Chelsey Brown quit a nine-to-five job to become a full-time content creator on TikTok and Instagram, earning $60,000 in one month and $32,000 from a single brand deal. Despite the financial success, she burned out from selling her life online and returned to a conventional job. Her decision was driven partly by guilt about influencer ethics, including promoting a product she did not like and felt was misleading to followers. Broader interest in influencing has declined among young people, even as economic pressures make it seem like an escape. Some creators now treat quitting influencing and returning to traditional work as a content niche.
"When she quit her job to become a full-time content creator on TikTok and Instagram, she once made $60,000 in one month. Another month, she made $32,000 from a single brand deal. "I was making stupid money," she remembers. But despite the financial rewards, she eventually burned out on selling her life online. She decided to quit and go back to a nine-to-five job."
"For a while it seemed that the dream of the 21st century was to make a living as a social media influencer. A 2019 Morning Consult survey found that 86% of young people aspired to careers as influencers, although that enthusiasm has since noticeably cooled - a recent Yahoo/YouGov survey found that only 5% of those under 30 still expressed the same ambition. Still, in a country where young people are feeling pessimistic about the job market and struggling with the high cost of living, influencing can seem like a get-out-of-jail-free card."
"One of the reasons Brown decided to go back to a more conventional job was that she started to feel guilty about the ethics of being an influencer. Remember that brand deal where she made $32,000? That was in return for promoting a product she didn't even like. "I couldn't keep on promoting things that my followers were buying and that I wasn't actually keeping," she says. "That's like, a huge f***ing lie.""
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Read at Yahoo Life
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