The many meanings of measure: Social media metrics and their implications for collective organizing in the influencer economy

Abstract

The professional cultural production of social media influencers is mediated by social media metrics. However, metrics are the site of significant ambiguity and contest across the influencer economy. What meanings and meaningfulness do these cultural producers derive from their measures? How do they shape how influencers understand the value of their work and themselves, and with what implications for the possibility of collective organizing across this sector of the creative and cultural industries? Drawing from 16 semi-structured interviews with social media influencers, this article examines the complex and contradictory meanings that influencers derive from their social media metrics. Findings show that the meaning of metrics is fraught and far from stable, oscillating between an imposed and coercive force that does not define their worth and an internalized value system that they believe and invest in.

Introduction

Social media metrics have become powerful digital artefacts that shape the parameters of work and distribution of rewards for creative professionals working across the increasingly platformized cultural industries (Poell et al., 2022). These digital artefacts are particularly significant for social media influencers, a group of platform-mediated cultural producers who have cultivated a loyal online audience and earn income by partnering with brands to produce and circulate sponsored content. For influencers, their professional identity and ability to earn an income depend directly upon their metrics, a term I use inclusively to refer to the collection of quantified indicators both publicly displayed and available through analytic dashboards that calculate the followers, views, likes, shares, comments, and so on that posts receive. These artefacts are potent signifiers in the emerging industry of “social media entertainment” (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). They are used by platforms, advertisers, and cultural producers alike to tell stories about the resonance of cultural texts, as well as the needs and wants of online audiences.

However, metrics are the venue of significant ambiguity and contest (Drott, 2020; Grohmann et al., 2022). For social media influencers, whose livelihoods are shaped by them, the meaning of metrics is far from settled and self-evident. Where platforms deploy algorithmic decision-making to rank and distribute content in opaque, mutable, and uneven ways, there is significant mystery surrounding what social media metrics actually mean. This article explores the varied meanings that influencers attribute to social media metrics. Drawing from 16 semi-structured interviews, it explores the dynamic, fraught, and ambivalent relationship that influencers maintain with their metrics and the platforms that deliver them.

In what follows, I first provide an overview of the contextual and theoretical grounding for this work in the literature. After summarizing the study’s methods, I relay the findings, which paint a picture of social media as a site of tension. The discussion considers what these findings suggest about the possibilities of labour organizing among influencers.

Literature review

Cultural labour and platformization

The ascent of platform media was initially heralded as a decidedly democratizing force in the world of cultural production. It was understood to reduce barriers and facilitate a more open, participatory, diverse, and egalitarian cultural sphere (Benkler, 2006; Jenkins, 2006). In contrast to the infrastructures of mass media, wherein the means of production and distribution for cultural texts are highly centralized, platforms seem to open the field by radically reducing the cost and difficulty of creating, publishing, and distributing content (Poell et al., 2022). This is because platform businesses operate, in one way, as market intermediaries. They create, host, and manage marketplaces while deploying algorithmic decision-making to manage the exchanges therein. Platforms act as “matchmakers,” facilitating the connection between different actors such as cultural producers, audiences, and advertisers (Evans and Schmalensee, 2016). In their capacity to coordinate markets, the advocates of the platform economy argue that platforms disintermediate employment relations, inviting individual actors to become entrepreneurs, who can bring their individual talents directly to consumers with the freedom to pursue their passions, build independent careers, and “unlock” the value of their personal assets (Kenney and Zysman, 2016). For cultural producers, the message has been that anyone equipped with the necessary mobile technology and an Internet connection can create and upload content, find an audience with which it resonates, and chart independent careers as cultural entrepreneurs.

The influencer seemed to embody the promise of the platformization of media. This figure rose to prominence seemingly by the power of popular demand, having cultivated a large and attentive online audience drawn to the sense of authenticity honed by a calibrated performance of amateurism, “realness,” and intimacy (Abidin, 2015, 2017, 2018; Cunningham and Craig, 2017). These actors leveraged that platform-mediated popularity into revenue, first by way of advertising dollars from brands eager to access attentive digital media audiences (Hund, 2023), and more recently through a variety of platform monetization schemes and forms of direct fan funding that have emerged and proliferated as the creator economy has expanded (Paredes et al., 2025).

Platformization “furnishes the potential for individual producers to be economically emancipated from legacy media companies” (Poell et al., 2022: 50). In some ways, influencers do enjoy significant creative and professional autonomy in their work. They technically have the freedom to decide when, where, and how often they create cultural texts, as well as choice in the tools, software, and subject matter (Omidi, 2026). Influencers operate as individualized, micromedia brands who exercise control over creative conception and execution, in contrast to many workers in other creative fields whose skills are channelled into the production of broader collective projects or whose project selection is subject to oversight (Henderson, 2019). While creatives in advertising agencies must tailor their work to sometimes tightly prescribed client expectations (Mitchell, 2001), influencers enjoy relative creative freedom in what they produce. Industry trade press commonly advises brands to concede creative control to individual influencers who have an intuitive understanding of what will resonate with their audience (Borchers, 2023; Five by Five UK, 2024).

