Trend Alert: F*** You Pay Me
Voxburner Content Team
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Trend Alert introduces you to the latest trends that are impacting the daily lives of 16-24s.
As the influencer industry grows and becomes increasingly vital to the success of many brands’ marketing campaigns, influencers themselves are finding themselves facing the same issues as other freelancers, especially around getting paid fairly and on time. Realising that they have more chance of being treated well if they work together, content creator Lindsey Lee Lugrin (@msyoungprofessional) has launched the brilliantly named web platform, F*** You Pay Me. The site features the tagline: “Your bank would never accept ‘exposure’ as payment. Neither should you.”
Co-founded with former Facebook employee Isha Mehra, the site hosts a private community only accessible to influencers (defined as anyone who has been paid to promote a brand on social media), where members swap details of how much they get paid and what various brands are like to work with. This helps other members understand how much they can charge when working with the same or similar brands. It’s a valuable resource since payment for brand deals varies widely and is not transparent, which makes the industry difficult to navigate for newcomers. By providing a reference point, F*** You Pay Me tackles the power imbalance between large corporations and influencers, who are typically young females with little experience of running their own business.
In order to join F*** You Pay Me, new members must contribute at least one review of a brand they’ve worked with, and they must also provide demographic information about themselves, including their race, gender and sexual orientation. This data will be used to track pay disparities between people of different backgrounds and identities, and to hold brands accountable for their commitments to equal pay. This pledge follows frequent reports of Black influencers being paid less than their white counterparts for the same work, a disturbing trend we first wrote about in 2019.
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