JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT

2023, VOL. 39, NOS. 11–12, 965–981

https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2157864

Influencers and the attention economy: the meaning and

management of attention on Instagram
Kyle Kubler
McGill Writing Centre, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The attention economy is often used to describe the market con­ Received 31 August 2021
ditions of influencers on social media platforms. It suggests new Accepted 27 October 2022
economic logics and marketing strategies governed through accu­ KEYWORDS
mulating attention. Critically examining this concept, this paper Attention economy; social
asks: how do influencers understand and manage attention on media; Instagram; influencer;
Instagram? Through 41 in-depth interviews with fitness influencers, content creator; digital
this paper found that attention is not always desirable, nor the basis economy
of new forms of economic logics. Further, as participants moved
from working part-time to full-time in the online fitness industry,
attention-mitigating strategies often replaced attention-seeking
ones. This paper critically extends the concept of the attention
economy and refocuses influencer marketing efforts on the con­
textual, rather than universal, use of attention.

Introduction
As social media marketing continues to grow, the popular press (Lorenz, 2020) and
academia (Hudders et al., 2021) have turned their attention to social media influencers.
Scholars frame the role of influencers in marketing in several ways such as self-branding
(Khamis et al., 2017), authenticity (Audrezet et al., 2018), and consumer engagement
(Hughes et al., 2019), which are often linked together through the concept of the
attention economy (Goldhaber, 1997). While there are several meanings of the attention
economy (Crogan & Kinsley, 2012), they all suggest that as social life becomes more
deeply mediatised (Couldry & Hepp, 2017), media consumers’ attention increases in
scarcity and value. However, the term ‘influencer’ often refers to a variety of actors that
range from mainstream celebrities, to professionals and microcelebrities, all of which rely
on attention, but to varying degrees. Following the calls of Swaminathan et al. (2020), for
more research on different types of influencers and person-brands, and Hudders et al.
(2021), for more qualitative research on the meaning of influencer metrics, this paper
critically engages the concept of the attention economy by applying it to the marketing
practices of influencers. Specifically, this paper seeks to understand how influencers
understand and manage attention on Instagram.
In its original conceptualisation, an economy of attention would eventually replace an
economy of money due to increases in the production and distribution of information

CONTACT Kyle Kubler [email protected] McGill Writing Centre, McGill University, McLennan-Redpath
Library, 3459 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0G4, Canada
© 2023 Westburn Publishers Ltd.
966 K. KUBLER

brought by digital technologies in the late 1990s (Davenport & Beck, 2001; Goldhaber,
1997). Developed before the ubiquity of social media influencers, proponents of the
concept anticipated the growth of stars seeking attention and cultivating fans through
the Internet, speaking to its continued use in the field today. Those who see influencers as
a product of the attention economy are often aligned with the original conceptualisation
of the term, seeing attention as a form of monetary currency for influencers (Rokka &
Canniford, 2016; Wu, 2017; Zulli, 2017). Critics of the attention economy suggest it creates
a false sense of equality by assuming that attracting attention can bypass existing social
and economic inequalities (Abidin, 2018; Fairchild, 2007; Marwick, 2015).
Influencer marketing research has primarily focused on how influencers leverage the
attention of their fans to sell products (Jin & Ryu, 2020; Reinikainen et al., 2020), change
marketplace dynamics (Schöps et al., 2020), and how different types of attention can vary
in value (De Cicco et al., 2020; Schouten et al., 2020). Advertisers rely on the quantified
measures of social connections and popularity expressed through social media platforms
to evaluate the worth of influencers in advertising campaigns (Jiang, 2018). This approach
sees the attention economy as explaining new levels of consumer-side information over­
load due to the increased saturation of digital technologies mediating market transac­
tions (Besana et al., 2018). Despite their different goals, arguments for and against the
attention economy often assume that the continual growth of visibility and attention
motivate influencer practices and strategies. To contribute to our understanding of the
attention economy, and its application to influencers, this paper provides examples of
influencers who sought to seek and mitigate attention on social media, complicating
views of attention as currency or universally desired outcome.
Drawing from 41 in-depth interviews, this paper investigated how fitness influencers
understood the meaning and value of attention on Instagram as well as the strategies
they used to manage it. Rather than all press being good press, attention could help or
harm chances of career success, as not all attention could equally be converted into
money. Those that sought rapid exposure and attention online were often in the early
stages of their influencer career, while those that were more established, regularly
employed practices that limited or reduced their social media exposure on platforms
such as Instagram. These findings question the usefulness of the attention economy as
a heuristic for explaining influencer practices and provides two key takeaways for the
study of influencer marketing. First, when brands partner with influencers, they should
consider their employment status and career trajectory. Second, influencers should con­
sider the impact of the attention they attract early in their careers.