Influencers themselves tend to participate in the reproduction of mythologies surrounding work on social media platforms as a site of fun, freedom, passion, and self-expression (Duffy and Wissinger, 2017), while hesitating to speak publicly about the constraints and vulnerabilities associated with platformized media work (Duffy et al., 2023). These discourses are self-reinforcing, functioning to draw in new cohorts of “aspirational labourers” (Duffy, 2015) looking for fulfilling creative careers while modelling the narratives and norms of self-presentation to follow to succeed in the industry.

However, scholars have noted that the autonomy and creative freedom of influencer cultural production are refracted in various ways as they negotiate a complex balance between satisfying their own creative desires, those of their audience, the expectations of brand partners, and the dictates of platforms (Cotter, 2019; Duffy, 2017; Fan, 2025; Glatt, 2024). Influencers are “platform-dependent” producers (Poell et al., 2022: 13), which is to say that they are tethered to the platforms where they cultivate and access their audience and rely heavily on platforms to create, distribute, and monetize their content. As independents, they have very limited power to shape decision-making processes of the platforms where they work or challenge actions taken, and they are particularly vulnerable to changes in platform architecture and governance that can transform their income or eliminate their accounts without warning (Kumar, 2019; O’Meara, 2019). Platforms manufacture a state of uncertainty for cultural producers through opaque and mutable algorithmic content distribution systems that demand constant attention and compel a posture of perpetual innovation in order to remain visible (Van Doorn and Velthius, 2018).

In contrast to the ethos of enhanced openness and egalitarianism, platforms have also proven highly uneven in their patterns of distribution. Platformed cultural producers still face “blockbuster dynamics,” wherein the vast majority of visibility and associated rewards flow in skewed ways towards a tiny cluster of top creators (Poell et al., 2022: 184). While platforms have the capability to steer attention in ways that amplify cultural diversity, evidence suggests that they choose instead to favour big hits (Rietveld et al., 2020), while reproducing patterns of (in)visibility that reward commercially palatable creators and sideline marginalized identities and less brandable content (Bishop, 2018). Success under platformized conditions is contingent upon one’s ability to “optimize” for platform logics of distribution, align to a clear commercial vertical, maintain an active content production schedule, and avoid falling afoul of monetization and moderation enforcements (Arriagada and Ibáñez, 2020; Bishop, 2025; Caplan and Gillespie, 2020; Glatt, 2022).

While the influencer operates with the risk and responsibility of an independent creative career, as the above demonstrates, platforms act with significant power to shape cultural production upon these digital infrastructures in ways that serve their business interests. In this, platforms operate not only as market intermediaries that facilitate exchanges between cultural producers and audiences but also as “shadow employers” who managerialize cultural production towards the profitability of platforms (Gandini, 2018; Omidi, 2026). They subject them to various technological and governance systems that monitor, discipline, and evaluate their work in ways that chafe against the notions of independence, freedom, and self-directed creativity that animate the field.

The creative autonomy, self-expression, and professional independence of the influencer must be negotiated against their subordination to the infrastructural logics, governance rules, and business objectives of the platforms where they engage in their cultural production. In many ways, this tension reflects and extends one that researchers of the cultural industries have long acknowledged, where the creative autonomy and personal fulfillment that workers seek out in careers in the cultural industries sit in tension with the coercions and exploitation of the capitalist economic system through which this activity occurs (Banks, 2012; Huws, 2006–2007, 2010; Taylor and Littleton, 2008). It is the preposition of this article that measurement is a key site where the tension between the two express themselves most acutely. For the influencer, metrics mediate this tension.

Measurement at work

Measurement “on the job” has long been a site of tremendous disciplinary force over workers and the labour process. From the time when Frederick Taylor and his disciples first descended onto the shop floor with their stopwatches and clipboards, measurement has been a powerful instrument of managerial control, allowing managers to map and subsequently define the standards of the working day, surveilling workers’ processes, and implementing benchmarks and quotas for productive output that entrench norms defined by owners around the appropriate pace and process of production (Braverman, 1974). Measurement defines when workers have met expectations, done enough, or done so correctly. As De Angelis and Harvie (2009) write, it defines the “what, how, how much, why, and who of social production” (15). In other words, measure is a tool by which capital exerts its demand for certain ways of doing, a certain quantity of outputs, and a certain pace of production onto working subjects (De Angelis and Harvie, 2009).

Metrics function as a type of job measurement instrument for influencers, facilitating the assessment of their creative acts. These are the languages by which brands justify decisions around which influencers to contract; they act as the benchmarks that allow or restrict access to platform monetization programmes, they structure negotiations with advertising clients, and they shape pay. While strong social metrics hold out the promise of access to the next job, the next connection, the next customer, or the next big payout, unimpressive metrics curb hireability, diminish rates of pay, or preclude access to the paid labour market entirely. In this, they demand ongoing attention and maintenance, compel certain behaviours and punish others, and shape cultural production (Bainotti, 2024; Duffy et al., 2021; Rocamora, 2022; Van Doorn and Velthius, 2018).

