The celebrity is far from dead, not supplanted by influencers—in part because the World Wide Web has been plagued with bots, and Google has failed to stem their tide, writes Jack Yan
 
Margot Robbie
Frazer Harrison; banner image courtesy Universal Music
Above: Margot Robbie, honoured at the Palm Springs International Film Festival earlier this year.
 
We often hear that the traditional idea of the celebrity is gone. Media are fragmented, and social media haven’t helped. As a society we don’t congregate around event television much any more. And if there were a celebrity, the audience is so fragmented that not everyone will resonate with them.

For every one of these, there is an opposing force. Media might be fragmented and social media might have given rise to certain celebrities, but at the end of the day, it seems legacy media build celebrity profiles—or at least raise them—to the general public’s consciousness. We might not have event television, but films still exist, and they seem to function on having stars—think last year’s Barbie, more a creation of a film studio’s promotion plus latent interest in the Mattel doll. And where would that be without Margot Robbie, both as producer and star? Robbie, too, seems to put paid to the idea that the audience is overly fragmented, as does Taylor Swift.

Over the last few days, we’ve run stories featuring Kim Kardashian and Kendall Jenner, with a predictable rise in traffic to them; Kaia Gerber has also brought her share of hits here. I’ve observed the same behaviour going back years, when the first rumblings of traditional celebrity culture being dead first surfaced.

And it almost seems that legacy media have a greater role to play in the 2020s, or at least those media who can play comfortably both in the digital space and in the traditional spaces.

Why? Because search engines have rewarded so much rubbish—see the Google-sponsored ads on bot-written and junk pages all over the web—that people have flocked to stuffing search engines and starting up Google Adsense accounts to finance them. Google, which the US Department of Justice has shown through its lawsuits, has internal documents wanting search to be made worse so it could report more page hits to its results’ pages. Like Facebook doing little to remove its bots, Google is fine indexing drivel. Same with Google’s subsidiary YouTube.

Earlier tonight, I wanted to find some clips from the Democratic National Convention and YouTube’s first result was from ‘CNN-News 18’. Yet the badly edited clips could not possibly have had the sanction of CNN. I went back to the results till I saw a legacy media name: CBS. It was their footage I watched on YouTube.

There are certain B-, maybe C-list celebrities whose Google results are absolute drivel, written by bots and obviously so. They aren’t worth clicking through. A-listers don’t suffer as much, but they do suffer.

Would Google News help? Not always: we’ve found splogs in there, too, though it is better than the main index. And it’s thanks to legitimate media that it is better.

It pains me to admit that the idea of the independent being listened to, because their website happened to have excellent journalism and presentation, is nowhere near as strong as it once was. It might even be on the descent, because their words are no longer easily found. They fail to rise above the noise. And with the World Wide Web out of commission as a trustworthy source for all the bots and LLM-written splogs out there, we fall back on big budgets and big media.

Social media themselves aren’t well indexed and they are hardly known for their search functions, though there is evidence some are using Tiktok and YouTube that way. Still, whatever comes can hardly be comprehensive, and designed for whatever brief gratification those websites present.

We don’t update our Instagram much because each time we do, we invariably get spam comments, and then we are dragged in to hours of reporting spammers, whose accounts are so dreadfully easy to find that you legitimately wonder why Instagram hasn’t weeded them out. The answer is obvious: it’s not in their best interests to. You might stay on hunting if there’s so much noise.

However, all that noise might wind up turning us off, leading us to abandon their platforms.

Which again points us back to big budgets and big media.

We might not be big media but we are grateful that Lucire exists in more than a single medium. Whatever is coming, at least that might confer legitimacy and trust—because online media alone are lacking.

The traditional celebrity, the one who appears across different media, the one who has an existence beyond “influencing” on Tiktok or Instagram, is still having their day in the sun. •
 
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.