The attention economy and influencer marketing

Despite its popular resurgence in the literature on influencer marketing and online
celebrity, Goldhaber coined the term ‘attention economy’ in 1997 to describe a new
economy based on the development and generalisation of the Internet that would upend
major pillars of market-based exchange. ‘The new kinds of connection that the Net and
cyberspace make possible also demand a whole new way of thinking[. . .]That implies
a wholly new set of economic laws that replace the ones we all have learned’ (Goldhaber,
1997). He continues:
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 967

It is precisely because material needs at the creature comfort level are fairly well satisfied for
all those in a position to demand them that[. . .]the energies set free by the successes of what
I refer to as the money-industrial economy go more and more in the direction of obtaining
[. . .]what is increasingly scarce, which is of course attention.

The attention economy rests on the assumption that a globalised and industrialised
capitalism has mostly solved the problem of producing and distributing the goods and
services we all need to survive, and in so doing, rewrites the rules of economics to focus
on the exchange of attention. What will distinguish the winners and losers of this new
economy will be their capacity to command attention.
Goldhaber was not alone in his use of the attention economy. He recognised the work
of Lanham (2007) on the same subject, which also relied on attention as a marketable and
scarce resource and was later published as The Economics of Attention (Lanham, 2007).
Davenport and Beck similarly claimed that, ‘in industrial societies, attention has become
a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts[. . .]Understanding and
managing attention is now the single most important determinate of business success’
(Davenport & Beck, 2001). Reacting to an increased flow of information due to the
continued adoption of internet communication technologies (ICTs) in the workplace,
such as email, Davenport and Beck also saw attention as an increasingly scarce resource.
These views were encompassed in the concept of the new economy, characterised by the
assumption that new digital technologies would revolutionise production and consump­
tion such that traditional antagonisms between capital and labour would be overcome
(Smith, 2000).
Although the Internet and digital technologies have not led to a post-scarcity econ­
omy, nor overcome the division between capital and labour, scholars continue to use the
concept, but often with a different meaning. Today, the attention economy either
explains the challenges of attracting and maintaining consumer attention in digital
environments (Besana et al., 2018; Orquin & Wedel, 2020; Romaniuk & Nguyen, 2017;
Santoso et al., 2020), or it explains the practices and motivations of influencers by their
need to continually attract and maintain attention (Arriagada & Ibáñez, 2020; Ashman
et al., 2021; Smith & Fischer, 2021). Kessous (2015) calls this the division between
a marketplace attention economy and a participatory attention economy, with the latter
focusing on the bidirectional relationship between self-brand and fan (Schöps et al.,
2020). This avenue of research is generally interested in which strategies increase the
conversion rate between product exposure and product consumption (Hudders et al.,
2021). For example, this relationship has been studied at the level of gender and para­
social relations (Jin & Ryu, 2020) and exclusivity of the product advertised (De Veirman
et al., 2017), through the concept of product-endorser fit (Schouten et al., 2020).
Despite its fleeting nature, some propose that attention can be collected and
exchanged through features of social media platforms such as likes, shares, and followers
(Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). In studying the way that consumers of luxury brands practice
microcelebrity on Instagram, Rokka and Canniford (2016) suggest that the accumulation
of attentional capital replaces status and wealth as a central currency. Others have also
extended this assumption that attention serves as a valuable currency which acts to
restructure social media use and economic behaviour (Besana et al., 2018; Duffy &
Pooley, 2019; Zulli, 2017). This focus on the development of the attention economy
968 K. KUBLER

grounds how scholars conceptualise influencers, content creators, and microcelebrities.