However, the intermediation of platforms facilitates the disciplinary force of measurement at a distance from the traditional employment relation. They function as an instrument of what Gandini (2018) calls techno-normative control, an indirect form of control where technological interfaces, algorithmic decision-making, and the metrics they deliver discipline and direct workers in particular ways, while normative discourses about what these systems facilitate and what the measures mean “encourage workers to internalize metric-driven norms” (Omidi, 2026: 182). However, as metrics discipline influencer labour, they are also highly fraught and contested instruments, which the next section examines.

The ambiguity of metrics

Social media metrics are part of a lineage of audience measurement mechanisms refined across the second half of the 20th century and deployed throughout the cultural industries to evaluate the resonance and popularity of cultural products with mass audiences (Turow, 1997). Instruments like the Nielsen ratings and Audit Bureau of Circulation have long sought to render audiences knowable, predictable, and therefore available to profit from (Duffy et al., 2021; Ettema and Whitney, 1994). Within this lineage, the notion that metrics provide clarity regarding audience interests and the social influence of cultural producers is one that is maintained by platforms and which sustains the influencer marketing industry itself. Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, promote their package of analytics as “insights” into the composition, tastes, and habits of online audiences. Third-party analytics firms and influencer marketing platforms offer analytics dashboards that promise to render the intangibles of social influence monitorable and predictable for brands (Arriagada and Valderrama, 2025; Bishop, 2021; Rocamora, 2022). As Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy (2022) put it, “A whole cottage industry of data intermediaries has sprung up that make metrics legible and works hard to sustain the idea that platform data can tame, predict, or help better understand audiences” (145). Alongside these firms, metric demystification has become a genre unto itself, where self-styled “experts” of platforms like YouTube and Instagram instruct creators on how platforms work, how they should understand the outcomes, and how to adjust themselves for metrified success (Bishop, 2020).

However, despite these stabilizing efforts, metrics are far from straightforward. In the first instance, metrics do not act upon influencers with consistency or impartiality. These indicators are racialized and delimit the possibility for action among influencers in different global contexts in wildly uneven ways (Arriagada and Siles, 2023; Christin and Lu, 2023). Metrics are also the site of significant mystery, ambiguity, and debate. Because there is little transparency with regard to how platforms rank and distribute content, cultural producers can never truly know whether, and to what extent, their content receives low quantities of engagement because audiences are not interested or because it is being suppressed by platforms (Bishop, 2025). The notion of “shadow banning” has emerged to describe the collective suspicion that platforms can and do surreptitiously intervene to curb the visibility of posts (Are, 2022; Gillespie, 2022). Given their monopoly of knowledge over how any piece of content circulates, however, platforms can deny shadow banning and tend to dismiss complaints from content creators as misunderstandings of sophisticated technical operations (Cotter, 2023). Nevertheless, suspicion about what these numbers actually represent is palpable. Content creators develop folk theories (Savolainen, 2022) and engage in “algorithmic gossip” (Bishop, 2019) to discuss how platforms intervene to distribute visibility and therefore shape metrics outside of simple explanations around not being engaging or interesting enough to capture audience attention.

Metrics are the site of significant contestation. Against this backdrop of opacity and uncertainty, an entire illicit marketplace of strategic engagement has emerged to inflate likes, follows, and other popularity indicators (Drott, 2020; Grohmann et al., 2022). In engagement pods, for instance, groups of influencers collectively agree to mutually engage with each other’s content to deliver some stability of outcomes (O’Meara, 2019). Engagement bots mimic the actions of humans and help produce the desired forms of engagement on accounts (Confessore et al., 2018). Other operations promise “real” engagement generated from click farms, where human workers, often located in Latin America and South East Asia, spend long hours performing click-based tasks for micro-payments (Symon, 2017). As Grohmann et al. (2022) point out, this invisible labour from click farm workers supports and sustains the activities, economies, and infrastructures of platformized cultural production at large. Against these efforts, influencer marketing agencies advertise “authentic engagement detectors,” which promise to eliminate or discount “suspicious” interactions, lowering overall quantities of engagement and recalibrating negotiations on brands’ terms (Arriagada and Valderrama, 2025).

Fans also act strategically and collectively to shape metrics. They coordinate to intensify the data flows associated with their favourite producers in a practice discussed as “data fandom,” popular in East Asian markets (Pan, 2025; Zhang and Negus, 2020). Alternatively, antifans and competitors purchase followers or likes for rival accounts with the intention of having them suspended by platforms, damaging their credibility, or crashing their engagement rate to make them less appealing to brand partners (ITP Live, 2020).

