In the wonderful world of influencers, there is no such thing as a precious five weeks of paid vacation per year.
Neither do weekends and holidays.
YouTube videos, Instagram posts and reels, TikTok, Twitch lives… Content creators must demonstrate consistency on the platforms, otherwise they risk being forgotten or repressed by algorithms.
So much so that it has become more and more common in recent years to see the leaders of the influence market announcing breaks to preserve their mental health.
The latest one is not the least.
Squeezie, the most followed YouTuber in France with more than 18 million subscribers, announced this Monday a break of two to three months to “rest, clear your head, get some inspiration”.
Before that, the year 2023 had been marked by similar announcements from Mc Fly & Carlito or the videographer Matsu.
Rankings, reminder messages, algorithms
Beyond the pressure from their fans, their detractors, and their workload, these videographers have the common point of having been ultra-productive before temporarily stopping.
“The more regularly a creator publishes, the more visibility their content will have.
Conversely, if he takes breaks, he risks being less exposed by the algorithms,” explains sociologist Marc Oriol, hence the difficulty in taking his foot off the gas.
These applications “operate on an advertising model.
Their goal is therefore for active creators to publish as much new content as possible, to generate more publicity,” adds Marianne Lumeau, lecturer in economics at the University of Rennes.
Beyond algorithms, social networks use various techniques to encourage influencers to post relentlessly.
“On YouTube, the ranking of the most popular videos is public.
Likewise, on TikTok, we know which creators generate the most money during lives.
Some applications also send messages to creators when they have not posted for a long time,” lists Marianne Lumeau.
“Influencers play the platform game and become their own worst enemies.
They are a kind of modern slaves,” comments Pierre Éric Sutter, work psychologist and author of the book
Encouraging well-being at work
.
“Moreover, the Internet pushes the natural limits of human beings: by posting, creators boost their ego,” he continues.
Towards more regulation?
According to Marianne Lameau, a regulation of work on the Internet is not completely unthinkable: “On the model of what was requested by Uber drivers, we could imagine that the work of influencers on the platforms would be considered as work employee, and is thus subject to the rules of labor law.”
The difficulty is that creators often work on different platforms at the same time.
Marc Oriol also relies on the power of the collective, but imagines that “content creators come together to ask the platforms to change their algorithms and that they value the qualitative more than the quantitative”, even if he admits that , for the moment, “individualist” logic prevails.