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Big money is changing hands, much of it to teenagers, which has made this a topic the media has loved to cover.

"The way that I started was creating a parody account of a fictional character, which is probably more common than you think."

Nikolai is in favor of working directly with companies to build awareness instead of driving traffic to websites and getting paid off AdSense, which he calls unsustainable.

Fans respond to originality, live-tweeting events, and piggybacking on trending topics

YouTube, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Pinterest—these are the platforms where you find young buyers waiting to be influenced.

Since Facebook makes users pay to reach target audiences, it’s the only major social network not in the mix.

Google+ is reportedly at work on AdHeat, a patented system connecting brands with influencers.

"Influencers" get paid per tweet or post, or work under contract on campaigns. Some get connected with companies covering multiple platforms, like theAudience, or specialty spots like Big Frame, CollectiveDigital, or Jukin Media, which focus on video creators. Then there’s twtMob for Twitter, theAmplify for Instagram, or HelloSociety for Pinterest. A startup called Niche gives you a customized group of social media "celebrities" who will organically tweet, post, and talk about your products. This isn't canned material made by some agency coming out these kids' mouths. It's them.

Twitter has started to quietly reveal engagement numbers for major users, a real metric influencers can use to prove ROI.

But while the 16-year-old stars making big bucks are being celebrated, what’s not as well known is that some of this activity is not legal. That’s because in the U.S. the Federal Trade Commission mandates the disclosure of paid or sponsored content. Penalties are in the six figures, but many in the space say there’s still a Wild West mentality at work.

On YouTube, Vine, and Instagram, creators are the stars, but on Twitter, the trendsetters are largely parody accounts, which can leave the people running them feeling like the Cinderella of the ball.

In 2009 the FTC released guidelines concerning online endorsements.

There are more than 50 pages of regulations, but the main takeaway is this: If you’re paid to post online, you have to make it known, and when it comes to social that means including an "s/p" designation (sponsored post), or tags that say #sponsor or #ad.

Typically millennials in their teens and 20s, influencers drive engagement—creating tweets, videos, photos, memes that people respond to, share, comment on, or even steal. Originality, wit, and volume posting is key—and so is pulling at heart strings or tickling funny bones.

followers and reach are key, but the main criteria hinges on "capturing an emotion or quality in a platform that is meaningful," explains Oliver Luckett, the founder and CEO of the social media publisher theAudience

they don’t have to be traditional stars. The fact that they’re relatable, and look and live like their peers actually make them more convincing than Hollywoo

With mainstream magazines like Seventeen putting Instagram stars on their covers, commercials using user-generated videos, and brands like American Eagle turning Viners into models, are these the new secret celebs?

People feel closer to them because they show up in their feed—they hang on every word and thing they’re wearing

it’s a win for teens to work with big companies that line up with their personality, and a win for brands to reach new audiences. "This is the way it’s going."

Perlman says back then Disney laughed when they proposed using an online heavyweight as a marketing tool. But in 2010 they convinced Disney to use the electronic musician Pogo to create an official remix for Toy Story 3. They also managed to twist Disney’s arm and sell tickets for the film on Facebook. The video got almost 4 million views and the gambit was a huge success.

Taryn Southern has built a following of almost 350,000 subscribers on YouTube, parlaying that success into television appearances, a web series sponsored by Glamour magazine, and a deal with Hot Pockets. Southern, who appeared on American Idol when she was only 18, says she won’t work with brands she doesn’t actually have an affinity for.

"Your audience knows—it never works with a brand you’re not passionate about," she told me. "Where I’ve made mistakes is trying to be clear of an integration that doesn’t work for YouTube personalities. If people are being paid on social they have to be honest."

"Anyone with 250,000 to 300,000 followers is influential enough to work with,"

Content thievery remains rampant, as are selling accounts, and failing to disclose brand partnerships. Eventually the FTC will start cracking down. And what happens when influencers grow up? What will their role be then—will they lose their brand appeal or morph into a new commodity?

author of Going Viral, which explores how ideas spread online.

