This paper asks how the influencer space and the attention economy got to where they are in 2024. It does so by focusing on an inflection point, the period between roughly 2010-2015 where a vanguard of the advertising sector was largely improvising the early moves of what would eventually reveal itself to be a course changing pivot to digital services. At the same time, a first generation of largely “amateur” content creators were creating new career paths and content genres in the nascent social media entertainment industry. This paper revisits this moment through re-appraisal of a series of interviews conducted with digital advertising industry professionals and content creators during this transitional period as the “blogosphere” became a minor player in a bigger platformized internet economy in which advertising and sponsorship became default models of fundraising, recommendation algorithms and ad tech honed their craft, and content creators developed their dual commercial/authentic identities (Abidin, 2016; Arriagada & Bishop, 2021). In reconsidering this moment, this paper aims to provide insight into the foundations of the structure of the contemporary online economy, the relationship between the advertising industry and the business models for content creation and ad delivery that it supports, and provide historical and empirical detail that contribute to debates and questions about labour and value in new mediums.

This paper investigates messaging by smaller businesses in the hair and beauty industries in South Africa who use targeted ads to promote products and services to Facebook and Instagram users in South Africa. These ads are currently not considered “political” ads, despite the fact that racialised notions of hair and beauty have played and continue to play a key role in white supremacist discourses in South Africa. Using the Facebook Ad Library, we obtained a purposive sample of ads posted to Meta platforms over a six month period (N=558) by 99 different advertisers whose ads matched the query “hair”. We review image-based adverts in this sample, asking how visual signifiers of gender and ethnicity address potential consumers and represent their hair. Multimodal content analysis was used with the aim of identifying current micro-targeting practices on the platforms. Our analysis of the messaging about hair in the ads found hegemonic racial ideologies and binary gendering in campaigns addressing ethnically differentiated audiences of women in SA. The relative absence of men from the messaging suggested that the burdens and pleasures of hair care and maintenance remain distinctly feminised while the hair industry is actively involved in production of gender. WoC were targeted with messaging which, at best, promoted a new aesthetic or promised to save money or time. At worst, it was promoting harmful products and perpetuating racialised discourses. Built on dataveillance, such micro-targeting may be fuelling feedback loops that further entrench the country’s extreme racialised inequality.

The algorithmic and individualised nature of advertising on social media - and the intentionally opaque and unobservable design of advertising algorithms - makes them difficult to study. We turn to participatory methods, working with 204 young Australians as 'citizen scientists' to collect 5169 screenshots of 'unhealthy' advertising on social media. Through SMS chat over a one week period, we engaged our participants in 'algorithmic gossip' to theorise why certain ads appeared on their feeds, how the algorithms serving ads worked, and what they thought about them. Some believed ‘the algorithm’ accurately targeted ads based on their interests and behaviors, while others felt these algorithms 'missed the mark'. Participants theorised the impact of search histories, friendship networks, interests, time of day/week/year, location, age, gender, and more in how advertising algorithms worked. Our study revealed complexities in participants' perceptions of ad targeting and how algorithms function. We highlight the need for greater transparency and regulation regarding advertising on social media, especially concerning unhealthy industries. Participants expressed concerns about manipulative and intrusive advertising practices, emphasising the importance of platform responsibility and centering young people's expertise in discussions on advertising regulation.

This paper presents findings from a larger mixed methods research project that examines the exposure, awareness and perceptions of young people to gambling marketing through and around live sport in two European countries. This paper is informed by the findings of an earlier set of focus groups with young people, but in this paper we focus on a qualitative analysis of gambling marketing communications around live sports events on Instagram from a number of major gambling companies. We collected a purposeful sample of posts, including image (N: 99) and video (N: 79), shared between October 2023 and early January 2024 from 7 major gambling brands’ Instagram accounts.

This study provides important insights into how gambling brands use Instagram, and potentially bypass existing regulations to prevent gambling communications being viewed by children and young people under 18 years. It furthers a growing body of evidence that evidences the extent of gambling marketing that young people are exposed to and how gambling companies exploit sports fandom to target both gamblers and non-gamblers alike and to (re)brand the gambling industry as a normal leisure industry.