Through each of these examples, different actors seek to intervene and assert themselves and their interests in the measurement, evaluation, and success of platformed creative production. Rather than impartial measurements of the resonance of cultural producers and their outputs, metrics are deeply interwoven with culture itself (Christin and Lewis, 2021). They shape what they are meant to measure, as actors respond recursively to their presence and their implications (Espeland and Sauder, 2007).

While metrics are fraught in their meaning, they are nevertheless compelling terrain. These instruments are part of “the quantification of the social,” where, thanks to the instruments of ubiquitous datafication, subjects increasingly understand the self and social relations through a quantitative lens (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Metrics offer to reduce the ambiguities of complex social relationships to digestible numerical values and configure abstract notions of social standing into “something that can be quantified, qualified, and publicized” (Marwick, 2013: 206). As such, these can be powerfully meaningful instruments with a strong affective dimension (Kennedy and Hill, 2017) that drives continuing investments of creative energies into their maintenance or growth (Grosser, 2014; Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020; Mears and Beauvais, 2025). Given their complex operations, the following explores how influencers make meaning from metrics and with what implications for the prospect of collective organizing across this field.

Method

Sixteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with influencers who work across genres that include lifestyle, beauty, fashion, travel, health and wellness, cooking, crafting, and interior decorating. Audience sizes ranged from approximately 6000 to 200,000 and included a mix of well-established and professionalizing influencers. All participants had experience working under contract to produce advertising content for brands. Half reported their influencer work as full-time, and half reported supplemental employment across a range of roles both within and outside the cultural industries, including office management, marketing, retail, television, the service industry, and photography.

Interviewees were between 24 and 41 years of age and located in English-speaking countries, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The study was strongly skewed towards female-identifying participants; 15 identified as women and 1 identified as a man. All interviewees maintained an active content production schedule on multiple platforms simultaneously, showcasing the tendency within this field to spread bet one’s production to mitigate the risks associated with singular platform dependence (Glatt, 2022). However, all reported their primary platform of paid work as Instagram, and our discussions centred predominantly on work on this platform. Other platforms where interviewed influencers also reported producing content include X/Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook.

Importantly, the geographic, demographic, and platform composition of this study’s participants limits the overall generalizability of the research. Findings do not necessarily map onto the experiences of influencers in different national and geopolitical contexts, with different gender identities, and working primarily on alternative platforms to Instagram. While this narrow scope has lent analytical specificity through a degree of common experience, it should be noted that this study speaks from a specifically Anglo-American and Northwestern European perspective, which is one part of a global, varied, and uneven industry (Poell et al., 2024). I return to reflect upon how this fact might come to bear on efforts to organize across geographic context in the discussion.

Interviewees were asked questions related to the labour process for platformized cultural production, how they negotiate the unique challenges put forward by platform environments, and working with brands. The present analysis focuses upon a subset of data from those broader interviews wherein interviewees were asked about how they interpret metrics and how they shape their work. Interviews were audio-recorded and manually transcribed. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the anonymity of participants.

The analysis adhered broadly to the steps of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Data was initially coded descriptively and organized by topic area. Codes were subsequently reviewed and refined into central themes in an iterative and recursive process. Findings are organized into four thematic sections: (1) articulating industry’s meanings, (2) audiences and the emotional resonance of measure, (3) metrics as platform demands, and (4) contesting measure. These themes showcase the predominant lenses through which influencers discuss and interpret metrics. While they have been separated for analytical clarity, there is significant overlap and fluidity across distinct categories as influencers move across boundaries in their descriptions of the role of metrics in their lives.

Findings

Articulating industry’s meanings

Across Facebook and Instagram’s creator-focused messaging, metrics are positioned as largely unambiguous statements of audience interests and behaviour. The landing page for Meta Business Suite, for example, explains metrics this way: “Detailed insights help you better understand your audience and optimize your content” (Meta Business Suite, n.d.). From the perspective of Meta, metrics reveal audiences and support creators in improving their content.

Several interviewees discussed social media metrics in ways that align with this framing. Samantha, a 30-year-old lifestyle influencer in New Zealand, articulated metrics as straightforward expressions of influencer skill and content quality. She dismissed claims from her colleagues that Instagram shapes metrics to incentivize or dissuade certain activities from influencers as “conspiracy theories.” Instagram, she explained,

demands higher quality content from the users of Instagram, which I think is right. [. . .] Only those who are posting good content are coming out on top. That’s what I think. [. . .] If you post good content and engage with people in your niche, you’ll actually get rewarded for it.

Samantha perceives metrics as representative of the quality of content production. She expresses the belief that these numbers are legitimate and valid indicators of the quality of the work of platformized cultural producers. “Good” or high-quality content is recognized and accurately captured via strong quantitative indicators, while low-quality content is identifiable by weak numbers. This perspective suggests that platforms are largely meritocratic systems that adjudicate quality according to a set of objective and fair criteria, distributing visibility and its associated benefits accordingly. Metrics reflect meritocracy; they are perceived to map appropriately onto the subjects to whom they are tethered.

