A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin, a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both adult and child and the general pop culture centered on social media, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Abidin offers interviewer David Edmonds a metaphor to understand how her cyber-ethnography and digital anthropology work in practice. “I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We’re not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We’re looking for what’s neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we’re measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study. … [A]s an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don’t always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what’s left behind.”

In this conversation, though, Abidin talks about something very shiny indeed – those professional internet celebrities known collectively as “influencers.” She explains how while the top influencers do generate the paydays seen in popular media, the ecosystem extends down to individuals who are spending their own money in hopes of someday making it big. She also draws a distinction between influencers and creators, and also between influencers and memes.

Abidin also dives into regional differences in influencer culture, using her own detailed analysis of Asia Pacific influencer cultures, to explore regional differences that should be understood when assessing content on global platforms. “[I]f we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who’s not included in them?”

In addition to her role at Curtin, Abidin founded the TikTok Cultures Research Network and is an affiliate researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. She was named an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow for 2019 to 2024. Currently the editor-in-chief of Media International Australia, she has written or edited a number of books that bridge popular concerns with academic rigor, including 2018’s Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online and this year’s Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Lauren Gurrieri and Jenna Drenten),

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: There’s a relatively new type of celebrity, a digital or internet celebrity. A subset of these new celebs are called influencers. They have sizeable followings on social media, on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram and so on. Professor Crystal Abidin grew up in Singapore but now lives in Australia. She directs the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University. Crystal Abidin, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Crystal Abidin: Thank you so much for having me, Dave. Glad to be here.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about influencers.

Abidin: We are, yes.

Edmonds: What is an influencer?

Abidin: So I think for most people, your perception of an influencer is probably a young person who is pretty good looking, swimming in money and then still making money off us online by sharing personal stories. And that is partially true. The more academic, scientific version of this is internet influencers are professional internet celebrities. They are experts who know how to capture and hold our attention primarily by telling stories about their personal lives, and once they capture our attention spans, they use their personal lives as a backdrop to advertise products, services, and these days, even political ideology.

So people come to look to them as role models, as opinion leaders, because we like them for who they are, first, because they’re not mainstream celebrities, and, more importantly, because they feel like you and I — like everyday people that we can relate to.

Edmonds: So how do they make their money? You say they advertise what they’re promoting particular products. What’s their source of revenue?

Abidin: So I started looking at influences in 2008 and traditionally, they made money when advertisers would pay them to endorse products, either through making advertorials, which has a prestige of an advertisement in the guise of an editorial, or through endorsements straight up sponsored ads and Instagram posts, YouTube videos, and the like. But as the industry became so professionalized and so saturated, a lot of these influencers are also making money of licensing deals – so lending their likeness, their namesake, their voiceovers, to a whole range of merchandise lines, sometimes even producing their own products, whether it’s drop shipping, meaning they buy it from third-party sites and slap a label on them, or whether they produce them in house, like a lot of fashion influences do.

But most recently, a lot of social media platforms have introduced something called “creator partnership programs,” which means, as long as your piece of content is eligible for the program and attracts a certain threshold of eyeballs and traffic, the platform pays you for that traffic, because they are ultimately also embedding advertising onto the sidebar, the top bar, the pop up, the pre-video ad onto the content. So, there are multiple streams of revenue that we’re talking about here.

Edmonds: Have you got any idea how much the most successful influencers can earn?

Abidin: For those of us who might just be pedestrians to this line of work, news headlines will tell you something shocking, like the highest-earning YouTuber being a child. He is  Ryan of Ryan Toys Reviews, and he annually brings in revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. And we’re only looking at a child who produces advertorials on YouTube. We’re not even looking at the larger-scale influences, say, the likes of MrBeast, or, for those of us listening, from the UK, the likes of Zoella, her partner, her siblings, an entire empire, where they’ve got multiple streams of branding and revenue streaming in. From my research, the top influencer I know who is in this market has progressed from being a one-man DIY show to running his own influencer firm, grooming and contracting other influences. He was recently listed on NASDAQ, they claim to make about tens to hundreds of millions of dollars across all of their revenue streams every year.

Edmonds: Who’s that?

Abidin: This is Mr. JianHao Tan from the YouTube channel Titan Digital Media. He started as one man based in Singapore, and now the entire company runs a plethora of assets, from online web series to in-person stores to merchandise you can buy online, to even talent incubator firms.

Edmonds: I can see it’s a fascinating topic. What first got you into it?

Abidin: There is a very formal answer, which I will give to you. And then there’s also the real tricky, sneaky answer, which I’m happy to share if we are keen. So, the professional answer is that I was consuming a lot of content as a young person growing up in Singapore from around the world, and due to the legacies of British colonialism, Singapore being a very hot tourist destination, a global hub, it was not uncommon for me growing up to consume Singaporean content alongside the likes of content from across Southeast Asia, popularly also from Japan, but also from the UK and the US. And as I started to consume these contents, when social media platforms were on the rise, I wanted to look for something local. I wanted to know what could represent the folks here, folks on the margins, folks in the minority. I discovered that a lot of them were young women, and I thought they were doing really great work, writing about their lives and also talking about very difficult issues, like breakups, pimples, homework, but also depression, suicidality, queerness and coming out. And yet, because they were young women, people often diminished what they did and dismissed them as be