Influencers' Media Work and Shared Visibility Practices with Legacy Media: the case of Finland

Social media influencers (SMI) today run their own businesses in Finland. Employing often the founder alone, many of these companies are remarkably profitable in comparison to influencer industry intermediaries, influencer marketing agencies intermediating between brands and influencers. Yet the great majority of SMI earn only side income from their practice. Together, these influencer industry actors represent a growing part of the Finnish creative industry workforce, occupying a growing role in young audiences’ media usage. This study contributes to the theorizing of media work by proposing to consider SMI as doing media work. With a qualitative approach based on thematic interviews with media managers, influencer agency entrepreneurs and influencers, this study finds that legacy media engage in what is here called Shared Visibility Practices (SVP) with SMI. The domestic Finnish online media destinations such as broadcaster video on demand (BVOD) services benefit from the attractiveness of SMI to young audiences, when cast to TV shows, whereas exposure to television audiences enhances SMI monetization by for instance increasing their familiarity to marketing decision makers. The findings elucidate a national context of video streaming destination competition and co-existence, suggesting that SVP may help counteract some of the financially detrimental effects of platforms to national media brands by directing traffic to their own media destinations where the audience attention can be monetized.