Jarre, who co-founded a Vine marketing company that previously worked with Nash, calls it “snack content.”

Vine, which has over 40 million members, declined to share the age breakdown of its audience, but marketers who work closely with the service say it skews young, toward people Nash's age.

Add Nash's Vine following to the number of fans watching him on Instagram (6.2 million), YouTube (3.3 million) and Twitter (3 million) and you’ve got a kid with higher social media ratings than the White House.

Nash's team also confirmed that major brands will pay the star between $25,000 to $100,000 to plug their products in a six-second clip and share it with his fans.

He's been called sexist, racist and homophobic in connection with a Vine telling girls how to be attractive; another video mocking Asian names; and a clip in which Nash suggests only gay people are afflicted by HIV, then shouts "fags!" while barely hiding a grin.

He's also purged multiple pejorative tweets about "homos" or being a "damn queer" that once littered his Twitter feed, as well as a post from May 2012 that read, “Gay rights? Nahhh."

for a certain class of adolescent, if you tried to design the world’s most viral human, you couldn’t do better than Nash

He’s got prom king good looks and magnetic, made-for-selfie blue eyes. He’s hilarious, at least according to the teens watching him, who happen to be among the most wired people on the planet. He’s a relentless self-promoter. And he’s mastered the art of “authenticity” — that combination of staged closeness, strategic imperfection and calculated self-deprecation that’s the key to charming the web.

The upbeat teen Nash plays on smartphone screens diverges so sharply from the kid who lashed out against "homos" that it can be hard to shake the sense his online image is at least in part a carefully constructed fiction — one more staged than his casual candids might suggest. Nash discusses "filth" in terms that hint he may consider it imprudent for business reasons: "You don't want to come off as stupid. You don’t want to have racial slurs. You don't want to limit yourself. You want an audience that [includes] anyone from 2 years old to 50 years old,"

Nash genuinely gives off the impression of someone who’s still more 16-year-old kid than groomed child star

As he ducked away from the screaming throngs at the mall, leaving them with nothing more of himself than the same digital images, an uncomfortable truth became clear: The closer you get to Nash, the farther you feel from him. On Vine, Nash can post a single video and make millions feel he’s talking directly to them. In person, you can feel lucky to get a full sentence. At the dinner table, waiting for his takeout, he stares at his phone. He slips easily into the clipped, non-committal generalities of the disinterested teen

The most intimate moment most fans get to share with Nash is taking a selfie.

Nash is, after all, only the latest in a string of nobodies who’ve become sponsorable online somebodies by bypassing agents and taking their talents directly to the web. In its short life, Vine has spawned a suite of homegrown celebrities who are creeping toward six-figure salaries thanks to an exceptional — and exceptionally strange — talent that until now had little marketable value: the ability to capture attention with six-second bursts of humor or skill. They include Viners like "KingBach," a 26-year-old actor who has landed a role on Showtime's House of Lies, and "BatDad," a father whose Batman alter ego helped him land a lucrative gig pimping laundry detergent for Tide.

Like other Vine sensations, Nash hopes six seconds of fame will be the gateway to something more lasting than 15-minute stardom. He “isn’t really monetizing right now,” according to Alan Spiegel, one of Nash’s three managers including his father. Instead, having conquered the smartphone, Nash is going after larger screens that can put distance between an idol and his fans.

They’re carefully-edited, six-second jolts of humor that are big on action, short on subtlety and long on relatability

You can play professional lacrosse, but they make less than a teacher’s salary now. I always thought about that. And it’s a very difficult career, a short career, as a pro athlete,” Nash explained. “I was like, ‘I can be an entertainer until I’m 75!’ So logistically, it seemed better. And I liked it better.”