As Cirucci (2019) notes, ‘in an attention economy, value is assigned by asking “who has
attracted, and continues to attract, the most eyeballs?” Indeed, microcelebrities spawn
from the fact that an attention economy does, in fact, exist’, (p. 35). Influencers are
‘vocational, sustained, and highly branded social media stars’, (Abidin, 2018, pp. 72–73)
that practice self-branding as ‘a form of affective labour that is purposefully undertaken
by individuals in order to garner attention, reputation and, potentially, profit’ (Hearn,
2010, p. 427). Tying the conceptualisation of influencers to the attention economy implies
that continually attempting to accumulate attention is part of what defines influencers as
a unique subset of social media users.
Since its inception at the peak of new economy ideology, critics have been sceptical of
the attention economy as an explanation for new forms of internet celebrity and the
mechanisms through which these new celebrities make money and achieve career
success (Khamis et al., 2017). As Fairchild notes, ‘regardless of its sociological vacuity or
validity, the attention economy is by now an established reality for advertisers’, (2007,
p. 359). Marwick is similarly hesitant when using the term to understand what motivates
microcelebrity practices. ‘[Microcelebrity] practices are pursued in view of the so-called
attention economy’, (2015, p. 138). These critiques focus on assumptions that accumulat­
ing attention can bypass traditional barriers and gatekeepers within the media industry
(Banet-Weiser, 2012; Duffy & Pooley, 2019). While this could imply that some are better
than others at attracting attention, it could also mean that there are discrepancies
between the types of attention that convert into money and those that do not.
An example of this can be drawn from Abidin’s work on eyewitness viral stars, such as
Michelle Dobyne, who attract large amounts of attention through local news clips of them
being shared online (Abidin, 2018). As these eyewitness viral stars are often not explicitly
trying to be influencers before they go viral online, the attention is rarely converted into
money or sustained for long enough that the attention can eventually become mone­
tised. Rather than the typical scenario where media gatekeepers prevent the success of
newcomers by restricting access to mass audiences, legacy media outlets give eyewitness
viral stars a surplus of attention. However, the attention rarely has a place to accumulate,
such as a pre-existing self-brand or presence on social media, and often fails to convert
into sustained improvements in their lives, financial or otherwise. As going viral is not
always planned, the inability to prepare could explain why viral stars fail to capitalise on
the attention they attract.
With attention-seeking strategies so central to the relationship between the attention
economy and influencer marketing, is it the case that all influencers seek attention to the
same degree? If not, why? One possible answer comes from how influencers are
employed, which can take a variety of forms. ‘The increasing saturation, competition,
and subsequently professionalisation of the Influencer industry has resulted in cohorts of
actors who now find themselves straggling along a continuum of voluntary and monetary
labour, amateur and professional resources, independent and institutionalised systems’,
(Abidin, 2017, p. 6). The relatively low barrier to entry on social media platforms such as
Instagram further stratifies this labour continuum. Echoing one of Goldhaber’s predictions
that, ‘individual attention getters of all sorts will find it ever easier to get attention directly
through the Web, without any corporate packaging necessary’ (1997), Khamis et al. (2017)
argue that, ‘[. . .]self-branding through social media does not require initial affiliation with
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 969

the “already powerful”. Rather, and to reiterate, what matters most is visibility and
attention – and therein lays the critical importance of self-branding strategies and
practices of micro-celebrity’ (p. 198). While not a guarantee of success (Duffy, 2017), social
media allows for practices of self-branding and microcelebrity to be highly accessible.
Marketing scholars have studied several different types of internet celebrities including
mainstream celebrities (Fournier & Eckhardt, 2019), YouTubers (Ashman et al., 2018) and
bloggers (Hughes et al., 2019; Smith & Fischer, 2021), all of which reside at different places
along the employment continuum, and have subsequently come to different conclusions
about attention-seeking strategies and their implications for influencer marketing. For
example, in their research on autopreneurs on YouTube, Ashman et al. (2018) identify
some participants that are eager to attract all forms of attention, positive and negative,
while others are concerned with only attracting the right type of attention from the right
people. As the authors sampled YouTubers from a range of channel popularity and
success, it isn’t always clear how that success relates to attention-seeking strategies. For
Smith and Fischer (2021), while they identify a hierarchy of blogger strategies that attract
audience attention and engagement, they do not explain why the bloggers chose
different strategies. To better understand these practices, this paper asked: how do
influencers understand and manage attention on Instagram?

Data & method

Several scholars have called for a deeper understanding of who influencers are and their
relationship to the attention economy. Swaminathan et al. (2020) argue that research
should investigate the differences between brands built by average people and celebrity
brands and identify the optimal approaches for reputation building across these two
types of person brands. Another useful approach would be to distinguish between
economic (‘commercial’) and noneconomic (‘non-commercial’) person brands (p. 40).
Hudders et al. (2021) have further suggested a focus on qualitative methods to compli­
ment much of the quantitative research on influencer metrics through which attention is
often evaluated. This paper responds to these calls by conducting 41 in-depth, semi-
structured interviews with fitness influencers with a range of commercial and semi-
commercial investment.
Table 1 presents participant demographics. Employment in the online fitness industry
included online fitness and nutrition coaching, conducting online fitness education
courses, or advertising for brands. Sixteen worked full-time in the online fitness industry,
while the rest (25), either worked full-time in the industry but only part-time online, or
they had jobs outside the fitness industry. Both categories of employment included
influencers who did not have commercial brand partnerships. For those in the part-time
category, this was often due to external financial security, either from work or family
members. For the full-time online workers, it was often because they wanted to focus on
promoting their own businesses. Annual income was from all income sources, with n/a
meaning the participant declined to report their income. Instagram followers were
recorded at the time of interview.
Both income and follower count were highest on average for those working full-time in
the online fitness industry, which is largely an outcome of having spent more time in the
industry than those working part-time. Despite having a higher absolute number of
970 K. KUBLER

Table 1. Participant demographics.

