Child Influencers in the Creator Economy – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Social media influencers play a well-established social media role in modern society. YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms for video content creation and vlogging has become a favourite activity among young children. This trend has created many YouTube channels targeting young children as their audience. Many YouTube channels that target kids have children leading them (called child influencers), often managed by parents. Influencer marketing has created the notion of the creator economy, which relates to content creation in social media with an ability to monetize. This research-in-progress paper presents an exploratory research agenda to investigate the notion of child influencers in the creator economy, alluding to the issues of morals, privacy, vulnerability and exploitation