DEEP BACKGROUND 06 OF 13 . ENTHUSIASTS Does influencer marketing actually work, and if so which part of it? The part that works is not the influence. Simulations found large cascades are driven by a critical mass of easily influenced people rather than by an elite. What moves is high arousal content, and the smallest influencers return the most. WHY THIS IS WORTH MONEY Two things get sold under one name. Buying access to people with large followings, and giving a certain kind of person something they can be first with. They have different evidence behind them and they cost differently. Anybody spending on the first while believing the evidence for the second is buying the wrong thing. WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS Arousal, not usefulness, is what gets shared Berger and Milkman (Journal of Marketing Research, 2012) took every article that appeared on the New York Times home page across three months, 6,956 of them, captured by a crawler every fifteen minutes. Twenty per cent made the most emailed list. Their finding: "content that evokes high-arousal emotions (i.e., awe, anger, and anxiety), regardless of their valence, is more viral. Content that evokes more of a deactivating emotion (i.e., sadness), however, was actually less likely to be viral." The two figures they state in running text: a one standard deviation increase in anger raises the odds of making the list by 34 per cent, and awe by 30 per cent. So it is not enough that what you give people is good. It has to move them. A worthy, useful, low arousal idea is the commonest failure at this position. And arousal on its own does it, even when it has nothing to do with the content Berger (Psychological Science, 2011) tested it directly. Participants either jogged on the spot or sat still, then were shown an unrelated news article. "Compared with sitting still, running in place increased the percentage of people who e-mailed the article (from 33% to 75%)." Positivity had nothing to do with it. Physiological arousal, produced by an emotionally neutral means, more than doubled sharing of content it had no connection to. The money, and the shape of it is the opposite of the market's shape Beichert, Bayerl, Goldenberg and Lanz (Journal of Marketing, 2024) ran three field studies with 319 paid Instagram influencers, alongside secondary data covering 2,808 sponsored posts, 1,698 influencers, 1,881,533 purchases and over seventeen million euros of revenue. Return on influencer spend: nano 17.85, micro 5.98, macro 4.68. Revenue per follower: nano 26.5 cents, micro 8 cents, macro 4.9 cents. The smallest accounts returned roughly four times what the largest did. Which is what you would expect if the mechanism is a position with a discovery motive rather than a market for reach. THE STRONGEST OBJECTION, AND THE ANSWER TO IT Watts and Dodds (Journal of Consumer Research, 2007) took the influentials hypothesis apart. Their conclusion, on page 441: "large cascades of influence are driven not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals." Stated again on page 442: "most social change is driven not by influentials but by easily influenced individuals influencing other easily influenced individuals." That should worry anybody selling an influencer strategy, and it is why this page names it rather than working round it. It does not undo the Enthusiast position, because the Enthusiast claim is a different claim. We are not saying a small elite has outsized reach and you should buy access to it. We are saying that within a domain there is a whole position whose motivation is discovery and sharing, a substantial share of that domain rather than a handful of people, and that the behaviour is what identifies them. Watts and Dodds demolish the elite. They do not touch the behaviour. And their own critical mass of easily influenced individuals is, in Cone terms, the wide end doing exactly what we would predict. Two caveats we carry rather than hide. Their study is a set of simulations, not field data, and influentials were modelled as the top ten per cent of an influence distribution. They say themselves that their results "do not exclude the possibility that influentials can be important." And a measurement warning that applies to every effectiveness claim in this area, including the favourable ones. Gordon, Zettelmeyer, Bhargava and Chapsky (Marketing Science, 2019) compared observational advertising measurement against randomised experiments across fifteen studies and 1.6 billion impressions: "in half of our studies, the estimated percentage increase in purchase outcomes is off by a factor of three across all methods." Prefer the field experiments. WHERE THE EVIDENCE STOPS Berger and Milkman is news articles being emailed. It is not a study of brands, products or paid content, and the generalisation is ours. The published meta-analytic work on influencer marketing measures attitude and purchase intention far more often than money. The revenue figures on this page come from the field experiments for that reason. Watts and Dodds is simulation. Treat it as a strong argument about mechanism rather than as a measurement of the world. We could find no peer reviewed study finding influencer marketing has no effect on sales, and we do not claim one exists. WHERE THE CONE SITS Enthusiasts are the position that carries you outward. Fanatics start you. Going straight at the wide end is expensive because those people are, by definition, casual about it. The reason Enthusiasts work is that discovery and sharing is the currency they already trade in. You are not persuading them to advocate. You are giving them something to be first with. Which makes the ask specific. If they feel they found you, they will carry you. If they feel they were handed you, they will not. They are also the position you can lose fastest, because the same curiosity that brought them could take them elsewhere next month. You do not own Enthusiasts. You keep earning them. WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY Take your next launch and ask one question of it. What here can somebody be first to find? If the answer is nothing, you have a campaign rather than a fan builder. Then check the arousal. Does it produce awe, or does it merely inform? Next is the position where the strongest published challenge to this whole method lives, and where that challenge is right. SOURCES Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192-205. doi:10.1509/jmr.10.0353 Berger, J. (2011). Arousal increases social transmission of information. Psychological Science, 22(7), 891-893. doi:10.1177/0956797611413294 Watts, D. J., & Dodds, P. S. (2007). Influentials, networks, and public opinion formation. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(4), 441-458. doi:10.1086/518527 Beichert, M., Bayerl, A., Goldenberg, J., & Lanz, A. (2024). Revenue generation through influencer marketing. Journal of Marketing, 88(4), 40-63. doi:10.1177/00222429231217471 Gordon, B. R., Zettelmeyer, F., Bhargava, N., & Chapsky, D. (2019). A comparison of approaches to advertising measurement: Evidence from big field experiments at Facebook. Marketing Science, 38(2), 193-225. doi:10.1287/mksc.2018.1135 Superfandom . Deep Background . https://superfandom.ai/science/enthusiasts/ Matt Hart . published 2026-09-08 . last changed 2026-09-09