Bonus #14

Ellen Yin19min

Ellen Yin

00:06

Hey friends, it's Ellen Yin. Welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle, the CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google. For today's bonus episode, I thought it would be great to do an add on to the interview that we published this week with Tiffany Yu all about how she made $100,000 as a content creator, with that being her side hustle to her main business. And in that interview, we briefly touched on some terms like influencer, marketing, UGC, which stands for user generated content, and the role of content creator. And so I just wanted to add my own perspective on top of that conversation, because I think it's complimentary to the discussion we had.

Ellen Yin

00:56

So if you haven't listened to Episode 188, with Tiffany yet, we'll make sure to link that below in the show notes. Give that a listen. It's really, really insightful. And I think it's so cool how we live in an age where all of us can really participate in the Creator economy. And I think Tiffany's story is just such a great example of that.

Ellen Yin

01:15

So anyways, what is the difference, right between these things, these terms that seem very confusing, there's a lot of overlap, I think between these terms of influencer and content creator and UGC creator, so I'm just going to kind of dive into what I think differentiates between these three things. So at their core influencers, content creators, and UGC creators are all content creators, right? Their product essentially, is content. And so that is the same is true for all three, but how they create the content and how they get compensated for the content. More importantly, I think, is where the difference lies.

Ellen Yin

01:53

So let's start with influencers. When you think about influencers in the traditional sense, and traditional, I say that a little bit ironically, because that term has really only emerged in the last decade. But if you think about early influencers, right, like the early 2010s, when like bloggers were essentially the first digital influencers of our time, influencers, typically are people who create content around their lifestyle as a whole. So they really bring you into their entire lives, not just one aspect of it, you get to see who they are as people who their friends are their family, what they do for work, what their homes look like. They share a lot of their big life events with their audiences. So typically the community around an influencer, the people who follow them follow their favorite influencers, because they actually feel a personal connection to who the person is. And/or the lifestyle that the influencer displays on line is aspirational to the followers. So traditionally speaking, it's all about the lifestyle that they portray.

Ellen Yin

03:05

And I think in their earlier years of influencers, the more glamorous the more luxe, the more almost unattainable the lifestyle was, the more those accounts really were successful, because again, it was aspirational. It was something that people looked at, and it was almost like an escape, right? Like, oh, I don't know what it's like to fly on a private jet, or oh, I don't know what it's like to vacation in the most glamorous places all over the world. But my favorite influencer does it and you know, maybe if I buy the products they use on their hair or on their skin, or that purse that they showed in their last post, I can just have like a little taste of what it's like to live that lifestyle.

Ellen Yin

03:42

So I think in the early years, that really was kind of like the norm. But of course nowadays, we see influencers and all sorts of different types of lifestyles, and I don't think it's always necessarily about creating this luxe sort of viewpoint or or aspirational lifestyle, but typically speaking, it's still going to be around lifestyle in general, and who that person is. So that's kind of my take on the type of content that influencers create.

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