Employment in online
Pseudonym Brand partnerships fitness industry Followers Income (USD) Location
Adam No Part-time 250,000 70,000 CAN
Barry Yes Full-time 63,000 130,000 USA
Cory Yes Full-time 13,700 250,000 USA
Alice Yes Full-time 15,100 50,000 USA
Bella No Part-time 690 40,000 USA
Carla No Full-time 649 n/a USA
Dylan No Part-time 3,051 500,000 USA
Danielle Yes Part-time 8,728 40,000 USA
Evan No Part-time 19,700 95,000 USA
Evelyn Yes Part-time 74,100 60,000 USA
Francene Yes Part-time 102,000 37,500 USA
Frank Yes Part-time 878 50,000 USA
Greta Yes Part-time 70,100 45,000 USA
Helene Yes Part-time 2,699 50,000 USA
Irene Yes Full-time 23,200 25,000 USA
Jill Yes Full-time 40,000 60,000 USA
Kate No Full-time 3,101 n/a NED
Lisa Yes Part-time 26,000 40,000 USA
Monica Yes Part-time 25,000 60,000 USA
Gary No Part-time 4,041 60,000 USA
Harry Yes Part-time 3,723 250,000 USA
Nancy No Full-time 29,500 75,000 USA
Ian No Part-time 764 43,000 USA
Jack No Full-time 94,500 37,000 UK
Kevin Yes Part-time 31,400 200,000 USA
Olive No Full-time 74,800 n/a USA
Larry Yes Part-time 10,700 46,000 CAN
Marshall Yes Part-time 78,700 30,000 USA
Patricia Yes Part-time 10,900 n/a UK
Norm Yes Full-time 4,246 5,000 USA
Owen No Part-time 723 70,000 USA
Quinn Yes Part-time 31,800 52,000 USA
Rose Yes Full-time 83,600 280,000 USA
Perry No Part-time 6,255 11,000 CAN
Quinton Yes Full-time 372,000 457,000 USA
Sarah Yes Part-time 29,700 75,000 USA
Teresa Yes Part-time 2,692 45,000 USA
Ulma Yes Full-time 48,100 200,000 USA
Randy No Full-time 65,800 n/a UK
Violet Yes Part-time 3,547 40,000 USA
Wendy No Full-time 3,587 n/a USA

followers, those working full-time online often reported their rate of follower growth
slowing down once they transitioned from part-time to full-time work. This primarily
occurred because business logistics and product development took away from the time
that participants had to produce content and engage with their fans online. When
switching from advertising for brands to advertising for their own companies, content
creation switches from a direct source of income to an immediate cost to hopefully be
recovered through future sales. Commercial brand partnerships were also less common
among those working full-time online.
Recruitment was primarily electronic and based on Instagram, which involved creating
a research account on Instagram where I would post roughly once a week about research
on the fitness industry and influencers. The goal was to gain in-group credibility with an
active and legitimate page through which I could contact participants. I contacted
participants either through the direct message feature on Instagram or through email.
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 971

Most interviews occurred over the phone, or over WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, and
Instagram Voice. Names of participants were replaced by pseudonyms and identifying
information was removed.
This paper defines influencers as branded and vocational actors with a ‘practice
focused on social media-based, multimedia, fame on the internet’ (Abidin, 2018, pp. 72–
73). Users were considered fitness influencers if they regularly posted exercise and fitness-
related content while pursuing the vocational practices described above. Despite not all
participants self-identifying as influencers, preferring terms such as content creator,
online fitness professional, or online coach, all participants engaged in influencer
practices.
Although fitness influencers may engage in different types of exercise, they can be
considered a cohesive group due to their similarity in practice. Duffy (2017) takes a similar
approach when studying fashion influencers, using fashion as a general heuristic for
categorisation, rather than dividing by sub-genre of fashion influencer such as luxury,
street wear, plus-sized, etc. Further, previous studies of fitness content on social media
have sampled using the hashtag #fitness, the most popular and universal fitness hashtag,
rather than identifying one specific type of fitness behaviour or activity (Boepple et al.,
2016; Carrotte et al., 2017; Simpson & Mazzeo, 2017; Slater et al., 2017; Tiggemann &
Zaccardo, 2016).
To collect my sample, I relied on both purposive sampling for range, as well as snowball
sampling, due to limited access to certain participants. My goal with sampling for range
was to find differences in participant experience so that I could best speak about fitness
influencers as a social group and the various possibilities of meaning within that group,
despite my otherwise limited sample size. To determine saturation for my sample, I made
sure that certain range parameters were met, which were developed based on the
research questions. The range parameters I used were the ability to partner with brands
outside of the fitness industry, the various strategies used to make money, follower and
post count, and their employment status. While not a perfect picture, I was able to make
judgements about these qualities by viewing the Instagram pages of potential partici­
pants. Instagram currently allows users to write a bio about themselves that appears at
the top of the page, and it is common practice for fitness influencers to use their bios to
list sponsorships, products, and businesses.
Data analysis involved coding each interview for emergent themes and sorting those
codes through both local and inclusive integration in order to produce a diachronic and
issue-focused analysis where individual accounts were analysed with the goal of speaking
to generalised trends in the sample (Weiss, 1994). Through the process of local integration,
I began to group together similar approaches to attention, separating those that were
trying to maximise the attention they received, and those that were trying to mitigate the
attention they received. The final process of inclusive integration allowed me to make
sense of why influencers had such different approaches to managing their attention, which
involved grouping participants by their employment status in the fitness industry.

