The Crypto Influencer Racket's Imminent Crash Landing
They are so many factors holding crypto back. Payola-grabbing influencers should be the easiest one for serious projects to kick to the curb.
Last week, I found out alongside most people that Ben Armstrong and Bitboy were not, in fact, necessarily the same thing.
I guess the good news and the bad news was that I wasn’t really paying attention anyway.
So, in what has been portrayed as either a compassionate dismissal or a palace coup, Armstrong is no longer the host of the wildly, inexplicably influential Bitboy show.
First, I would like to again go on record as saying that I hope Armstrong gets the help that he needs. Say what you want about the man — and I am most certainly not a member of his fan club — but this raw nerve confession took some guts.
Second, having received and accepted that help, I hope he stays the hell away from crypto and never comes back.
Third, I hope that so-called influencers who travel his well-grooved path reconsider their approach. They are, on balance, bad for the ecosystem they breathlessly, cosmetically claim to support.
Ideals, Unevenly Distributed
The cryptocurrency movement was founded on the basis of building a better financial system. Unfortunately, along the way, few felt the need to explore promotion with the same level of urgency.
The pressure on crypto marketers to get on a “Big YouTuber’s” show is intense. Crypto communities — and I realize that word “communities” sometimes does a lot of work in this space — see such placement as evidence of momentum and a catalyst for numbah-go-up.
What a lot don’t appear to understand — due to either blissful naïveté or willful ignorance — is that a lot of these Big YouTubers take in money to promote a project and don’t necessarily disclose that they’ve been paid.
I’ll tell you… It’s a quaint experience, getting called “dumb” or otherwise bad at your job by a bunch of anons who get financial advice from someone who will review pretty much anything for a five-figure sum. (Bitboy would charge $35,000 for a dedicated review.)
Think about it: If it came out that Goldman Sachs was paying Maria Bartiromo or Jim Cramer under the table to promote their IPOs, it would inspire months of jawboning from the tech-business chatterati. There would be trials. Hearings.
But, within a lot of projects, the attitude generally appears to be “C’mon, man. It’s just crypto.”
Pretty disappointing, really.
Not All Influencers
To be clear, I use the term “payola” carefully, as a near-synonym for “bribe.” The person accepting a bribe doesn’t particularly feel the need to disclose same. This is very different from the discussion of sponsorship.
I have worked with influencers in the past. The first-order variable is always “Do you disclose that this is sponsored content?” Once we agree that the disclosure is sufficient to satisfy a reasonable person, then the conversation can continue.
(I hasten to mention that this is a conversation worth having with publishers of credentialed media as well as influencers. When native advertising started to become more popular, it was too often the supposedly shrewd and scheming marketer who had to school the pure-as-the-driven-snow media outlet on what made for proper disclosure.)
My optimism very often arm-wrestles with my experience, and that experience tells me that the shillers will continue to shill and the scammers will continue to scam. I only hope that enough strong projects turn away from this game before it provides the pretext for smothering the entire ecosystem.
In a thorough study that I totally just made up, people who subscribe to this newsletter think faster, smell better, and tend not to hallucinate small, mechanical elves. If you were forwarded this newsletter, please consider subscribing.
Recommended Reading
“Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule,” The New Yorker — While I find the article’s subject easy to dislike and ridicule, it’s interesting to watch scribe Ronan Farrow expect readers to recoil in horror that… Musk wasn’t willing to donate Starlink wireless Internet to Ukraine for $400 million per year forever? I might argue that the bigger story could be that government procurement is so broken that space, defense, and EV-evolution relies so extensively on Gen-X’s Howard Hughes. Nevertheless, a wonderful read.
“‘I Didn’t Kill My Wife!’ — An Oral History of The Fugitive,” Rolling Stone — “Success has many parents,” the saying goes, “but failure is an orphan.” The Fugitive could have easily ended up in the latter camp. In the context of the writer’s strike, though, it’s instructive to see how the former takes shape.
“How Rage Against the Machine Used Capitalism To Sell Communism,” Reason — Rage Against the Machine is what happens when you take a college sophomore’s Che Guevara t-shirt and make it sentient. Several years ago, I saw guitarist Tom Morello sitting in first class on a New-York-to-Los-Angeles flight. As soon as he saw that I recognized him, he gave me this kind of “Yeah… I know…” look. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that he shouldn’t get a first class seat until everyone did.
“An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology,” The New York Times — I’ve been a big admirer of Mike Masnick since I first met him in the early 2000s. Phenomenal powers of observation and insight. Was glad to see him covered in The Gray Lady.
“The God Phone,” Longreads — What are an artist’s responsibilities when it comes to how people interact with their art? A thoughtful, probing read about one of Burning Man’s longest-running installations.
Bottom Story
Further proof of the long-standing idea that everything in Australia that moves will try to figure out a way to kill you.