It's not directly transferrable, but some accounts have successfully monetised their accounts (though this is largely impersonal accounts like We Rate Dogs which are based around a brand.)
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But it is transferable. Even though not always visibly or in an causal way. Should I get old Bourdieu out and talk about "social capital" and "symbolic capital"? Or is it enough to point to it?
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Replying to @romluras @FreyjaErlings
No, the specific actions you have to take in order to make money from your Twitter account are detailed and complex enough that anyone trying to claim any kind of direct ratio of X followers = Y dollars is outright lying
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If you're going to bang on about social capital and symbolic capital, you need to understand that the idea that online metrics actually measure those things is completely false
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There are people with enormous social capital who do not use the Internet at all, and there are people or entities with a very large online "presence" whose actual meaningful social capital is very little
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The whole thing about the WeRateDogs stuff is people were really shocked and disappointed at the expose on how that account actually works Because it's run like a business, requiring a lot of labor and a lot of decisions that feel "disingenuous" and "unnatural"
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It's in a sense analogous to people disappointed that the old horse_ebooks account was in fact made by a human comedian who put a lot of effort into it The idea of just lucking into a big following and then paying your rent from it is nonsense, it's a pipe dream
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Anyway as one of those "big accounts" I know more about it firsthand than most people and it's kind of infuriating the way people talk about it It reminds me of MRAs saying all attractive women should count as rich because the "market value" of their bodies is "human capital"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @romluras
Reach ain't the same as grasp, to put it succinctly
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Replying to @FreyjaErlings @romluras
It's almost not even that Being Internet famous is proximity to privilege and capital in the same way that, say, literal physical proximity is - it's like living in New York City rather than living in rural Iceland
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It's *something*, it means that many opportunities are at least theoretically possible that otherwise wouldn't be But it's not much of a thing Plenty of homeless people in New York who are very unlikely to ever be anything other than homeless
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I know people on Twitter with over 3x my follower count who are literally homeless and below the poverty line, for example. Smarter folks than I. If follower count was directly transferable to wealth, that'd be a near impossibility.
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Replying to @RaeGun2k @arthur_affect and
I think the confusion lies in that anyone who's famous for other reasons often have large follower accounts and do, themselves, wield additional privileges and powers. But the Twitter following is an effect, not a cause.
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