Through this lens, it is the subject who must take responsibility for the numbers. This was a sentiment also expressed by Jessica, a 24-year-old photography and lifestyle influencer in the United Kingdom. She explained,

My feelings are if something on Instagram changes and it has a negative impact on what you do then you need to take a look at yourself and be like, “how can I keep up with it?” [. . .] I’ve had times where my photos haven’t been seen very much, and so I’ve looked at it and thought, “what can I do to change it?” I never liked the thought of putting the blame on Instagram because I think you need to take responsibility for yourself. Every time I hear the algorithm argument, I just kind of try to avoid it.

In this case, “tak[ing] responsibility for yourself” means accepting ownership of the numbers and responsibility for them. There is a neoliberal logic of personal accountability that is particularly perceptible in Jessica’s views, where the individual is the sole agent to whom all outcomes are attributable, and upon whom culpability for success or failure inevitably settles. This stance of personal accountability, initiative, and self-management is suited to the asymmetries of knowledge and power that characterize work as a platform-dependent cultural producer. In the absence of clear knowledge or control over how platforms will assess, rank, and render content visible, the most readily available course of action is to turn inward and adjust oneself in pursuit of better results. Jessica dismisses arguments from her peers about the role of algorithms in these outcomes, refusing to participate in the “algorithmic gossip” (Bishop, 2019) that her peers use to make sense of their results.

Samantha and Jessica’s perspectives must be read in light of their own success as platformed cultural producers on Instagram. They were among the most successful influencers interviewed in this study. Both are full-time content creators. In addition to her personal influencer brand, Samantha operates an influencer consultancy business and podcast in which she provides industry advice. Jessica had been an early success in Instagram’s emerging influencer economy in the mid-2010s. She had benefited from having her profile featured in a spotlighted users list, which promoted her account to new Instagram sign-ups and brought her consistent visibility for a time, along with a steady influx of followers and engagement.

Emotional resonance of measure

The sense of personal responsibility for social media metrics was also perceptible in the expressions of embarrassment, shame, and guilt that interviewees shared about unimpressive numbers. This was clear in comments from Rashida, a 32-year-old lifestyle and interior design influencer in California, who described the experience of having to share unimpressive metrics with brands as feeling “really embarrassing.”

Sometimes that’s like “Ugh, really? Do I have to?” It’s really embarrassing. I want you [brands] to like what I did and be proud of the content I created and the engagement I created. When it’s just like, “Hey guess what! Twelve percent of my followers saw the thing you gave me to post.” That really sucks.

Rashida’s comments highlight an incongruence between how she values her cultural production and the instruments of measure that her advertising contract employers use to evaluate her. She wants them to understand her value in terms of the quality of the cultural texts she produces, and her demonstrated capacity to capture attention and provoke others to respond. Her brand partners, however, seek to evaluate her, in part, on her capacity to make their products maximally visible. For Rashida, quantified indicators like “reach” misrepresent and diminish the value of what she does. She explained that unimpressive metrics can become a significant source of stress and disappointment for creatives such as herself: “[Low numbers] obviously feel so shitty. [. . .] It gets some people really down, and they get really, really, really bummed out about it.”

As Rashida describes, metrics have a strong emotional resonance. Sarah, a 35-year-old lifestyle and interior design influencer, expressed sentiments that indicate a similar affective intensity. She explained that she often hesitates to look at her metrics “because they’re depressing.” She described how her content production strategy is often informed by this affective experience of metrics:

If I’ve gone a few weeks without getting some homeruns I will be like “ok, it’s time to put up something that I know is going to do well.” Part of it is my own external validation. I don’t want to have a row of stinkers! Of course, I’m going to put up a photo of cupcakes to make everyone happy.

Sarah modulates her cultural production to court the “analytic gaze” (Bainotti, 2024). As she puts it, the numbers validate her, affirming her status as a skilled practitioner and influential actor in tune with public sentiments and tastes.

Gillian, a 32-year-old crafting influencer, was animated in our discussion of metrics. She explained, “As a professional social media expert, metrics are everything. I’m constantly checking mine and comparing it to others, and checking others and comparing it to mine.” She described a scenario of comparing her metrics to others: “Ok, they’re double the size of us in terms of audience, but we’re crushing them in terms of reach and accessibility. People are listening to us as opposed to them, even though they’re trouncing us in terms of size.” Gillian was visibly excited about the topic of metrics. When I pointed this out and asked about the motivating effects of metrics, she became more pensive and explained, “Well, it’s motivating if you’re excelling, but it’s not motivating if you’re not.”

Gillian’s comments on metrics indicate a highly competitive relationship between cultural producers. Metrics facilitate her comparisons, rendering the unique and indissoluble mix of visibility, attention, and trust that gives shape to specific relationships of influence into quantities that can be commensurated across different actors. They provide the basis for a combative orientation between producers who can now be understood to be “crushing” and “trouncing” one another. This competitive, hierarchical posture in relation to other producers is antithetical to a lens that would allow for identifying shared interests, fostering solidarity, and engaging in mutual aid or collective organizing with other platform-dependent producers in the field.

