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Discrepancies Experienced by Black Content Creators (Expert Insight)
By [email protected] (Flori Needle)
Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of underrepresented business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success.
This piece is in collaboration with HubSpot Podcast Network’s Amplifying Voices campaign partnership with The Gathering Spot.
In 2019, Charli D’Amelio shared a video on TikTok doing the Renegade dance. The video blew up and is inarguably her claim to fame. Since then, she’s amassed 150M followers on the app, done brand deals with household names, and her family has an unscripted reality docuseries called The D’Amelio Show.
Thousands of TikTokers followed her lead, did the dance, and attributed it to D’Amelio, but she didn’t create it — Jalaiah Harmon did. Harmon’s erasure from her dance is attributed to racial bias as she’s Black and D’Amelio is White.
Harmon’s experience is just one of thousands, as many Black content creators face inequalities, from receiving credit for trends to late payments to algorithm biases. In this post, we’ll delve deeper into some of these inequalities and share expert advice from Natasha Pierre and Ross Simmonds on overcoming these roadblocks.
Table of Contents
- Discrepancies Experienced By Black Content Creators – Key Stats
- Discrepancies Experienced By Black Content Creators (+ Expert Thoughts)
- How can Black content creators rise above discrepancies? ( + Expert Advice)
Discrepancies Experienced By Black Content Creators — Key Stats
- Black influencers in the nano and micro-influencer tiers (under 50k followers) average $27,000 annual compensation. (MSL)
- Black macro-influencers (50k+ followers) received an average of over $100,000 compensation from brands. (MSL)
- 49% of Black influencers reported that their race contributed to an offer below market value from a brand. (MSL)
- The pay gap margin between white and Black influencers is 35%. (MSL)
- 79% of Black influencers feel comfortable posting about diversity issues, but more than half feel they’re negatively impacted by posting about these issues, whereas only 14% of White influencers feel the same way. (MSL)
- 58.3% of influencers say they’ve been discriminated against as an influencer on any social platform. (Influencer Marketing Hub)
- Influencers say that TikTok has the worst discrimination they’ve faced. (Influencer Marketing Hub)
Discrepancies Experienced By Black Content Creators (+ Expert Thoughts)
1. Pay Disparities
Black influencers are paid 35% less than White influencers. Most of the time that means creators aren’t getting paid what they’re worth, and sometimes they’re being paid late. There’s also a lack of pay transparency, so Black creators don’t know what others are getting paid if they’re being shorted and what to negotiate for.
92% of influencers responding to MSL’s Time to Face the Influencer Pay Gap research study said that …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