Findings
Data analysis of the in-depth interviews resulted in two main findings regarding how
influencers understand and manage attention on Instagram. The first speaks to the
972 K. KUBLER

meaning and value of attention. Many influencers do not understand attention as some­
thing that is always desirable, or an accurate measure of how much money one makes on
Instagram. Rather than a new form of revenue made possible via social media platforms,
influencers understood attention as something that could facilitate success on Instagram
if it was aligned with their needs. Participants stressed that metrics for attention on
Instagram, such as likes, comments, and followers, did not accurately reflect the meaning
and value of attention.
The second finding was a trajectory from attention-seeking to attention-mitigating
strategies. As influencers developed their self-brands, they often shifted from advertising
for other companies, to advertising for their own small business. This shift often coincided
with a reduction in attention-seeking strategies and an increase in attention-mitigating
strategies due to both time constraints and concerns about maintaining authentic fan
relationships. Although it is often assumed that those who have been in the industry the
longest and have the most followers can attract the best brand deals, influencers were
concerned with dividing the attention of their audience with competing brand partner­
ships. Many who worked full-time online owned their own businesses, producing similar
products to ones that they had been brand ambassadors for in the past. To maintain
authentic fan relationships, these influencers were conscious to not overload their audi­
ences with advertisements by prioritising their own products over those from other
companies.

The meaning and value of attention

Influencers were keenly aware that attracting and maintaining attention was only
valuable if it could be converted into money. Rather than a separate economy running
on attention, participants often referred to their work using traditional marketing
language.
Instagram isn’t a place for us to be making money. It’s more of a business card, like a place to
stay on people’s minds because the more attention we can maintain, the more potential you
have to convert them as a customer and a follower. (Cory, 11/22/19)

The business card metaphor suggests that for Cory, the role of attention via social media is
analogous to the role that attention plays in marketing a product through any other
medium. Business cards are given to potential customers, not as an end, but to facilitate
market exchange and converting attention into money. While platform features such as
likes, comments, and followers quantify attention in a unique way, influencers did not
always see the role attention played in market exchange as novel.
While attention is required for a market transaction to take place with or without the
existence of an attention economy, not all attention becomes money. Several participants
were eager to dispel the myth that having high levels of attention measured through
likes, comments, or followers equalled monetary success.
It’s funny, people who aren’t in the influencer or social media space think that people on
Instagram are balling out with money from different posts, but really Instagram is not a high-
paid app[. . .]the people I worked with didn’t provide enough value for me to continue
putting in the work for them[. . .]I get a ton of free stuff, like I have way too many leggings
to even know what to do with, but it isn’t money. (Irene, 1/14/20)
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 973

For Irene, the effort she was putting into her brand relationships was not worth the
monetary returns she was receiving. As a full-time online personal trainer, advertising for
other brands meant splitting her audience’s attention between their products and her
own personal training services. The trade-off for spending time developing relationships
with brands and advertising for their products was time that could have been spent
working with her online clients or advertising for her own business. When attention did
not mean money, or at least a foreseeable pathway to it, it was not worth pursuing for its
own end.
Another concern regarding attention-seeking strategies was not just attracting the
wrong attention, but too much of it.

Everyone would think that all those people are doing well. But I mean they’re not, those are
my buddies. Like I said, the guy has 900,000 followers. He’s maybe making $1,000 a month
[. . .]But if you go on his profile, you’ll understand why. It’s all shirtless pictures, out of the
900,000, probably 800,000 of them are just women that think he’s hot and maybe 100,000 of
them are potential buyers, but he doesn’t know how to talk to the potential buyers. So 10
people buy from him a month. (Dylan, 12/5/19)

Kate brought up a similar problem, with the gender roles reversed.

I know a lot of girls who are personal trainers, and they talk with women, but if you look at
their audience, it’s all men. So those are just guys staring at their half-naked pictures. And
I mean, you don’t get any business from it. And a lot of them have a lot more followers than
I do, but it’s still not any business. You need to make sure that you target the audience that
you want to target. (Kate, 1/23/20)

