Mapping Factors of Success: A Structured Literature Review on Social Media Influencers’ Business Models

Purpose: In 2023, influencer marketing will generate a global turnover of US$21.1 billion. Therefore, social media influencers (SMIs) represent a successful and relevant group of media entrepreneurs. Yet the study of SMIs’ economic activities has received relatively little academic attention. Therefore, this study reviews and conceptually represents the current state of knowledge on the business models of SMIs. Methodology: Structured literature review based on 57 peer-reviewed, English-language journals in the Scopus database between 2017-2022. The findings are organised according to Osterwalder and Pigneur’s nine-dimension business model concept, adapted to service-dominant logic aspects following Ojasalo & Ojasalo (2015). Findings/Contribution: SMIs generate value by offering community-oriented and commercial content, based on personal qualities (e.g. authenticity, credibility, expertise, attractiveness) and parasocial interactions with their users. SMIs’ key activities include content production, content distribution (increasingly on multiple platforms) and community management, but also collaboration processes (entering and executing cooperations, measuring success). Here, SMIs work in complex (co-)production settings, involving several stakeholders (brands, agencies, SMIs, users). The length and depth of cooperation varies significantly. They require mutual vetting and interactions at each stage of the process, incurring significant transaction costs. Compensation is often non-monetary (e.g. product samples). The role of monetary transfers increases with the SMI’s professionalism and reach. Due to the highly personalised nature of the value generation, the scalability of SMI business models is limited and their long-term viability seems uncertain. The study enlarges the understanding of media entrepreneurship within platform-based ecosystems by looking at complementors with limited resources and limited scaling ability. It also sheds light on digital business models from a service-dominant logic perspective (where resources are used in overlapping processes of value co-creation and exchange between actors) and allows to clearer understand success factors in SMI business models.