There is nothing wrong with the frankness of money, and the relationship can be priced.
The Translation Bureau is a compilation team that focuses on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on foreign new technologies, new ideas, and new trends.
Editor’s note: Instagram launched a new feature called “Close Friends” at the end of last year. This feature was originally intended as a means of helping users deal with contextual crashes. But Instagram’s net red has turned it into a way of making money. Come on, make a fixed monthly payment, you can determine the intimate relationship with the fans, watch exclusive private content. Kaitlyn Tiffany explored this phenomenon on the Atlantic Monthly website, titled ‘Close Friends,’ for a Monthly Fee
Gabi Abrao, or @sighswoon, which is well-known on Instagram, is “developing an invisible language.” Half of her pages are mysterious, and the other half is her own photo – eat and live Fresh fruit, or try a metal detector, or wear a super-dress in the bathroom of the museum, or wear a stylish anti-fouling mask to stare at the medium – often with poetry about the past, the present and the universe Text.
She has nearly 94,000 fans, of which about 400 are her “Close Friends,” a privilege they earned $3.33 per month on Patreon. These “Close Friends” fans have access to exclusive “private words and personal updates”, including “stupid details” about Abrao’s emotional life, big ideas about “survival and health”, and her poems and poems. prose. Instagram’s original feature is to create a photo-based circle of friends. She is one of the many people who find it can also be used to earn extra money.
Danielle Wiley, CEO of San Francisco’s online agency Sway Group, said: “Of course we have heard of this. We will recommend it. We support everything that Net Red does for making money.”
A lot of Instagram users who have seized this wave of Dafa are lifestyle red, who charge for friendship in the most literal way – to friendshipDecompose into individual components and then divide them into different levels according to the value. (Like high school!) Others include artists and creative fundraising projects that charge $1 a month for behind-the-scenes footage in their role-playing or illustration accounts. For additional visits and more intimate interactions with the host, podcasts and YouTube channels with loyal fans will be charged extra. Former VC Jenny Gyllander has now taken the operational product review Instagram account @sometest as a full-time job, charging her Close Friends list members a $100 lifetime membership – currently 300 people have registered, and now she is working on an alternate List.
This approach is precedent: Porn models have long offered a subscription to Premium Snapchat, a way to sell nude photos to a specific customer base, a bit of a cut-off, but more secure. (An Instagram spokesperson said the company has no plans to add payment options to its platform.) But in any case, Wiley believes that the only strange thing about this approach is the name that Instagram chose for this feature. She said: “That is called ‘Close Friends’, but Instagram makes this feature look even more bizarre. This is not a real close friend; it is controlled content. Net Red has just come up with a way to change this function. Become something that fits your business model.”
The introduction of Close Friends can be traced back to November 2018, as a way to help users deal with contextual crashes (someone who occasionally sees something published by someone who doesn’t necessarily have the same feeling, which is a bit embarrassing, and, on Instagram The more uncomfortable thing to say is that this may lead to a reduction in the content that everyone releases.) Employers and admissions officers often have a lack of respect for the thirst trap and the deep-fried meme. People who want to attract a wide audience of net red can’t remove the mask or joke about the actual friends. Inspired by the secret trumpet that has been around for many years, Close Friends is also a transparent move aimed at renewing the interest of young people – in the past, those young people thought that Snapchat was seen by divers who did not want their parents and hunters. The safest place for content.
For anyone outside of Instagram, the intent is not to make money, but like Facebook, the official choice for Instagram as a “friend” brand is not neutral. Assigning a relationship as an app’s functionality can have strange consequences.
Caroline Calloway is researching “Close Friends”Read the perfect case of potential meaning. Calloway is a net red, so that she is not known for her true beauty and romantic life with superb subtitles. In August of this year, she began offering exclusive options for her 797,000 fans to access their Close Friends list.
According to Instagram’s definition, fans who pay $2 a month will become “Close Friends,” and fans who pay $100 a month will become “Closest Friends,” meaning they still You will receive a one-hour Skype call per month. (Calloway only reserved 20 seats for Closest Friends because “there is only a lot of time in a month.”) She currently has 342 close friends, and her Patreon page promises that when the number of close friends reaches 400, she will specialize Make an “Orchid Hairstyle Tutorial” for them.
Like everything that Calloway has done in the past few months, this move has caused controversy. One fan tweeted: “Whenever I think that Caroline Calloway can’t surpass her previous ghost tricks, she can always break through. She sells friendship on Patreon. It’s friendship!” After testing Water Friends 2 days later, Calloway posted Out of her manager and manager assistant who manually added people to her Close Friends list of photos, which seems to further weaken the value proposition of friendship.
The 22-year-old Texas student Mina Hughes told me that because of curiosity she couldn’t stop her from subscribe to Calloway’s Close Friends. Given that everything that Calloway had shared was very private, she asked: “How can I not want to see her things behind the pay wall be more private?” However, since the first week of charging, Calloway has not released Too many things, according to Hughes, most of the content reappears in her public story later.
Hughes said: “I want to cancel the subscription, because it is a waste of money.” But she still has a glimmer of hope – Calloway will soon release something really ridiculous and spectacular, only a few hundred What the individual can see.
