These are the tiers of internet celebrity
From nano-influencers to traditional celebrities, how the digital fame ladder works
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The line between celebrity and online star keep blurring.
“Celebrity is a condition of fame and broad public recognition of a person or group due to the attention given to them by mass media,” according to Wikipedia, while an influencer is “an individual who builds a grassroots online presence through engaging content such as photos, videos, and updates. By using direct audience interaction to establish authenticity, expertise, and appeal, and standing apart from traditional celebrities by growing their platform through social media rather than pre-existing fame.”
Emphasis on pre-existing fame. It’s hard because it feels like celebrity and influencer should be interchangeable. An influencer can become a celebrity, a celebrity can become an influencer. But a celebrity doesn’t necessarily have to become an influencer. Some remain offline, like Elizabeth Olsen or Brad Pitt.
According to shopify, there are five typers of influencers:
Nano-influencers: 1K-10K followers
Micro-influencers: 10K-50K followers
Mid-tier influencers: 50K-500K followers
Macro-influencers: 500K-1M followers
Mega-influencers: 1M+ followers
Let’s consider, however. What happens when someone breaks the 1 million, mega-influencer mark?
Think about Emma Chamberlain. She’s listed as an “American influencer” in her Google overview. She currently has almost 15 million followers on Instagram and 12.1M on YouTube. Emma has interviewed stars at the Met Gala for Vogue, attended Paris Fashion Week, posed for magazine cover shoots, and more. She also has her own podcast and coffee company and has acted as a “brand ambassador” for luxury companies.
By my assessment, she is a celebrity. But she didn’t start out that way. Emma started out as a YouTuber and worked her way up to influencer.
One of the most famous gaming YouTubers, Markiplier, has 37.5M followers. His Wikipedia page states that “he was listed by Forbes as the third-highest-paid content creator on the platform in 2022.”
This is nothing against Mark, but I wouldn’t consider him a celebrity. He’s highly influential in his subject, but he’s missing the “broad recognition piece,” since he has a large but niche audience.
Another example? Addison Rae has branched from TikTok dances to popstardom. As of writing this, she has 14.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify with her single “Diet Pepsi” ranking at the top of on her chart. Her new album “Addison” is the result of her efforts to escape her TikTok label and cement a place for herself amongst the stars.
A New York Times article blasted this point with their story, “TikTok Made Addison Rae Famous. Pop Made Her Cool.”
“A couple of years ago, when Addison Rae went to pitch herself for a deal with Columbia Records, pop stardom was not a guarantee. She was best known as one of TikTok’s breakout stars, someone who had used the app to catapult from anonymity to ubiquity, but as a dancer and personality — not a musician,” Jon Caramanica wrote.
Celebrity requires notoriety. YouTubers and vloggers fall into the most unique, gray-space of celebrity. Media outlets don’t tend to cover them until they breach containment – i.e. Emma Chamberlain, MrBeast, or Logan Paul.
The terms “internet celebrity” and “internet personality” have been tossed around as a way to describe those who gained celebrity from viral content, too. They can also be referred to as “micro-celebrities” or “cyber famous.”
Followers don’t necessarily equate fame, which is defined as “the state of being known or talked about by many people, especially on account of notable achievements” by Oxford Languages.
According to Paul Chadwick for The Guardian, fame can be broken down into the following five categories:
fame by election or appointment
fame by achievement
fame by association
fame by chance
royal fame
An internet personality’s fame perhaps came from a combination of these – achievement, chance, association. This kind of fame exists in a platform-dependent chamber. If their presence doesn’t extend past YouTube, neither will their fame.
The story that the “traditional Hollywood star is dying” is overdone, but still relevant. Do these “viral sensations” threaten stereotypical celebrities? Perhaps yes, in certain physical spaces, like the red carpet or the runway, for instance.
Think about Hollywood’s “A-list” versus “B-list” stars. A now-deleted Reddit account termed internet celebrities as a part of a “Z-list.” I love this concept. It feels like a level of stardom category of its own, still in the same alphabet, but so far-removed that it becomes an entirely unique entity.
Influence is highly desirable for brands. The reason these tiers exist – nano, micro, mid, etc. – is more for financial reasons than anything else. The bigger the influencer’s audience, the bigger the influencer’s paycheck, the bigger the brand’s payoff. The smaller the audience, the smaller the paycheck, the smaller the payoff.
It also depends on what the brand is buying. Author Ramit Sethi wrote a great explainer of the options here, with deals ranging from paid partnerships, where the influencer promotes a product, to affiliate marketing, where an influencer gets a cut of a sale.
“In the wild world of social media, influencers are finding more creative and lucrative ways to turn their followings into full-fledged careers,” Ramit wrote. “The key takeaway? There's no one-size-fits-all salary for influencers. It all depends on a bunch of factors like who you are, who your audience is, and how engaged they are with what you're putting out there.”
Celebrity is all about where the fame originates. It seems easy to branch from a trade – music, movies, art, politics – and into the digital sphere, but much harder to branch from the digital sphere into traditional celebrity.
The conclusion, then, becomes that it’s easy to turn a real life audience into a digital audience, but hard to turn a digital audience into a real life audience.
Read my last story: "Any engagement is good engagement."
My weekly roundup:
🎶 What I’m Listening To: “Addison” by Addison Rae ✨
🎞️ What I’m Watching: White Lotus Season 2 rewatch (best season FR1)
⚠️ What’s On My Radar: TikTok bans #SkinnyTok in an example of online censorship I’ve talked about before
Read the full Gen Z Dictionary here.
FR: For real