youtube vlogger burnout and the realities of social media influencing as a long-term career

 
“Maybe that’s why I get burnt out sometimes not just from the physical work, but mentally I’m like what am I doing, where am I going with this?”
— Arnell Armon

Like many Black millennial women, I joined YouTube in college as I was navigating my natural hair journey and establishing my own relationship with beauty in general. YouTube “Beauty Gurus” became my guides as I experimented with new makeup looks and hairstyles which was very much a process of trial and error. Although I sport a fully shaven head these days and wear minimal makeup I will always appreciate the techniques I learned from the OG Beauty Gurus like Jackie Aina, Alissa Ashley, Arnell Armon, and Tiarra Monet on YouTube. These days a majority of children, teens, and adults aspire to pursue careers as social media Influencers. More specifically, as surveys from Morning Consult and Lego have revealed, they want to become “YouTubers.” The splashy headlines inspired by these findings may make it seem as if “Influencing” is a newfound career path for fame-seeking young people who are eager to be paid for simply being their authentic selves. However, the long careers of the aforementioned Black Creators reveal that there are some people who are new to this line of work and that there are others who are true to it. 

These Creators have effectively established trust with their followers by consistently providing free, educational content on YouTube for an average of 12 years. Aina, for example, has published nearly 1,000 videos over her 13-year career on YouTube. I counted. Watching their weekly videos has become a part of my routine over the years, so I was surprised to notice the absence of these OG Beauty Gurus from my YouTube subscriptions page last year. They seemingly disappeared from the platform. That is until I began to see “Why I Left YouTube” themed videos from each of them published around the same time last Fall. These “disappearances” can be partly chalked up to Influencers simply taking a summer break as many workers do. Arnell Armon, for example, took a three-month break starting in June 2022, but others like her sister Alissa Ashley took longer breaks that lasted 9-months or more. As a cultural anthropologist who studies the hybridization of work and life among Black social media content creators in the United States, the timing of these breaks and their corresponding explanation videos, given the long careers of these particular Creators, reflects larger trends in the evolution of how social media is produced and consumed. Who better to learn from about the ins and outs of Influencing as a career than these YouTube OGs, who arguably pioneered the genres of beauty tutorials and lifestyle vlogging?

In June 2022, Arnell Armon posted a video on her channel about the future of influencers. In the video, which features her chatting while installing a wig she planned to wear to an outing that evening (a strategic combination of multiple trendy content forms) she talks about the importance of establishing a niche on the platform that can grow into a distinct personal brand. She expressed that having multiple personal interests or being a multi-hyphenate can cause confusion from a branding standpoint especially in an industry like “influencing,” which she says has become so “oversaturated.” “Maybe that’s why I get burnt out sometimes not just from the physical work, but mentally I’m like what am I doing, where am I going with this?” she muses aloud to the camera. The video which is one of the last two videos she published before her 3-month break from YouTube offers a lot of helpful advice for aspiring Creators. In it, Armon explains how TikTok has changed the definition of what an influencer is because content creators can grow an audience faster on that platform than on a long-form focused platform like YouTube. While she doesn’t believe that having a lot of followers automatically makes someone an influencer, she acknowledges that brands correlate large followings with perceived influence. In my own work, when asked how to distinguish content creators from influencers, one shorthand I use is that all influencers are content creators, but not all content creators are influencers. This seems to align with Arnell’s perspective that in order to be an influencer you have to be able to influence your audience to buy a product which not every content creator can do. That said, definitions of the two terms, “content creator” and “influencer” can often vary by person, but generally, those who are able to monetize their content are able to do so due to a perceived “influence” over their followers. In their respective “Why I Left YouTube” videos, Arnell Armon and Jackie Aina both discuss the decline in engagement for beauty content on YouTube. Both recognize that beauty content generates more engagement on TikTok where the audience is younger and generally newer to the beauty tutorial format compared to YouTube where the audience may have already been consuming beauty content for a longer period of time. Commenters of both videos affirmed these theories with anecdotal evidence. Aina’s nearly year-long break from YouTube from November 2021 thru September 2022 was the first visible break in her 13-year YouTube career. She offers several reasons for her “disappearance” from the platform, many having to do with changes in the industry and changes within herself.  In her “Why I Left YouTube” video which like Armon’s was formatted as a “Get Ready with Me” chat-style video, Aina comments on the traditional “work twice as hard, for half as much dynamic” that has long plagued Black workers across all industries, as well as the realities of the global Covid-19 pandemic which not only make makeup less of priority but presented a challenge for conceptualizing new content ideas about beauty without ignoring current events. For aspiring YouTubers, Aina’s video provides useful commentary about the labor involved in Influencing. She mentions the fact that although she personally wants to expand the kind of content she produces on YouTube, she has long struggled with wanting to hire help while still maintaining her “authenticity.” She also reveals that she has long been a one-person production team for most of her career and didn’t start working with an editor until her eighth or ninth year on YouTube.  “I could’ve hired help years ago, but I didn’t want to detach from what made my channel so special,” Aina explains. This isn’t always discussed publicly, but one of the reasons why more brands have begun to invest in influencer marketing for their campaigns is because most influencers produce high-quality content as one-person teams, managing roles as talent, producer, editor, and more. This makes influencer marketing more cost-effective than hiring a full production staff at times. In their “Why I Left YouTube” videos, Armon and Aina, both make mention the fact that it takes more dedicated resources and effort to produce long-form video content on YouTube than it does to produce short-form video content on TikTok and Instagram. Notably, all the aforementioned Creators who “disappeared” from YouTube were still active on TikTok and Instagram during their breaks. It is important to acknowledge that Creators who have been active on YouTube for as long as they have could be more eager to express their creativity in new ways. 

