While listening to a recent episode of the Decoder podcast—featuring some advertising exec guest whose choice of career seems likely to have inspired me to gouge my eyes out—the host asked a simple question: what’s the difference between a “content creator” and an “influencer?”
The answer the host received was nearly useless: essentially that influencers had a few more followers, or something, and therefore a slightly elevated status of, uhhh, influence. I dunno, it obviously sounded like the viewpoint of someone who thinks about “social” solely through the lens of how it is used to sell things—which, for me, is very much the corrupted version of social.
But I won’t get into all that here. This post is just about the difference, as I see it, between being a content creator and an influencer. I’m not sure how widely held these definitions are, but they’re the ones that seemed to emerge early in my circles of the so-called “creator economy.”
In my mind, content creators and influencers are quite different things. People can choose—and often do—to play both roles, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Both roles produce “content” to generate an audience, but for entirely different reasons.
Creators:
- Produce their own products, whether that’s a paid newsletter, training course, onlyfans videos, comics, etc
- Value is in the quality of the product: does it solve a customer’s needs? Does it entertain them in a way that they’ll pay for?
- The “customer” of a creator is the audience that directly consumes the content
- Use platforms like: Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, MightyNetworks, Gumroad, Buy Me a Coffee
Influencers
- Create an audience for advertisers to sell things to
- Value is in delivering eyeballs, clicks, and sales for other companies
- The “customer” of an influencer is the companies that they advertise for
- Use platforms like: Instagram, Amazon Associates, Youtube, podcasts, affiliate marketing platforms like Rakuten, Google AdSense, etc.
To me, this is a substantial difference—not just in scale of followers, but also in purpose, activities, and incentives.