Creators hunt for online niches to go mainstream. Remixing niches can create virality. Combining poetry and food marketing, or Kerala pickles and adventure travel is the norm. As one aspirational influencer puts it, “My poetry should reach more and more people. I want to join hands with products or companies, may it be food products or specific products.”
Micro entrepreneurs such as “Goodboy Kitchen” (@goodboy_ kitchen on Instagram) combine the rising craze for special dog breeds among Indian elites with socially conscious marketing of plastic-free packaging – from Instagram to their doorstep. Cloud kitchen models promise Kerala pickles from their farm to the diaspora’s table.
A niche can be simple, humble, grounded and yet gain global attention if it hits the right emotive nerve. Village fashion influencers like Neel Ranaut (@ranautneel on Instagram) from Tripura have gone viral and gained more followers than most of the top fashion brands in India. Ranaut combines stones, petals, leaves and flowers with adhesive tape and parades through their village. The cognitive dissonance of playing with gender identities, fashion trends and village stereotypes has hooked millions on their profile.
In recent years, many low-income youths have become influencers through body flips, lip-syncing to popular songs and cool dance moves. Tanzanian village influencers Kili Paul (@kili_ paul on Instagram) and his sister Neema Paul (@neemapaul155 on Instagram) have garnered millions of followers, from India in particular, as they move and groove while lip-syncing to popular Bollywood and Tollywood songs. In February 2022, the Indian High Commission honoured Kili Paul for winning “millions of hearts” in India for his creative contribution.
Small-time artists try their luck on Instagram by getting extremely specialised and contextual. Relatability boosts engagement. The local can transform into the universal by tapping into global aspirations for travel, food, entertainment, community and intimacy. Content creators need to carve their niches and stay with it, as one ghostwriter for a media organisation explains:
Whatever your niche, whatever be your category, on that basis you have to create content because people follow you from that point that this is a dancer, this is a food vlogger … On that you can’t switch your niche. So, first decide your niche and then on that niche relevant content should be posted.
Niches have limits. Micro entrepreneurs must balance scalability and selectivity due to limits in logistics. While their businesses may be entirely on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, and promise unlimited growth, they still have limited offline production and delivery capacity. Artists have modest aspirations for follower counts since their price points are high and thereby affordable only for premium clientele. Civic activists may have specific causes that are tied to a mission or an event, which may not align with the medium of virality, as one NGO member shares:
The entire social media game depends a lot on making Reels. But as an organisation, it also gets difficult to make Reels, because what are we supposed to do … the topics that we work on are so sensitive that we can’t make it … you know, we can’t always make certain things that go along with the, you know, trending audios. But we can’t dance to audio, right? We can’t do the trends. So, we can’t jump into every trend with the sensitive topics that we have. So, it gets very difficult to engage at times.
Typically, though, aspirational influencers aim for masses of followers to attract advertisers, paid partnerships, affiliate marketing and ads on reels. They optimise many platforms, including Indian apps like ShareChat, Moj, Josh, Nojoto, and Chingari, beyond the usual suspects, such as Facebook and Instagram.
Many content creators recognize that their content is niche. To survive in this game, creators need to be authentic to their context. Their cultural capital, where they come from – their village, or what they wear, or eat, or how they dance – can be turned into useful data if remixed with the right K-pop dance or Bollywood song. What was once considered “primitive” is now prime for the algorithm.
Creativity is collaborative. An aspirational influencer describes her creative process:
When I have to create a masterpiece, a very visually appealing content, and I do not want to deal with learning how to use a difficult application, I choose to collaborate. In such a situation, I get to focus on the content part of the project, like the storyline/plot, and the other team member, who is an expert with an application, will manage the visuals.
You can create a digital “masterpiece” and yet share creative ownership. Young creators view themselves as creative “geniuses” as well as collaborators. They don’t view this as a contradiction; it is their creative reality. Aspirational influencers put tremendous energy into the creative process; staying trendy can be exhausting and putting their content out in the wild can be risky. It helps to have a creative community to transform concepts into content, test ideas in a safe space, and build relationships and buy-in with peers. Reciprocity is fuel to these creative fissures. Online groups play a vital role in reinforcing the collective creative identity of members. They help resource-constrained users access expensive applications and learn resources through designer-driven mentorship programs online, ‘giveaway’ awards in competitions and joint scholarships for licensed apps.