In each of these cases, the meanings that Gillian, Sarah, and Rashida attribute to their metrics have a perceptible affective intensity to them. They elicit feelings of excitement, enthusiasm, and pride when things are going well, and depression, embarrassment, and anxiety when they are not. It is also worth noting that the moments when influencers were reflecting on metrics through the lens of audience interests were when the affective dimension of measurement was most perceptible. They are strongly animating when read as meaningful indicators of one’s status and resonance in a community.

Metrics as platform demands

In other instances, metrics were discussed, not through a lens of content quality or audience interests, but as the platform company communicating its expectations of influencers. Charlotte, a 36-year-old travel influencer from Toronto, for instance, put it like this:

I think, basically, at the end of the day Instagram’s goal is to make money and the way they make money is by selling sponsored placements, right? And the way they are able to ask more for those placements is to be able to show metrics for how much time users spend on their platform. It’s in their interest to be promoting and supporting features that increase the amount of time everyone spends on the platform. So, if you’re a creator, lots of your followers are likely staying on the platform longer [for your content], and so they’ll throw you a bone [by enhancing the reach of your content]. It’s basically a reward feedback loop.

Charlotte understands metrics as the platform “throwing her a bone” for fostering the type of fan activity that is profitable for the company. Rashida also spoke about metrics as a reward for using the platform in certain desirable ways: “Any new feature that comes out, if you use it, then you’ll get more engagement. [. . .] In general, they just reward you if you evolve with them.” Sarah also used the language of reward to talk about high numbers. She explained that when she encourages her followers to interact with the latest features, “the platform rewards you by bumping the photos in your main feed as well.”

In each of these cases, the metrics that influencers receive are conceptualized as representative of the desires of the platform company and the influencer’s ability to satisfy those. They are a form of compensation doled out to influencers who foster the types of participation and interactivity that the platform seeks to cultivate. Rather than indicators of audience preference or evaluations of the quality of their work, metrics are here understood as communicating to influencers what the platform company wants them to do and how it wants them to engage with the platform. In this sense, metrics express a demand from the platform, rewarding compliance and punishing deviance from this demand.

Contesting measure

Trust in numbers was not universal or consistent. This was held in tension with dissenting views. Interviewees were often reluctant to accept that their metrified reputational indicators are an accurate statement of their popularity, their influence, their relationship to their online community, or their skill as professional creatives. Tracy, for instance, explained her frustration with being evaluated on the basis of engagement metrics by describing the invisible chasm that exists between people who appreciate her creative work and the number of “likes” a post receives: “Perhaps a thousand more people saw the picture and thought, ‘Wow, that’s really cool!’ but that just can’t be captured.” Nicole, a 42-year-old lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, described her relationship with metrics as “enormously frustrating” and raised her suspicions that these numbers don’t represent the interests of her audience because “there is seemingly no rhyme or reason to why something performed well and why something else very similar performed poorly.” Angela, a 30-year-old fashion influencer in New York, shared a similar doubt in the veracity of the numbers. She had taken her incredulity to the source, voicing her skepticism about what her metrics actually mean to several professional contacts at Instagram. She explained,

I’m in touch with some people at Instagram. I feel like they have something to defend because it’s their policy, and I don’t like their policy. [. . .] In my experience, they deny most of the things that I tell them are my issues. They say, “no that’s not the case.” Obviously, they can’t deny the algorithm, but they would say, “This should work to your benefit. It should actually make things better.” But I don’t actually see how it makes things better! Let’s agree to disagree is usually how those conversations end.

Angela’s experiences interacting with representatives from Instagram provide an evocative illustration of what Cotter (2023) describes as “black box gaslighting,” where users’ lived experiences with algorithms are dismissed as untrue or impossible by platforms. Angela’s experience of the platform and its mechanisms of circulation are invalidated as “not the case,” and the experiential knowledges she has developed about the logics of those systems are denied. Implicit in the platform representative’s response, of course, is the suggestion that low numbers are a truer reflection of the quality of her work, her skill as a cultural producer, and the quality of her relationships with her followers. If she is receiving low numbers, this colleague’s comment suggests that the source of this problem and responsibility for it is located with her. Angela rejects this explanation and what it implies about the quality of her work. However, she has little power to move her claims forward and must simply close the conversation by “agreeing to disagree.” Cotter’s (2023) work shows how black box gaslighting is one way that platforms maintain epistemic authority over what platforms do and how they work. The present example extends this line of thought, suggesting that the epistemic authority which black box gaslighting grants platforms is not accepted wholesale by creators, but begrudgingly and in half measures, largely because they have few mechanisms by which to assert the validity of their own understandings.

Twenty-six-year-old Toronto fashion influencer, Kelly, was also dubious about how much personal responsibility she should take for her low numbers.

