Opening the geographical black box of the influencer economy: an introduction

Abstract

The ‘influencer economy' is a recent innovation emerging from digital platforms and their ability to bridge virtual and physical space to both create new industries (e.g., digital content industry, mobile games, live streaming industry, online retail, online hailing etc.), as well as newly emerging platform ecologies. Although there is now an increasing economic geography literature on several ‘economies’ that emerged because of digitalization and digital platforms, such as the platform economy and the gig economy, so far, little research has been done on the influencer economy, although it represents an increasingly important part of the platform economy, particularly in China and the USA. Social media influencers are individuals who earn money directly from personal brand building and monetize their influence due to sponsored content. Typical industries using influencers include fashion, cosmetics, beauty, plastic surgery, gaming, travel, and luxury branding. Recently, some articles in economic geography touched upon the influencer economy, such as in work by Repenning and Oechslen (2023) on "digipreneurs", and Poorthuis et al. (2020) and their work on the fashion industry from an attention economy and social media perspective. Based on this emerging literature in economic geography and neighboring social sciences on the influencer economy, our paper aims at developing a future research agenda on the geographies of the influencer economy, including both ideas for empirical and descriptive research, as well as for more theory-informed research on the influencer economy that is affected by several perspectives and paradigms in economic geography, such as evolutionary, relational, institutional economic geography.