These stories point to the explicitly sexualised nature of influencer labour on Instagram
(Drenten et al., 2020). These types of influencers outlined by Dylan and Kate are known as
boosters who ‘promote access to self-marketed products and perform sexualised labour
to exploit the attention of social media followers for monetary compensation’ (Drenten
et al., 2020, p. 16). However, in this case, rather than benefitting from the attention
brought to them through their sexualised labour, it was hurting them because the
attention was not coming from the same people who would buy their self-marketed
products.
As Kate was employed full-time in the fitness industry and well established in her
career, she could identify missteps of those with less experience. In contrast, Norm,
a student and part-time in-person trainer who recently started to build his brand online,
highly valued attracting and maintaining attention. ‘People’s attention spans are so short
and you need to constantly be in their face in order for them to remember you and want
to keep following you’ (Norm, 4/6/20). This emphasis on consistency and immediacy was
common among part-time fitness influencers early in their careers.
These examples suggest that not all fitness influencers understand attention or value it
in the same way. Most realised that attention was not itself money, but expectations
around what types of attention would convert into money differed. For those that worked
part-time online or who were in the early stages of it was difficult to discern between
profitable and non-profitable forms of attention. For those that worked full-time in the
online fitness industry, attention was only valuable if it came in specific forms that aligned
with their business model. Influencers often learned the meaning of attention through
their strategies of seeking and mitigating attention.
974 K. KUBLER

Attention-seeking and mitigating strategies

Fitness influencers that reported spending lots of time seeking out attention were often
only employed part-time in the online fitness industry and were in the early stages of their
careers. As being part-time often meant that the influencer had another source of income
outside of the online fitness industry, there was not always an immediate need to convert
attention into money. Those employed full-time in the industry engaged in the most
attention mitigating strategies. These strategies were used to save time for other tasks, or
because an increase in attention would potentially hurt business.
Norm’s focus on consistently and immediately seeking attention led him to offer home
workout advice and training plans when gyms across the world were closed due to
COVID-19. His attention-seeking strategy focused on a wide range of exposure through
hashtags and advertisements.

I used all the popular [hashtags] for fitness. And then I had all this capital saved up from
personal training I’ve done in the past and I just spent it all on Instagram ads[. . .]I targeted
everyone in my area, all of the hotspots of fitness in the country[. . .]I got tons of engagement
and then the right people reached out and were like, you’re on to something. And that’s how
I got involved with all these agencies. (Norm, 4/6/20)

Relative to other fitness influencers, his advertisement targeting strategy was broad,
targeting everyone in his area and all the fitness hotspots in the United States. The choice
to spend his savings on advertising reflected a belief that the first step towards success
was the accumulation of attention. This belief was also aligned with his goals of working
with talent and modelling agencies to advance his career as an influencer. As the
accumulation of attention is one way that talent and modelling agencies evaluate the
worth of an influencer, investing heavily in this attention-seeking strategy made sense for
Norm.
Early in his career, Marshall took a similar approach to Norm which revolved around
getting as many followers as possible. He quickly found his self-brand, which consisted of
posting informational infographics about fitness and nutrition, and within a few years of
posting multiple infographics a day, he was able to grow his account to 78,700 followers.
As a part-time online personal trainer, Marshall recognised the value of the attention that
his page received through his high volume of content and follower growth but acknowl­
edged that he needed to start investing more in converting his followers into customers.

What worked the fastest for growth was just doing purely infographics. Now I post a lot more
videos of myself and other types of content showing more of who I am because if you just
have infographics and no one knows necessarily who you are behind the page, that’s not
going to get someone to purchase a high-ticket program from you. I had a ton of success
growing a very large volume [of followers] early on, but I struggled in selling clients on my
program because they didn’t know if they could trust me. So now that I’ve been posting a lot
more content of me directly, sales improved dramatically from doing that. I care a lot less
about the aesthetic of my page and just gaining followers. Cause I realised that’s great to be
like, oh yeah, I have this many followers, but it didn’t mean anything if my business wasn’t
growing, and I wasn’t helping more people. (Marshall, 4/1/20)

Online personal trainers offer a variety of products and services such as selling workout
plans, conducting group training, consultations, or in Marshall’s case, high-ticket pro­
grams. High-ticket programs refer to all-inclusive training packages containing training
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 975

and nutrition guidelines, as well as check-in calls with the coach which can range in
frequency from bi-weekly to multiple times a day. These programs are the most expensive
option offered by online personal trainers and often cost over $1000 a month. The fans
that Marshall attracted through infographics were not necessarily those looking for
a high-ticket training program, or if they were, the infographics were not doing enough
to convince fans to make a purchase. While still actively posting content to seek attention,
he no longer followed the strategy that maximised attention via follower growth, but
rather one that mitigated attention to better improve sales.
Alice, a full-time online fitness coach, shared similar feelings of what it was like to first
start her page.

When I first got into posting on Instagram to build a business, I was really excited by the fact
that people liked to follow my journey[. . .]there’s an excitement that comes with realising that
posting about yourself can get attention and can influence other people. (Alice, 11/25/19)

However, after she switched to running her business full-time, much of the excitement
and investment wore off. Alice did not employ anyone to help with her business which
meant that the relative drop in attention-seeking strategies was due to time constraints
that emerged as her business grew.

