxes on the interest--> $12 of chocolate cake, video games, and Red Sox tickets.

With consumption tax: 1 hr work --> $16 pre-tax --> $32 of savings in 10 years --> $16 of chocolate cake, video games, and Red Sox tickets + $16 of tax.

So under a consumption tax, there is a greater incentive to work and save today in order to consume in the future.

(...)

The bottom line: Both consumption taxes and income taxes discourage work, but income taxes discourage saving as well.»

Source : http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/06/consumption-vs-income-taxation.html

Worse, we are currently in a period of weak personal savings and of increasing consumption-related personal debt. If the U.S. should experience an economic slowdown in 2008 and a continuation of the liquidity crunch, the weak personal savings level in Canada would not allow consumers to reach for their "nest egg" to fuel further consumption. This, in return, would likely increase chances of an economic slowdown here as well.
Could something be done to correct this unfortunate policy decision of the current government?
Fortunately, yes. We would need Monique-Jerome Forget, Québec's finance minister, the integrate this 1% GST rebate to add it to Quebec's PST. For consumers, there would be no immediate impacts as prices of product sand services bought in Québec would not change.

This additional 1% would represent more than 1 billion dollars extra in Québec's budget. This would allow the option of either reduce the income taxes by the same amount or to invest it in the Generation Fund for the eventual purpose of debt reduction. Note that I did not even suggest that it could be used as part of the operational budget as I believe this would be an even greater mistake.

Some would argue that any tax reduction is good, wherever it is coming from. It is a view which lack, er... vision! In a stable and long-term perspective, Canada should progressively move towards income tax reduction and a raise of consumption taxes.

Now, I hear some object that consumption taxes are regressive and that its elimination improves the lot of the poorest among us. Well, in the short-term, maybe (although the GST is not applied to most of the basic consumption items). However, similar income tax progressiveness adjustments can be applied to consumption taxes.

The point is to be able to separate short term impacts (political, social and economical) from those, beneficial, that a sound fiscal policy will provide. For the result-based political observer, that is the bottom line and should be the goal in this specific case.

I'm leaving you with a few links to comments from various economists and other pundits on this topic:

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2007/10/the-federal-gov.html
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canadavotes2006/national/2005/12/01/gst-reac051201.html
http://globeinvestor.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071024.wgstt1024/GIStory/
http://www.asdeq.org/activites/comite-politiques-publiques/pdf/2007/reduction_de_la_tps.pdf