it can take a very big toll on your mental health as well so i think opportunities for creators to, kind of, regain that connection with their audience in a real direct way is something that s going to be really beneficial going forward. we have talked about making money via social media but of course, for every well intentioned musician, there is someone perhaps with slightly darker motives. i have been speaking to cath, who is a reporterfrom the bbc panorama programme who has been investigating a new kind of criminal, the fraud influencer. fraud influence is someone who has a large following but the difference is the engaging content they are putting out there is fraud. they are promoting this glamorous, criminal lifestyle and sometimes even using social media to sell criminal services, fraudulent services. now, you looked into an influencer called tankz. how many followers does
are realising that creators drive a lot of engagement and trends, and it s not enough any more to just give them a place to grow an audience. they need to offer them better features and ways to get money, and besides youtube which used to be the only game in town, there wasn t a way to earn directly from social media networks until the last year or so. becky, what do you make of these new developments? i think there is a really growing trend of creators who are trying to kind of, almost regain the connection between themselves and their audiences without the platform because at the end of the day, it s really hard to trust the platforms. you know, changes are being made every single day to the algorithms, how our content is being served to our audiences and is often done in a very hard to read, almost like black box algorithmic way, which is hard to decipher and decode and you often second guess yourself and what you re doing. am i doing something wrong, why are my views not flowing ve
i ve got to look at my list because we contacted quite a few social media platforms. we contacted twitter, instagram, facebook, snapchat, youtube. they ll say they don t allow for content on their platforms and in relation to tankz per se, his accounts and those respective platforms barring twitter and youtube, they ve been taken down. let s get into the nuts and bolts of your investigation to an extent because there were some good old fashioned journalism going on here. how did you first come across these fraud influences? 0k, well, i might not look it, but i m quite young and like a lot of young people, i. you ve got a few years advantage on me, let s put it on that way! i hope so! i spend a lot of time on social media scrolling through snapchat and i kept noticing the fraud posts popping up on my feed and it turns out i m not the only one because as part of this investigation, i went to my old school to speak
there s a huge difference between them. it really refers to someone who has a following online and is creating content. let me stay with you for a moment on the status quo and what we might be changing from. say for the sake of argument, someone has an instagram following of 100,000 people. how is she or he making money based on those 100,000 at the moment? the most common way by far is sponsored content, so that s promoting a product in an instagram post or in a story, so that s by far the most popular way people make money, but creators have really branched out. they re, you know, teaching online courses, starting podcast, selling merchandise, so there are a lot more ways to monetise but sponsored content is still number one by far. that status quo until at least fairly recently wasn t necessarily going to make a huge amount of money, was it? it depends. it really depends. some people i talk to have a small niche
but that 96.5% figure, that s quite telling, isn t it? it is. i think this is a really broad ranging subject and. - some have an awful lot of money and they have the have nots - who are most of us when it comes to create a space i and i think that tiktok in particular by trying i to develop a new way - of doing this where they try and monetise as many people as they can by giving them - a little bit, but there are always different platforms, not least patreon as welli who are, kind of, offering other alternatives. a sort of way of- spreading out your eggs in many, many baskets. becky, let me talk to you a moment about when you were a youtube influencer as a teenager under the name becky cruel, i think. and you did a lot of material