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YouTube is a platform that defies categorization because it is not solely a “social” platform or a “video” platform. It offers Creators aspects of both even if it makes it harder for media buyers with stretched budgets to determine how to best invest in the platform. Media buyers and Creators alike tend to invest their resources where they have the most engaged audience which is quickly becoming short-form video content platforms like TikTok. TikTok’s rapid growth in the United States now makes it the most popular place to watch video content. According to Pew Research Center, about a quarter of U.S. adults under 30 now regularly get news on TikTok. YouTube is attempting to compete with short-form video platforms like TikTok through its Shorts offering which debuted in 2020. Although YouTube Shorts seems like a copy/paste of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Snapchat, the offerings differ in their ability for Creators to monetize the content they produce on the platforms. TikTok launched its first revenue-sharing program in May 2022, called TikTok Pulse, which offers a 50/50 split to creators at least 18 years or older with a minimum of 100,000 followers who have posted at least five videos within the last 30 days. Meta (Instagram’s parent company) doesn’t currently have a dedicated revenue-share model for Reels creators on Instagram, but it does offer a revenue-share program on Facebook where creators receive 55% of revenue from ads that run at the bottom of their videos and in between the videos. That said, overall, TikTok payouts to Creators are reported to be smaller than Instagram payouts. As for YouTube, the company plans to launch a revenue-sharing model for Shorts in 2023 that will make it possible for Creators to monetize their Shorts content by applying to join a Shorts-focused revenue-sharing program on the platform which will offer Creators just under half (45%) of all ad revenue earned from Shorts. Although TikTok has risen in popularity over the past few years, Creators still value the communities they have created on YouTube and the ability to monetize on the platform. As Armon, who is part of YouTube’s “Top Creator” program, shares in her “Future of Influencers'' video, even if a Creator is not getting brand deals on YouTube, they can still generate income on the platform from Adsense, Google’s program that lets creators in the YouTube Partner Program get paid. This revenue-sharing program distinguishes YouTube from other platforms like TikTok in that Creators can get paid a certain amount of money per video view. 

