Nothing makes you feel more like you’re on a different planet than when you are faced with the fact that there is an 11-year-old child out there who has amassed millions of dollars through reviewing toys on YouTube. 

Tiny millionaire business tycoons aside, witnessing my peers make obscene amounts of money through influencing is truly a mystifying experience. Making money on the internet as a result of being an internet figure is not a new trade. What’s rather new is how drastically the internet game has progressed in the last decade.

The internet has a God-like ability to cultivate and facilitate popularity. It’s been well-documented since the early 2000s that digital social spaces are a place that can be expertly commandeered by non-celebrities. People could become reasonably popular on early digital platforms, but the reach wasn’t as wide as it is today. Users typically only dominated smaller concentrated pockets of the internet. However, there were some special unicorns whose internet presence enabled us to see a glimpse of the future.