Reader,

Kim Kardashian is a very poplar “influencer” and makes tons of money by being “who she is.” You may adore her or you may despise her but, in either case, she is slowly becoming irrelevant. She’s 45 years old and will soon be too old to be cool.

Aitana Lopez is a 27-year-old, “up and coming” influencer and currently has a social media following of 400,000. She may become more popular, but she has no worry about “aging out.” Why? Because she’s a “virtual soul” and, therefore, never has to age. She’s AI generated and can stay 27 forever.

One is real, one is not. Both influence the buying habits of a lot of people. And that, my friend, is big business.

According to Fast Company magazine “Influencer marketing is now a $32.55 billion industry, giving AI influencers a massive market to enter. U.S. influencer spending is expected to hit $12.17 billion in 2026, and six in 10 marketers already use AI in influencer campaigns, according to a new report from Sociallyin, a social marketing agency.”

Are Influencers a 21st-century phenomena?

Answering this question requires a quick side-track exploring the reason for being an influencer. It’s simple – money. Somebody wants you to spend your hard-earned money to buy something. Maybe it’s underwear, maybe it’s perfume, maybe it’s a newspaper.

And that brings me to the story of “yellow journalism” and the rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal.

Yellow journalism was a late-19th-century style of newspaper reporting that used sensational headlines, exaggerated stories, emotional language, scandal, crime, conflict, and sometimes weakly verified claims to attract readers and sell papers.

(Side note: The term came partly from a popular comic character, “The Yellow Kid,” which appeared in both the newspapers involved in that circulation war.)

Yellow journalism showed that when a communication technology becomes commercially powerful, the incentives can shift from informing people to capturing attention. Hence, even in 1890, businesspeople focused on the “attention economy.”

More circulation meant more advertising revenue. That created pressure to make stories more dramatic, emotional, and urgent.

Business lesson for AI

Yellow journalism is a useful historical warning.

The danger is that when the cost of producing attention-grabbing communication falls, the volume of persuasive but unreliable information rises.

It happened with the rise of the newspaper barons, and AI can multiply that problem. It can create headlines, articles, posts, images, videos, fake reviews, fake experts, and emotionally targeted messages at enormous speed and scale.

The more powerful the communication technology, the more important verification, editorial judgment, trust, and accountability become.

Be a skeptic. If you find it on the internet assume you have to verify it yourself. There are very few real editors out there. Influencers are there to separate you from your money.

“The book”

Monday starts week two of my LinkedIn marketing campaign. If you’re on LinkedIn, I’d appreciate a nod from you.

Thanks,

Bill