Eric Siu argues most influencers chase money over product quality or audience trust. He cites Kevin Espiritu and notes that low earnings, short-term thinking, and entitlement drive influencers toward brand deals rather than building real brands.
What do you think is the one thing that influencers care about the most? How cool they look. Close. How many followers they have. Also close. Definitely not how much money they make. Yes, it is that. No! Yeah, it is, it is. So Kevin Espiritu, Plant Daddy, so he owns Epic Gardening, and it's been quoted that his gardening blog, they do like $30 million a year or something. So he said this, the dirty secret of influencer marketing, 80% plus of influencers do not care about anything but money. I see this happen 24/7 in my space. They don't care about product quality, brand, theirs or the brands that they're repping, their audience, et cetera. They just want money. The reasons why are simple. They don't make a lot of money, even large accounts. 2, this is usually their first business venture. 3, they suffer from extreme short-term thinking, high, high time preference. 4, they don't understand how brand is built. And 5, they can be quite entitled. And I've actually seen this a lot of these financial YouTubers, they all just focus on brand deals. And when it comes to talking about business, you can tell there's not a lot of like thought that goes into it.
