WHAT IS AN INFLUENCERS?

Influencers are XXX

We can study influencers by their:

Format: Blogger, Streamers, BJs

Platform: Instagrammer, TikTokers, YouTuber

Concept: Internet Celebrities, Micro-Celebrities, Creator, Influencers

There are over 51 million YouTuber in the world in 2022

29,000 YouTuber have over 1 million subscribers

Around 3.7M new videos are uploaded to YouTube everyday

YouTuber makes $3~$5 per every 1,000 views their videos get

What comes to mind when you think about influencers?

DO YOU RECOGNIZE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE?

These 27 faces are virtual humans

We created them as composite faces through a combination of qualitative ethnographic and quantitative computational methods

They represent the 'average' looking Influencer on the most popular genres on nine platforms

Everyone's impression of influencers and internet pop culture is created through personal taste and media consumption

However, platforms play an important role in shaping these impressions through their inherent algorithmic sorting and recommendation systems

Do these virtual influencers match your expectation of what influencers look like?

OUR PROJECT

We studied 9 popular short video, long video, and livestream video platforms from Silicon Valley and the East Asian region: AfreecaTV, Bigo, Bilibili, Instagram, Kakao, TikTok, Twitch, Xiaohongshu and YouTube

Focusing on the top 3 genres of each platform, we conduct image capture, cropping, averaging, texture smoothening, and modeling to create 3D virtual influencers that represent the most popular 'face' on the platform

In this pilot study, we focus on skin tone and gender composites

Check out our 27 virtual influencers from nine platforms

SUMMARY

In our project, we found that XXX

This has impacts on platforms, influencers, and everyday viewers, because XXX

We make the following recommendations: Platforms should XXX Influencers should XXX Everyday viewers should XXX