I could put in the time and do it, but it’s not really worth it in my mind. There was a point where
I was posting two to three times per week on YouTube posting on Instagram way too much,
and you know, my business was growing pretty well and I think once I established that
foundation of a certain amount of clients to where you know enough people were renewing
every month and that people were referring their friends that I no longer needed to invest that
much time in my content. So once I had that base, I think I kind of ramped back on putting out
so much stuff and just focused more on the quality of the content that I did put out.

Like Marshall, Alice was happy to reduce her attention-seeking strategies because that
reduction was a response to increasing sales. Alice also relied on word-of-mouth market­
ing for her business, which was a way for her to mitigate the amount of attention she
sought out by relying on current and past clients.
Too much of the wrong attention wasn’t just a concern regarding wasted time and
money as is traditionally the case, but on Instagram it also impacted the influencer’s
ability to correctly market themselves in the future. Fitness influencers contend with what
is colloquially called ‘the algorithm’ on platforms such as Instagram. The algorithms that
mediate a user’s Explore and Discover page, suggested pages, and rank the posts in their
feed on Instagram all fall under this generic term of ‘the algorithm’ (Bishop, 2020).
Attracting the wrong attention pushed the algorithm to show the influencer’s content
to the wrong audience in the present and the future. Not only did the attention not
convert into money, but that same attention reduced the ability of potential consumers to
access content from influencers.
As algorithms mediate the type of attention influencers attract, there were numerous
strategies oriented towards beating the algorithm (Cotter, 2019), such as engagement
groups (O’Meara, 2019), also known as Instapods (Leaver et al., 2020, p. 141). These groups
were often made up of influencers who produced similar content that were looking to
mutually boost each other’s work by liking and commenting on posts with the hope that
this would lead to favourable treatment by the algorithm. However, this strategy came
with its own drawbacks as well.
976 K. KUBLER

I was in an engagement group before and I didn’t really like it. I was in it for a short time and it
kind of worked. I got a bunch of comments and it looked like I got more engagement on my
posts, but then I was finding out that Instagram was only showing my posts to those people
in the engagement groups. Yeah, it looks good, but I don’t want those people to see it, I want
other people to see it. So then I left the group. (Rose, 4/9/20)

Although Rose’s posts attracted more attention, it was from the wrong type of fans.
Engagement groups can work well for those that are looking to secure advertising deals
because they boost engagement metrics such as likes and comments which play a role in
valuing one’s worth to advertisers. As a full-time online coach, Rose wanted her fans to be
people who were relatively new to fitness and potentially interested in personal training
services. Instead, the engagement group ended up making Instagram’s algorithm show her
content to other influencers in the engagement group that were not interested in her services.
As they invested in their online business full-time, some influencers chose to disas­
sociate themselves from previous brand deals. After taking ownership of her friend’s
fitness lifestyle company, Olive noted, ‘I decided when I bought [the company] to remove
most of my sponsor codes[. . .]I didn’t want to be that influencer who’s just beaming out
codes, like buy this guy’s stuff and also buy mine’ (Olive, 3/25/20). Although being
associated with other brands can lead to increased attention through exposure on
brand pages, there were several reasons why this attention was not desirable given
Olive’s employment status. First, as the owner of a fitness company, Olive wanted her
fans’ attention on her company’s products rather than sponsored content from other
companies. Second, the sense of an authentic fan relationship can be harmed by pushing
too many products at once. ‘I have to have some level of authenticity with my customers.
I don’t want to put them through the constant barrage of ads’ (Olive, 3/25/20). The
removal of brand sponsorships as Olive transitioned into becoming a full-time online
business owner also signified a shift in self-branding strategy. Her self-brand was sub­
sumed in the brand of the business which required a new way to mitigate attention.
Unlike the previous examples of attention mitigation as a way for fitness influencers to
save time, Olive mitigated attention to maintain her authenticity. Olive saw advertising on
Instagram as reducing her level of authenticity with her fans, but also as a necessity to sell her
company’s products. This example helps explain the relationship, or paradox (Hietanen &
Rokka, 2015), between attracting the right attention and authenticity. Both help turn a fan
into a customer and attention into money, but one without the other can impede the ability
to do so. Authenticity without attention from the right people can look like Rose’s experience
with engagement groups, or the sexualised labour described by Dylan and Kate. Attention
without authenticity describes Marshall’s case, where his page was growing successfully
through infographics, but his relationship with his followers was not authentic enough for
them to feel comfortable purchasing a high-ticket personal training program from him.