Armon’s twin sister Alissa Ashley is also a prominent YouTube Beauty Guru who has taken a break from the platform in 2022 with her break lasting for 9-months compared to Armon’s 3-month hiatus. Both sisters joined the platform in 2014. Alissa was the first to post regularly on YouTube in 2015 with Arnell following suit in 2016. Although they are twins their approaches to Influencing are wholly different as were the public reactions to their individual breaks from YouTube. Ashley’s career on YouTube is a unique case study because even though she posts less frequently than her peers, her videos consistently generate high engagement. Her earliest videos provided tutorials on makeup application for hooded eyes which garnered millions of views, but over the past two years she has begun to explore interests outside of beauty, such as fitness and photography, across her social media platforms. Out of the Beauty Gurus whose breaks from YouTube I researched for this article, Ashley’s break has seemed to receive the most vitriol online. While her followers have largely embraced her pivot into fitness content, the subject became a trending topic on Twitter last year as she responded to a subtweet from Twitter user @blackfatqueer whose Tweet about a “major makeup girl trying to rebrand as a fitness girl” resulted in her followers assuming it was about Ashley and tagging her in the thread. Even a thread within the “BeautyGuruChatter” subreddit about the subject of her pivot generated nearly 200 comments and nearly 700 upvotes alone. In her “Why I Left YouTube” video Ashley shares that although the social chatter around her pivot contributed to her anxiety about continuing to create content on YouTube her primary reason for leaving YouTube for as long as she did is because she felt a lack of passion in all areas of her life at the time. For Ashley, dealing with burnout and a loss of passion for makeup drove her closer to her other interests. She shares that she spent much of her time away from YouTube going to the gym and going out with friends. “It was my way of escaping from my responsibilities and just zoning out from everything,” Ashley explains in the Get Ready With Me formatted video. Ashley goes on to share that now that she has returned to YouTube she plans to simply post content that she is interested in as she feels like it.

Feeding the content machine can grow cumbersome for Creators, especially those who have been in the game for multiple years. Pivoting and expanding one's interests into new and different arenas is one way that Influencers have been able to maintain longevity in their careers. As Armon explains in her “Future of Influencers” video, “The reality is if you are spending years on this platform, building a fanbase, growing your page, the end goal should be to start a business.”

The Black Beauty Effect Docuseries

Jackie Aina offers a strong case study on how to leverage social media fame into different business opportunities. In addition to founding the lifestyle brand FORVR Mood, she is an executive producer of the Xfinity docuseries, “The Black Beauty Effect” (2022) which discusses social change in the beauty industry from the perspectives of Black women. Tiarra Monet, another OG Beauty Guru, who first joined YouTube in 2008 is leveraging her social media fame to transition into a music career. In her own “Why I Left YouTube'' style video she offered a life update highlighting her three months away from YouTube in 2022. During the period she not only dealt with having Covid-19, but also a miscarriage, both of which she explains impacted her not only physically, but also emotionally. Towards the end of the video she reflects on her transition into music which for her isn’t really a pivot because the first video on her channel was a music cover. Monet released a Christmas Song called “Snow Angel'' on November 30, 2022 which she has smartly made copyright free for Creators to use in their vlogmas content.

Tricia Hersey writes about the power of rest as a liberatory practice in her new book, “Rest Is Resistance” (October 2022). Hersey, also known as the Nap Bishop, is the founder of The Nap Ministry which is an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance by curating sacred spaces for the community to rest via Collective Napping Experiences, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. In a section of her book that promotes the power of the imagination, Hersey writes about the month-long “Sabbaths” she regularly takes from social media and labor and how they have become an important personal, spiritual, and political practice for her. “I have done this consistently and name it as one of the main ways I am able to continue to be inspired as an artist and activist in the midst of the beast of capitalism,” Hersey writes. She goes on to explain the importance of experimenting with rest practices for Black women in particular. Hersey promotes the importance of detoxing from social media which she believes is a form of labor in itself and an extension of capitalism. “There is no vision or model of a Black woman to be free from the exploitation of her emotional, physical, and spiritual labor,” she writes. For the Black Creators highlighted in this article the breaks they took from producing long-form content on YouTube to explore other interests elsewhere, both online and offline, was their version of Hersey’s “Sabbath” practice. Those who offered explanations for their “disappearance” from YouTube to their followers like Hersey, described their breaks or Sabbaths as periods of healing that allowed them to not only recover from extreme exhaustion, but to reconnect with themselves and their purpose. News headlines can make it seem as if “Influencing” is a new career path, however, for Beauty Gurus on YouTube who have been consistently cranking out content for the past decade (or more), experimenting with boundary-setting and rest as well as understanding their purpose, has been the secret to their longevity in the Creator economy. If you want to know what longevity looks like in an industry that changes as rapidly as Influencer marketing then look no further than the careers of these real OGs.