Marginalised creators find a cultural belonging for their creative expression. They seek out “DIY Clubs”, hashtag networks and curation communes. Followers also have a role to play in this creative collaboration. Aspirational influencers seek to co-create with their followers to keep the conversation going and deepen fan loyalty. Influencers and creators establish authenticity, trust and credibility by sharing their raw products with their audience. At the same time, creators’ obsession with novelty gives way to remixing as the creative standard.
Remixing is at the core of self-expression and is well-suited to digital cultures that are built through networks, cross-posting and collaborations. Creators view the process of building on other people’s content as creative and critical in this trending culture. Youths are unapologetic and frank about their creative approach; as one of them explains, “Remixing content, mashing things up and reviving old trends are very important because you do not always have something to say.” Content without visibility is meaningless as one Gen Z youth puts it, “What is the point of making [something] if I can’t post [it]?”
Attribution over ownership is the new ethical code of practice among creators. Rising creatives value giving credit to originators via online tags to acknowledge inspiration. It is flattering for many creators to be copied; as one remarks, “I feel good that someone is copying. I feel that I must have at least done something good to warrant that.” However, it is inexcusable to not give due credit.
This is felt most acutely among rural and semi-urban creators. They are deeply tuned into the copyright regime as they have been at the receiving end of intellectual and creative theft from mass cultural industries for decades. They want content protection, like watermarks and fair remuneration systems. However, in the face of these challenges, one rural influencer defiantly remarks:
Today they [other content creators] might copy and take one or two creations of mine, [but,] finally they will have to do something on their own. How long can they be dependent on me? If they take one or two palms full of water from an ocean, what difference will it make?
Increasingly, creators are demanding that attributions be factored into the design of the platforms. With rising protests by influential creators of colour, TikTok’s director of the creator community, Kudzi Chikumbu, in a 2022 press statement announced the new “culture of credit”. The goal is to introduce features that will make the algorithm more equitable for underrepresented creators. Chikumbu promised creators that they would finally have crediting tools like the ability to directly tag or mention in the video inspirations behind their content. TikTok has added user prompts to nudge creators to give credit, educating users on the importance of crediting via features like pop-ups.
TikTok also debuted an “originators series” that highlights trendsetting creators on their site every month to build awareness of creative attribution for a global creator community. While it is a step in the right direction, this does not fundamentally align with redistribution or profit sharing between creators and platforms. Moreover, attribution is still talked about in terms of individual creators online, with little attention to the offline social networks of creators that enable these creative products and processes.
Creativity has long been a collective process. This is especially so among artisans in the Global South. Our algorithmic cultures, however, are biased towards computing individual people’s products and processes. For instance, in Bangladesh, women makeup 60 per cent of the labour force in the creative industries but barely eke out a living from their creative work. Prominent heritage crafts like kantha are made by rural women who gather in a household and repurpose worn-out clothes with intricate embroidery. Ownership, here, is the village where it is produced.
The pandemic pushed many of these artisans to sell their creations online, inspiring several social entrepreneurs, like Shimmy and Bengal Muslin, to step up and equip these women to leverage digital resources and boost their living. Many women artisans have had to rely on male family members who had better digital skills and access to mobile phones. These new intermediaries have resulted in further cuts from their already meagre livelihoods.
There is a double standard on platforms like Etsy, which claims to be a digital space for “millions of people selling the things they love”. In practice, its typical creators are middle-class, white women, who do artisanal work as a hobby. Their craft is recognised as personal, handmade and authentic. However, if the kantha women’s groups came on Etsy, they would be viewed as commercial and mass-produced. In conventional design hierarchy, individual and unique creations trump mass products and collaborative processes. Templates are out to disrupt such hierarchies.
Excerpted with permission from From Pessimism To Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech, Payal Arora, HarperBusiness.
