How Influencers Are Negatively Being Impacted During The Coronavirus Outbreak

A lot of influencers don’t think about introducing multiple streams of income when they’re first starting out. I always knew that I couldn’t put all of my eggs in one basket, whether that’s the site, social media, whatever. From the jump, I wanted to be one of those influencers who had an empire and had built it with investments in multiple lanes — of course, some would get more priority than others.

Instead, I wanted to diversify my revenue streams so that if anything ever suffered, you would still have a few other streams that you could potentially depend on. Well, I recently talked about how the coronavirus has been affecting the fashion and beauty industry, although it’s really affecting every industry right now and nobody is immune to its damage. But it is slowly doing more things now that are leaving a lot of influencers, myself included, a bit frustrated.

So recently, some large fashion and beauty retailers have paused affiliate link programs because of the fact that these brands, instead of paying out that percentage to those affiliate programs like rewardStyle, would rather save and hold on to that money because of the uncertainty of the times.

It has been a lot receiving emails from different affiliate programmers who have said that even if we do share different products with our audiences that we can’t make a commission off of that. It’s weird because people are still shopping at this time. I think half of it is panic shopping, but half of it is also that brands and businesses are offering deals so that they don’t take too much of a blow to their revenue. But nonetheless, even though people’s shopping habits are still doing something, influencers who depend on affiliate marketing are going to be the ones that suffer.

Now, I’m not saying that influencers are the only ones to suffer in this.

Obviously bigger brands and companies have a lot to lose when they don’t have influencer marketing behind them or when they don’t have affiliate programs that allow for different audiences to be able to reach. However, it really sucks that a lot of people who potentially make the majority of their money from affiliate programs are now sort of lost in what they can and cannot do. This can include many influencers who use that money for their rent, or that is their main source of income.

And even though people always say that influencers chose the life that they live, we all have, to some degree. And so it’s not really fair for anyone who has to suffer the ramifications of this. However, like I said, I can completely understand why brands have to do this, because cutting costs is a high priority for many of these companies. And they want to ensure that they have enough money in their own back pocket, instead of passing that percentage off to a third party.

In a recent Business of Fashion article, they spoke to different influencers who have talked about how the coronavirus is affecting them, whether it’s figuring out a way to replace the income or how they have had support teams or even the cost and allocation of money and resources.

I personally know that there were some financial things that I wanted to put into place that I cannot right now, simply because I would rather wait for all of this to pass over and then be able to assess from there, but my heart goes out to people who have been depending on checks from affiliate marketing and using that money to hire freelance writers, photographers, stylists.

They have interns, they have a manager, PR person, and they know that there are people who rely on them. Everyone at this point right now has to rethink their business plan, Q2 goals, and really the rest of the year and the damage that this is going to cause the industry. It’s one of those things that at the end of the day, I feel we are going to have to see how people can get creative and how people can get scrappy with the resources that they’re given.

Obviously, this is a hard time for people considering influencer marketing is an all-time high. But I do believe that if you stay the course, and if you try to figure out different ways to diversify, that you will be in a better position to weather the storm and also figure out a way to jump back into the industry.

When this is all said and done, I think that if anything else, this whole Coronavirus outbreak has taught us the necessity to be flexible and to be able to pivot in ways that we’ve never had to be before.