Quoted from article:
"The collapsing distance between brand and life has led to social-media influencing, in which advertisers pay for endorsements from people with strong online followings.
There is an undeniable aesthetic and demographic conformity in the vanlife world. Nearly all of the most popular accounts belong to young, attractive, white, heterosexual couples. “There’s the pretty van girl and the woodsy van guy,” Smith said. “That’s what people want to see.” At times, the vanlife community seems full of millennials living out a leftover baby-boomer fantasy: the Volkswagens, the neo-hippie fashions, the retro gender dynamics.
Top
social-media influencers receive tens of thousands of dollars for
endorsing a product, but King and Smith aren’t there yet; they make
between five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars for each sponsored
post. Last year, their first year attempting to earn a living primarily
through social media, they made eighteen thousand dollars. In the first
two months of 2017, they had already lined up ten thousand dollars’
worth of endorsements. Smith and King told me that they work only with
brands they feel connected to. “We try to leverage the power we have as
influencers in the social-media world to bring light to companies that
are doing good in the world, that are creating products we believe in,”
King explained. “We see every dollar as a vote.” They are sponsored by
several companies whose products they use every day, including
TruthPaste, which makes clay-based toothpaste, and Four Sigmatic, a
“superfood company” that sells instant coffee enhanced with mushroom
elixirs."
