Real talk: Influencer culture is toxic bullshit and it needs to die. The fact that kids and young adults are making these regular people into some kind of deity and buying any garbage they get paid to touch a fingertip to in an Instagram post is disgusting and it needs to end. Case in point? Emma Chamberlain, who has more than 12 million subscribers on YouTube and 16.1 million followers on Instagram, thought it was a great decision to charge fans for a DM from her. The price tag will make your eyes water, too. Chamberlain legit thinks a few words typed on a screen from her is worth $10,000. Yes, really.
why is emma chamberlain charging 10K for an instagram DM this is wild pic.twitter.com/vO0ghF34TK
— Layla 🪬 (@itslaylas) March 18, 2023
- Emma Chamberlain isn’t just selling DMs. She’s launching an online store called Anything Goes where she sells all kinds of junk to further line her pockets. However, the $10K DM was what drew the attention (and ire) of her followers and skeptics after Twitter user @itslaylas shared a screencap of the listing.
- If you’re a poor, you could always finance it. The listing for the DM points out that if you haven’t got $10,000 handy but are desperate for a few copy/pasted words from Chamberlain in your inbox, you could always finance it. “From $902.58/month (£740/ month) with ShopPay installments powered by Affirm,” the listing offered. For the cost of a down payment on a house, you could get a generic message from an influencer who will be irrelevant in a few years. Sounds like a bargain!
- Literally no one (besides Chamberlain, perhaps) thinks this was a good idea. As one Twitter user wrote: “Hey man I don’t think I can go out tonight, I still got my monthly affirm payment for the emma chamberlain dm I got a couple months ago.” Another added: “If it was for charity i could see why someone would buy it but 10K is a lot of money. that’s more than what I made last year as a grad student.” Another pointed out that Chamberlain said in 2021 that her demographic is girls in their teens and early 20s, which begs an important question. “Literally WHO is this $10,000 DM marketed to if her audience is primarily young adult women and teenagers???”
- It wasn’t long before Anything Goes was shut down. The DM fiasco meant Emma Chamberlain was forced to shut down the store not long after it went live. Let’s hope someone is reassessing this garbage and making a whole lot of adjustments before the shop opens again.
