This is a question that has been debated across generations, to which your answer depends on your mentality and thought process. My personal answer is: ‘If you can make money off of it, then it’s a job’, but I don’t want to explain my side of the argument without discussing the opposing one.
Reasons to answer ‘no’
Is your career really financially stable if long lost tweets, from the 2000’s, can destroy your reputation in the eyes of the public? Even if you make it through, it’s likely that people will remember you being ‘cancelled’ for years after the scandal happened.
Being an influencer can also be viewed more as a hobby than an actual career. After all, professional lego builders are rare- and you don’t really see any ‘professional toy unboxers’.
Also, kids run social media accounts sometimes, and if ‘Influencer’ is a real job, then major media platforms could potentially be liable for child labor cases. This is if it weren’t for the fact that a federal law called the ‘Communications Decency Act’ has specifically exempted website hosts and ISPs from most claims like that.
As anybody with more than zero followers/subscribers on any social platform can be considered an Influencer in its broadest definition, some 67 year old great-aunt who’s only tweeted once about making a delicious pasta salad can be considered an Influencer, even though she’s been retired for years.
Reasons to answer yes
According to most sources: a job is classified as ‘a paid position of regular employment.’ , meaning that anything that you get paid for and do regularly is indeed a job.
If being an ‘Influencer’ isn’t a real job then comedians/entertainers in general could be considered as unemployed, but I don’t really think folks like Jerry Seinfeld or Jack Black could be considered as unemployed when they’re self-made millionaires.
In the grand scheme of things, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are all companies that pay their users to promote them. The influencers and the people operating the sites are the advertisers; Have you ever been watching a YouTube video, and then all of a sudden you get an ad for YouTube? Although this seems strange, its purpose is to make your brain regard it on the same level as the other big brands advertising on YouTube. Therefore, you subconsciously take Youtube a bit more seriously as a brand. This, along with things like ‘ Youtube Rewind’, make people want to become users and attract more potential advertisers, making the site more profitable.
What to take away from this
No matter what side of the argument you’re on, it’s undeniable that being an Influencer fits the definition of a job. Even though ‘Influencer’ isn’t really an accurate occupation, as they are truly advertisers/entertainers.