Discussion
The findings of this study lead to several conclusions about the concept of the attention
economy and its application to fitness influencers. First, the attention economy does not
accurately describe contemporary economic conditions, troubling its ability to explain both
the thought and practice of fitness influencers. Second, understanding the heterogeneous
composition of fitness influencers, based on their position within the production process,
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 977

their career trajectories, and their strategies, is necessary for understanding the meaning of
attention. Finally, these same differences among fitness influencers help explain the variety
of approaches to attention within the marketing and communication literature.
In its early conceptualisation, the attention economy was a form of capitalism rewired
by digital technologies to such an extent that the principle of scarcity no longer impacted
the exchange of goods and services, leaving the economy ordered by the scarcity of
attention. Although none of this happened, some argue that the rise of social media
influencers is evidence for the attention economy’s continued usefulness. However,
because attention facilitates the exchange of goods and services with money on social
media platforms serving as digital marketplaces (Hund & McGuigan, 2019), the degree to
which an attention economy describes the thoughts and practices of influencers is
tenuous. Fitness influencers were aware that attention was valuable, but its contextual
specificity meant that it did not serve as a medium for universal exchange.
Attention can appear like a currency for those looking to become influencers because
having attention from a follower base is the necessary, but not sufficient, condition for
making money as an influencer. Influencers that work with brands as wage labourers to
advertise products and services are compensated for commanding attention. However,
once influencers start their own businesses, they relate to attention not as wage labourers
but as entrepreneurs, or even employers. In this position, continually seeking attention
becomes a cost on, rather than immediate source of, revenue. Further uses of the attention
economy should pay attention to the position of influencers within the production process
as this helps explain differences in attention-seeking and mitigating strategies.
While extant literature identifies attracting attention as what defines being a social
media influencer (Cirucci, 2019; Rokka & Canniford, 2016), these findings show cases
where attention-seeking strategies are avoided or replaced by attention-mitigation stra­
tegies. As influencers develop in their careers, they become more aware of the types of
attention that do and do not convert into money, which often comes with a shift from
primarily wage labour to business ownership. For fitness influencers working in part-time
positions, it was often advantageous to attract and maintain attention broadly as this
either helped market their self-brands or connected them with brand and agency partner­
ships. As self-brands grew, influencers working full-time in the online fitness industry
began to mitigate attention by investing less time on brand endorsements, leaving
engagement groups, and reducing the frequency of their content production.
These findings advance the application of the attention economy literature to influen­
cers by answering calls by Hudders et al. (2021), for more qualitative research on the
meaning of influencer metrics, and Swaminathan et al. (2020), for a deeper investigation
of commercial and non-commercial person-brands. The meaning of attention metrics on
Instagram such as followers, likes, views, and comments varied among fitness influencers.
Those looking for brand partnerships put more value in attention metrics than those who
were running their own businesses. This division in meaning helps explain why some
describe the role of attention in advertising as a risk to be managed (Fournier & Eckhardt,
2019), or a cost to be limited (Besana et al., 2018), while others see it as a scarce resource
to be readily acquired (Ashman et al., 2018; Drenten et al., 2020; Smith & Fischer, 2021).
Influencers are a heterogeneous group of social actors, with different understandings of,
and strategies towards, attention.
978 K. KUBLER

Beyond theoretical contributions to a conceptualisation of the attention economy, this

paper also offers practical implications for influencers and the brands that work with
them. For those working with influencers to market products, these insights help con­
textualise what attention means and how it might relate to the success of selling
a product or promoting a brand. Understanding employment status and the career
trajectory of influencers can further ensure that brands make mutually beneficial com­
mercial partnerships. For influencers looking to develop their self-brand, these findings
underline the importance of considering how the accumulation of attention early in
a career may relate to the trajectory of one’s career through both brand partnerships
and business development.

Limitations and future research

There were several limitations to this study, which were primarily due to the method of
investigation. Conducting in-depth interviews afforded a rich level of analysis about how
influencers engaged with attention and what it meant to them. This came at the cost of
a larger, and potentially random, sample that could have been attained through conducting
a survey. Although a conscious effort was made to sample for range, it became difficult to
secure enough participants without also engaging in snowball sampling, which can run the
risk of homogenising a sample population along certain social characteristics. The composi­
tion of interview samples was also inherently limited by those willing to be interviewed. This
study also relies on participant accounts, which may be impacted by face-saving or recall
bias, however the effort to anonymise interview data was an attempt to minimise this effect.
There are also avenues for future research. At the level of influencer strategy, compara­
tive work between different fields and industries would be helpful in identifying simila­
rities and differences in how influencers relate to attention. To date, most research on
influencers has focused on single industries, a limitation that this study shares, making it
difficult to compare attention-seeking strategies across industries. Avenues for monetisa­
tion and employment among participants were in part shaped by the focus of this study
on the fitness industry. One of the most common professions in the industry, personal
training has transitioned online with little occupational disruption, making it a popular
employment choice for fitness influencers. These occupational dynamics may not reflect
other industries that are popular among influencers, such as fashion, gaming, or journal­
ism. However, the focus of this study on employment offers one possible approach for
expanding this analysis across different fields of internet celebrity. If employment status
can be held constant through two or more industries, industry-level impacts on how
influencers relate to attention can be better understood.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Kyle Kubler is a faculty lecturer at the McGill Writing Centre at McGill University. He is also a research
fellow at the Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy at the University of Washington.
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 979

ORCID
Kyle Kubler http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2162-4336

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