The shift towards influencers is no longer merely a matter of cultural fashion; it is increasingly visible in the underlying economics of media. The crucial questions are straightforward: where are audiences growing, where is trust migrating, and where is advertising money going? Increasingly, the answer points towards content creators.
According to the Reuters Institute, 46% of people now obtain news from creators, while 27% turn specifically to “news influencers”. Advertising is following attention. Social-media advertising expenditure in Europe reached €35.5 billion in 2025, up 19% in a year, with social video leading the expansion. Meanwhile, YouTube has overtaken the BBC in audience share in the UK.
For traditional publishers, this represents something more consequential than the arrival of another distribution channel. It signals a reordering of the attention economy. Audiences that once arrived through a newspaper homepage, television bulletin or search engine are increasingly assembling around individual personalities. The institution is giving way, at least partly, to the individual.
From opinion leader to influencer
However, the influencer is not as historically novel as the technology surrounding them might suggest. Long before Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, scholars were examining how individuals acquire the capacity to shape the opinions and behaviour of others.
Paul Lazarsfeld’s concept of the opinion leader provides perhaps the most obvious starting point. His work on the “two-step flow” of communication challenged the assumption that mass media influenced audiences directly. Information often passed first through particular individuals who interpreted it, contextualised it and transmitted it to others. Recent scholarship explicitly conceptualises influencers as digital opinion leaders, combining mass reach with unusually personalised communication. As such, the influencer did not invent opinion leadership; social media industrialised it, allowing interpersonal influence to operate at mass-media scale.
But scale alone cannot explain the phenomenon. Herbert Simon provides another part of the answer, namely why influencers became economically valuable. In an environment of information abundance, attention becomes scarce. The economic value of the influencer lies precisely in the ability to capture, retain and direct that scarce resource. Followers become a visible stock of accumulated attention; engagement measures its intensity; advertising converts it into revenue; and political or cultural access can transform it into power.
Pierre Bourdieu helps explain the next stage of the process. Influencers operate as cultural intermediaries, mediating between production and consumption and helping audiences decide what is desirable, fashionable, credible or important. They do not simply tell followers what to buy. Increasingly, they influence what to wear, watch and eat—and, in some cases, what to believe. Cultural and social capital can therefore be converted into attention, attention into economic capital, and economic success into still greater visibility.
There remains, however, a crucial ingredient: trust. Horton and Wohl’s concept of the parasocial relationship helps explain why audiences can develop feelings of familiarity with personalities they have never met. Social media has dramatically intensified this phenomenon. Influencers speak from their homes, cars and holidays, reveal personal issues, answer comments and address the camera as though speaking directly to a friend. Research on influencer effectiveness finds parasocial relationships particularly important, alongside credibility and perceived expertise. One study even found parasocial relationships more consequential than conventional opinion leadership for followers’ purchasing intentions. Traditional mass media offered reach without intimacy; friendship offered intimacy without reach. The influencer combines the two: intimacy at scale.
Seen through Max Weber, this also points towards a wider transformation in authority. Legacy journalism derives much of its credibility from institutional and professional authority: trust this because it comes from an organisation governed by established norms. Influencer culture shifts authority towards personality: trust this because you know me. Therefore, the transition is not simply from old media to new media, but increasingly from institutional trust to personal trust.
And Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle supplies the final piece of the puzzle. Under influencer capitalism, the individual becomes simultaneously producer, product, advertisement and distribution channel. Lifestyle, relationships, holidays, political opinions and even vulnerability can all become content. The personal self becomes the personal brand.
The influencer, then, is not an historical anomaly produced by social media. It is what emerges when the opinion leader, celebrity, cultural intermediary and entrepreneur converge within an economic system in which attention itself has become a form of capital.
The paradox of democratised media
This brings us to a deeper question. Has the rise of influencers actually democratised media power, or merely concentrated it in different hands?
As Natalie Fenton and Des Freedman argue in their chapter “Media Reform and the Politics of Hope,” contemporary accounts of media power often emphasise its diffusion across networks, platforms and society. Yet, this can obscure a more stubborn reality: media power remains remarkably concentrated. States continue to shape communications systems; corporations retain formidable control over media markets; and a relatively small number of presidents, commentators, celebrities and digital influencers enjoy vastly disproportionate visibility, amplified by platforms whose algorithms and business models reward attention, engagement and traffic.
Here lies the central paradox of the influencer economy. Never have the means of publishing been so widely distributed, yet the power to command attention remains highly concentrated. Social media may have dismantled some of the old gates, but it has not abolished gatekeeping. Instead, editors, broadcasters and newspaper proprietors now coexist with a more complicated hierarchy of algorithms, platforms and highly visible individuals capable of commanding audiences once available only to major media organisations. The democratisation of publishing, in other words, has not necessarily produced the democratisation of influence.
When journalists become influencers
Legacy media appears to have understood the implications. The BBC has reportedly encouraged traditionally print-focused journalists to accompany their articles with social-media videos. The Guardian is creating 40 roles to train journalists as content creators, while in the Netherlands, Mediahuis’s SPIL initiative is led by twenty-something journalists who think “TikTok first, article second”, training reporters to “embody the news” and adapt their journalism to the conventions of the creator economy.
These experiments amount to more than an attempt to master a new format. They suggest that traditional news organisations are beginning to absorb the logic of the creator economy itself. The journalist is no longer expected merely to report the story; increasingly, he or she must become part of the product through which the story is consumed.
That may prove commercially necessary. But it also creates a profound tension for journalism. The institutional model asks audiences to trust processes, which include verification, editing, professional standards and collective responsibility. The influencer model asks them to trust personalities. As publishers increasingly combine the two, the boundary between journalistic authority and personal authority will become harder to distinguish.
The rise of the influencer should, therefore, not be understood simply as the triumph of social media personalities over legacy media. Something more fundamental is occurring: the architecture of public authority is changing. The old gatekeepers have lost their monopoly, but gatekeeping itself has not disappeared. Power has migrated: from institutions towards personalities, from distribution towards attention, and from professional authority towards perceived authenticity.
The defining question may therefore no longer be who has the means to speak? Almost everyone does. It is who has the power to be heard, and, more importantly, who controls the machinery that decides it?