Dana Andersen is also a 22-year-old musician from northwest England who says she doesn’t regret the story of being subscribed to Calloway. She even wrote about it on her blog. She believes that being a close friend of Calloway is like attending a private club, even if she thinks it is just an illusion, but as long as she can feel good, there is no reason to refuse the illusion.
She said she might not pay for being a close friend of other people either.Any similar content of other net red will give people a feeling of “fake”. This distinction is in fact irrational to a person’s choice of how to distribute attention and love. Calloway, despite all its shortcomings, is a real person in Andersen’s view: a sincere disaster, a worthwhile reason. Her blog wrote this: “I will give my own money to Caroline Calloway every month, because I am willing to spend that money on the things she plays with.”
However, for those net reds that sell close friendships, all intimacy is an obligation.
Fashion and travel network Red Ashley Torres said that efforts to provide paid “close friends” content is because her life “has become known to everyone.” To think of something extra will only mean more and more personal. Now, she will share with her close friends what coffee she drank in the morning, and tell them about what happened in her life. It is the kind of “no script has not been edited.” Torres’ account @ dailypursuits has more than 200,000 fans, but so far only 30 people are willing to pay $6 a month. These people are what she calls “BFF.”
After paying the monthly fee, “BFF” will be added to Torres’ “Friends” list, and then you can enjoy some exclusive private content, such as “extra IG story, exclusive weekend coffee lecture, free gift, Starbucks [Gift Card] and so on!”, can appear in the private chat inbox including Torres. If she passes by the city where the fan is located, she can be invited to have a coffee together, as well as “extra content” about her husband Andy. The note says “Love you, really!”
Do you really love you?
Of course. Instagram product owner Robby Stein said: “A large number of users” have developed about 20 “close friends”, and there are hundreds of close friends with a large number of fans, “because those people are really friends for them.”
Although the idea of turning a celebrity into a personal brand (which can be sold as a product, the pricing method is the same as other products) is not new, but this practice still has some problems and is easily confused. Ordinary people who don’t have many fans now often make jokes about their true friends. They have to charge their friends for the best content. This is somewhat self-deprecating and self-aware, but it is not completely hypocritical. It is a form of expression and relationship. The standardization of the idea of monetization should also be carried out. Is the difference between them really only semantic?
It turns out that most of the people who tweeted to charge for “close friends” content are joking, or that unless someone takes it seriously, they are just joking. Jasmine Brooks is a 23-year-old actor in Boston who asks for $1 and is atAdding her Venmo account to her tweet, she told me: “I did use this tweet as a joke, but you know, jokes generally have real ingredients. If someone really gives money, I am not I will be angry. I will be happy to accept it.”
Someone gave this kind of hope to the warmth of the eyes. One of the 30-year-old Tad George in Pennsylvania. He tweeted: “Give me 40 dollars, I will add you to my exclusive “close friend” Instagram story, I may or may not put a long list of my crying video.” When I give When he left a message, he gave me a perfunctory explanation: “This is a joke, because many people or creators are sharing or showing more intimate things to paying audiences. When the ‘Close Friends’ feature was launched, I was thinking It’s fun to let everyone spend $40 to see if I’m doing boring or just crying like this.
Extruding, this joke actually means that many people pay for the details of the private life of any other ordinary person. Last December, the New York Times published an article introducing webcaster Jovan Hill. Jovan Hill calls his work “a gay bankruptcy diary” and he doesn’t call it a job. He is creating a parallel universe where he does nothing except talking and lying down. Therefore, most of the time he just wanders around Los Angeles, or sits in an apartment and talks to fans who like his voice and face (like to be willing to pay). They paid him rent. They want him to live a comfortable life. These people may live a life that is not financially stable, but they can work together to provide a guarantee for a person who likes it – the cuteness of this idea is like its darkness. For only $10 a month, they can see private Instagram and enjoy the priority of private chat. For $50 a month, fans can chat with Hill via iMessage and FaceTime. If he comes to the city where the fan is located, he might also have lunch with his fans.
“I am very poor today,” he likes to announce, it’s not too weird, because now the cool kids on the Internet are saying how they can’t open the pot. As a member of the millennial generation and the Z generation, those people like to remind everyone that they have not done anything special, and they should not suffer from the bankrupt economy, high student debt, and poor work. In this case, the semi-satire of monetizing friendships is not illogical.
Addie Presson, a nursing practitioner from New York, said: “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to eat by face or body, but I don’t like it like this, ‘I’m going bankrupt; save me.’” He also sent a half-joking tweet to levy a subscription fee for Close Friends. “In a way, I am very happy that everyone can be like money.This is frank, but culturally, I think everyone is really desperate. This shows that we are in the midst of an alternating generation.
Here, the behavior of buying and closing Close Friends doesn’t look so stingy, you will feel the same amount of money passing back and forth between people who are on the Internet all day, just like the real neighbors are always between the blowers. Borrow and borrow the same. It doesn’t really matter if you look at the money for any moment. What do you pay for two dollars a month between friends?
Translator: boxi.