Beforehand, I would easily get 2,000+ likes on photos, 3,000+ even. It was really, really great. And then you notice this massive drop. When you think about it, it’s like, how does someone have 30,000 followers, but a maximum of 400 likes? It doesn’t add up.

For Kelly, the numbers don’t “add up” in a way that adequately reflects her capacities as a cultural producer, her influence, or the value of her relationships with her online community. She questions how they valorize her. Yet, despite her skepticism, it became clear in our conversation that the metrics nevertheless affect her self-perception. She continued, “It sucks and obviously it plays a lot on your mentality at times. You think, am I producing good stuff? Are people liking what I’m doing?”

Kelly’s comments highlight the conflicting and contradictory nature of her relationship with social metrics. Her feelings of suspicion about the numbers and her efforts to distance herself from them are, at times, inflected by feelings of insecurity and self-doubt that perhaps they do represent something real about her value. These artefacts are both claimed and refused in a way that oscillates between identification with and rejection of them.

This tension was also visible in conversation with Angela. She grappled with a sense of incongruence between how she evaluates the quality of her work and her relationship with her audience, and what her metrics suggest about these things.

Sometimes it makes me insecure about even the quality of my work. Like am I doing something wrong? Because these used to do so well, but now [trails off], you know. I guess it makes you insecure about the product that you deliver. Although, if I think about it, I know it’s not the product, I know it’s the technology. But at the same time, you’re trying to explain it for yourself, thinking “what could I do better?” or “what could I do to improve this for myself?” So yeah, that’s a struggle.

Like Kelly, Angela struggles with the truth of her numbers. Again, there is oscillation between accepting and internalizing the meaning of measure and refusing them as externally imposed instruments that are not representative of her values. In one moment, these are insightful indicators of the quality of her work. In the next, they are technological interlopers that diminish and misrepresent her value. Interestingly, in parallel to her protestations, Angela articulates an entrepreneurial ethos in response to her low numbers. Even while refusing to accept them, she explains that she is nevertheless compelled to want to “do better” and “improve” in the face of them. In this way, her comments echo those of Jessica, described above, who explained that low numbers drive her towards the question, “what can I do to change it?”

Both Kelly and Angela express suspicion about what the numbers mean and the responsibility that they should internalize for these quantified outputs. At the same time, these numbers impose upon their psyche and sense of self-worth and catalyse action to respond and improve them. The metrics have a powerful ambivalence; they can be both evidence of inadequate measurement tools that don’t express their value and meaningful representations of their resonance with online audiences.

Discussion: What do metrics mean and with what implications for collective organizing?

My conversations with influencers about metrics showcase ambivalent meanings and competing interpretations. These numbers are unsettled in what they say and what they represent. They stand in for a variety of actors, at once representative of audiences, platform businesses, technology, and themselves. Are social measures about fickle audiences, as suggested in Sarah’s comments about “making everyone happy” with her cupcake photos? Do they say something about the creator and their capacity to “do good work” as Samantha believes about those posting “good content [and] coming out on top”? Are they representative of platform businesses, their priorities, and demands for certain efforts and actions as the “reward feedback loop” that Charlotte describes? Or do they stand as evidence of an inadequate technology that fails to capture value like Angela asserts when she says that she knows the problem is “not her, but the technology”? It seems that they can be about all of these things. The meaning of social measure is multiple and mutable, uncertain and unsettled.

What are the implications of this deeply ambivalent relationship to metrics for the possibility of collective organizing across this sector? This study highlights two interrelated challenges: the tendency towards internalization that ambiguity produces, and the tendency towards fragmentation and techno-normative policing across differently positioned influencers.

Internalization

The varied lenses through which influencers discuss their metrics reflect a competing tension between social media metrics as an internalized value system that speaks a “truth” about the individual producer, their work, and their audience and an external, imposed, and coercive set of instruments that reflect the inadequacies of technology to capture their value or that express the narrow business interests of platforms and their demands of cultural producers. This tension reflects what Gandini (2018) calls the platform’s dual capacity as market intermediary and shadow employer, between platforms as venues where audiences and producers meet, and platforms as managerial infrastructures that direct and compel influencer activity in specific ways. Platforms maintain ambiguity of their role in organizing encounters between content producers and audiences, and so influencers can never feel truly resolved in their understanding of what the measures mean. Are metrics reflections of themselves and their standing in an online community or of platforms?

The choice matters. How influencers interpret, and therefore respond to, metrics has direct implications for the possibility of fostering solidarity and for collective organizing. Understood as reflections of audiences, the role of the platform fades into the background, and metrics help to individualize producers, keep them focused on their creative outputs, and locked in a competitive posture towards one another. Understood as indicative of platform logics, demands, and limitations, however, metrics become the site of a collective grievance and an opening from which to begin articulating shared demands.

