because we contacted quite a few social media platforms. we contacted twitter, instagram, facebook, they all say they don t allow fraud content on their platforms and in relation to tankz per se, his accounts and those respective platforms barring twitter and youtube, they ve been taken down. let s get into the nuts and bolts of your investigation to an extent because there was some good old fashioned journalism going on here. how did you first come across these fraud influences? 0k, well, i might not look it, but i m quite young and like a lot of young people, i. you ve got a few years advantage on me, let s put it on that way! i hope so! i spent a lot of time on social media scrolling through snapchat and i kept noticing the fraud posts popping up on my feed and it turns out i m not the only one
it so easy for the average person to go viral and garner a big audience and i think that social media platforms of realising that creators drive a lot of engagement and trends, and it s not enough any more to just give them a place to grow an audience. they need to offer them better features and ways to get money, and besides youtube, which used to be the only game in town, there wasn t a way to earn directly from social media networks until the last year or so. will this will becky, what you make of these new developments? i think there is a really growing trend of creators who are trying to come a kind of, almost regain the connection between themselves and their audiences without the platform because at the end of the day, it s really hard to trust the platforms. you know, changes are being made every single day to the algorithms, however content is being served to our audiences and is often done in a very hard to read, almost like black box algorithmic way, which is hard to deciphe
and who s moderating all of this online? well, let me introduce you to our guests. sam yam is the co founder and now the chief technical officer of patreon. in a few sentences, sam, give us a flavour of what patreon actually is and what it does. thanks for having me, julian. patreon is effectively a platform for creators to get paid in an ongoing sustainable way to their community, and in return, their community gets access to exclusive content, access to the creators and in many cases, a safe environment for their community. we ll expand on that in the next 25 minutes or so. becky flint is a social media influencer and founder pepper studio, a social media marketing agency. how do you spot the next big youtube or tiktok star? i think the really important thing to remember about social media is often, we re going there to see unpolished is better, almost. we re looking for things that are relatable and almost, kind of, more attainable than the typical celebrity,
heavy rain from northern england, wet weather for east anglia and into the east midlands and south east england here over the next few hours. temperatures to start the day on sunday, 13 15 degrees. a scotland across eastern areas of england as well. through sunday i think we will still have some cloud and patches of rain working in across the east coast anywhere from lincolnshire down towards kent and later showers in central and later showers in central and eastern scotland, central and eastern scotland, central and eastern scotland, central and eastern england, dry was sunshine to south west england and wales, north west england, northern ireland and maybe western scotland as well. in the sunshine it will feel pleasant. into next week a lot of dry weather on the way and thenit of dry weather on the way and then it should feel quite warm.
we are going to hear the words creator and influencer i suspect quite a lot in the next 25 minutes. what s the difference? so, this has been a huge topic of debate for some people. for me, i really think they re interchangeable. i think a few years ago, we would have said instagram influencer and a youtube creator, but i think creator has become the more preferred word now, but i don t think there s a huge difference between them. it really refers to someone who has a following online and is creating content. let me stay with you for a moment on the status quo and what we might be changing from. say, for the sake of argument, someone has an instagram following of 100,000 people. how is she or he making money based on those 100,000 at the moment? the most common way by far is sponsored content, so that s promoting a product in an instagram post or in a story, so that s by far the most popular way people