Cashing Out by Julien Saunders & Kiersten Saunders

Author:Julien Saunders & Kiersten Saunders [Saunders, Julien & Saunders, Kiersten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Content Creators Make How Much?!

In 2015, toward the latter part of our corporate career, one of the last projects we worked on was an influencer marketing campaign, which at the time was relatively new. In short, our company agreed to set aside budget to find influential people online who would be willing to post content about their experience with the company’s brand. One guy was particularly intriguing because he was a Black father of two who celebrated the joys and pitfalls of parenting and wanted to break the persistent stereotype that Black men weren’t active participants in raising their children. The other influencers were diverse couples and large families, all of whom had seemed to build out active audiences online who loved their content. These influencers seemed to be living the dream, and we often wondered, Are they getting paid? And if so, how much?

After doing some digging, we learned the Black father was paid $10,000 for his part in our company’s marketing campaign. All he had to do was take two all-expenses-paid trips to our kid-friendly resorts, stay a few nights with his children, and eat at our restaurants. When he was done, we required that he post some pictures of his experience to his Instagram account, post a video to his YouTube channel, and write a blog post about his vacation linking back to our company’s website.

Do you understand the words you just read/heard? A man who is not a celebrity by any means was paid $10,000 to take vacations with his family, take pictures, and write a blog post. And that’s not all. When he was done, the company sent him some branded merchandise in the hopes he would post another picture with the children and their gifts.

Do you know what we would have had to do to earn a $10,000 raise at the same company?! We would have had to crush all of our intentionally lofty key performance objectives and gain the favor of peers both in and outside our core organization. We would’ve had to learn new skills and display measurable impact from those skills above and beyond our equally deserving peers in a single calendar year. We would’ve had to find an influential executive sponsor and serve as an admirable mentor to the younger workers below us. And we would’ve had to do it as Black professionals in a predominantly white work environment.

Even as real estate investors, at our peak our two properties delivered a consistent $1,300 a month. To earn another $10,000 in rental property income, we would’ve had to either find the cash-flowing deal of the century or pick up two more moderately profitable properties. This would’ve required us to save up a down payment for the loan, get insurance, conduct site visits, manage contractors, and hope an inspector doesn’t find mold or termites.

The difference in effort required to earn $10,000 between this influencer and us was astonishing. Seeing this up close was the final push we needed to completely reevaluate not just how we viewed income as a whole but how we viewed income creation.

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