The influencers in this study understand their metrics in diverse, ambiguous, and conflicting ways, sometimes simultaneously. The platform, as an actor in this equation, advances and recedes into the background in its explanations. Its mediating presence between themselves and audiences is not consistently perceived, enacting a particular type of techno-normative control that oscillates between the obtrusive and the imperceptible. The result is that influencers periodically internalize metrics. These become meaningful indicators of their worth, producing a sense of shame, inadequacy, or doubt about themselves when results are low, and validation, confidence, and pride when they are high. This uncertainty is highly productive, driving continual investment in improving or finding new ways to “do better.” The potential for collective organizing will depend upon the extent to which the second view of metrics as imposed and inadequate instruments—as meaningless instruments—becomes widely shared. This is a prospect that is limited by the interrelated challenge of fragmentation and the enforcement of techno-normative control, which I turn to now.

Fragmentation and techno-normative policing

Metrics divide, parse, and differentiate; they individualize and mark each producer as distinct. These realities of differentiation within the influencer economy undermine the forms of collectivity and solidarity that have historically been a source of strength in labour organizing. The hyperindividualization of social media metrics atomizes platformed cultural producers, feeds comparison and competition, and serves to individualize their struggles as the idiosyncratic outcomes of failed personal strategies, with equally individualized solutions.

The present study shows fragmentation among influencers operating along another plane. Namely, in assent to metrification and its distribution of rewards between influencers. More successful influencers, like Samantha and Jessica, are more readily prepared to accept metrics at face value and participate in legitimizing the platform’s measurements. They have every reason to affirm the neutral objectivity of metrics, where good content is rewarded with the visibility and engagement it warrants. Their own success actively incentivizes them away from problematizing these instruments, challenging normative explanations about what metrics say, how they compel a response, or conceding the ways that metrics might fail to articulate the interests of audiences or the skills of producers. These actors reinforce the techno-normative control that metrics exert over influencers by championing normative interpretations and dismissing the experiences and alternative readings from their peers as conspiracies and anomalies.

This places them at odds with platformed producers who feel the nonneutrality of platforms and articulate metrics as a type of external coercion, demand, or failure by the platform. These divergences might be particularly pronounced along racial lines and national contexts where some creators have more reason to be skeptical of how the numbers define and discipline their work. Racialized creators and those from global majority countries are subject to systemic patterns of discrimination and uneven market valuations that disrupt their circulation on platforms, devalue their work, and diminish the strength of their metrics in brand negotiations (Christin and Lu, 2023). The conditions are set for fragmentation among influencers to be pronounced across these differences, where White creators in wealthy Western countries are more likely to benefit from the imbalanced dynamics of distribution. What’s more, successful actors may participate in enforcing techno-normative control over their peers by validating metrics against other, dissenting interpretations. Such divisions across what metrics mean and how they act in influencers’ lives pose clear challenges for initiating and sustaining collective projects.

Conclusion

This article explores the varied meanings that social media influencers attribute to their social media metrics. Drawing from 16 semi-structured interviews with influencers, it demonstrates how content creators maintain a fraught and ambivalent relationship with their metrics and the platforms that deliver them. In some instances, the meaning they attribute to these quantified indicators is aligned with industry narratives and reaffirms social metrics’ role as reflective of the influencer’s skill as a content creator and as a reflection of audience desires and interests. At other times, they contest these meanings, choosing to read metrics as a communicative device that reflects platform demands or as representative of the failures of these instruments to express their value as creative professionals and members of an online community. Influencers shifted between these positions over the course of our conversations or held multiple at once. But while the specific meaning of the numbers was in flux and ambivalent, their capacity to drive action remained strong. They maintain an affective resonance that compels ongoing action and investment, not least because these actors are embedded in and dependent upon the regimes of value that these numbers produce and sustain.

There are potential implications in this for efforts to collectively organize towards the pursuit of more control and autonomy for workers in this sector. Collective projects will have to contend with the internalization of these measures that keep individual actors isolated and atomized, focused upon their individual projects of metrified self-improvement, and the fragmentation of interpretation across a global workforce.

This study also raises new questions for future work. In what is a truly global industry, this study has captured only a small slice of the experiences of the field, influencers working in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Is an understanding of metrics as coercive instruments and platforms as shadow employers more acute and consistent in contexts outside the imperial core, where labour’s discipline has been subject to more direct campaigns of control? Future work could compare this study’s findings with how influencers from the majority world perceive and respond to metrics. Furthermore, this study’s gender bias towards women influencers also calls for additional research. For example, is the strong affective dimension of metrics different across gender identities, and do differently gendered subjects internalize measures in different ways? Finally, beyond the focus of work in the creative and cultural industries, this study points to the way that metrification shapes how subjects conceptualize and valorize social life and social relations across the infrastructures of platform capitalism. Future work should continue to engage with how social metrics shape understandings of self-worth and sociality across different spheres, cultural and geopolitical contexts, and identity markers, as well as the alternative values and regimes of valuation that they foreclose.