Nash recently landed a deal to appear in a yet-to-be-specified movie produced by Dreamworks-owned AwesomenessTV and the director of Varsity Blues

“There’s always someone coming, always someone funnier, cuter, more engaging, which is why [social media] stars today are seeking out professional managers and agents,”

Nash has a collection of catchphrases — including "Nashty," "or nah" and "zayummm" — that his fans repeat themselves and sport on T-shirts.

His new dream, he said, is to be “the first, like, George Clooney or Leonardo DiCaprio who starts from the Internet.” According to the logic of a plucky teen who’s excelled at most of the things to which he’s set his mind, going Hollywood is, despite its risks, purely the most logical career route.

When Shawn Mendes, another teenage Vine star, launched his debut album and asked fans to "get this bad boy to No. 1," it took them just 37 minutes to push it to the top slot on iTunes.

This time around, his first video, “How to wake up like a thug,” got him 1,000 likes and 4,000 followers after it was shared by another Viner with a large following. “I was like, ‘Holy crap! I have to keep this up,’”

Nash scrutinized the techniques of Vine stars like Marcus Johns, a college student with several million fans, for clues about what would draw the largest audience.

Currently, the 12 most popular Viners are each variations on the same formula: They are all comedians, they are almost all men and many of them are God-fearing Christians who bleep f-bombs and steer clear of sex.

There is no filler or downtime, only punchlines and story climaxes in continuously looping six-second doses. “It’s fast, it’s punchy, it’s like a party,” said Hemsley, the expert on viral phenomena.

Vine can evoke a basement rec room on a Friday night — young, frenetic and full of inside jokes. There are pretty girls filming staged sleepovers in one corner, someone belting out John Mayer somewhere else and everywhere, the attractive fraternities of male Viners who film “collabs” (collaborations) they use to help each other get more fans.

Nash realized from his study of Vine that the blockbuster formula had two ingredients: He had to be funny, and he had to be clean.

“Kids still want programming, but they don’t want to sit through Boy Meets World" — a mind-numbing 24 minutes long — said Rob Fishman, a former Huffington Post editor who is now the co-founder of Niche, a marketing platform that connects brands with social media creators, including Nash. "What Nash and these guys do is they fill that void.”

He also tries never, ever to publish videos in the middle of the day. He saves them for after 3:00 in the afternoon — just as teens are streaming out of school and pulling out their phones.

Nash says he's "trying to steer away from being called a Viner." He's prioritized YouTube videos and auditions in Los Angeles as he works to reinvent himself as a Hollywood star.

More recently, using money he earned plugging Sonic milkshakes and Virgin cell phone plans on Vine, Nash bought himself a camera and video-editing software that he learned to use by watching tutorials on YouTube.

This was the closest most of the girls had ever been to their idol. But thanks to the stream-of-consciousness updates Nash dispatches online (“I LOVE ACNE. YES. WOO.”), his fans have the sense they know every detail about his daily routine.“He just got highlights,” one said with authority. Another: “What’s that water that Nash endorses? … Yeah, I bought it.” A third girl confessed, "I Google-earthed their house."

dropped the chat feature from its main app

a Buy button, which is in beta, and a Save button, which bookmarks content for later

"For example, we should have considered other non-experimental ways to do this research. The research would have also benefited from more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people. Last, in releasing the study, we failed to communicate clearly why and how we did it."

started tracking users' shopping and browsing habits

cracked down on click-bait, like-gating, and other news feed spam.

The app's confusing permissions, however, caused a firestorm of misconceptions: Users blamed Facebook for intent to eavesdrop on conversations and snoop on text messages. Neither of these were true, of course, but that didn't prevent users from rating Messenger poorly in the app stores.

If you want to send and receive messages on your mobile device, Facebook requires you to download Messenger, which also lets you place phone calls -- including international ones over WiFi -- and send pictures and video.

may not provide the most effective medium for your business message.

LinkedIn is right for you... if you are in B2B

most users are in work mode on LinkedIn so it is optimal for peer networking and industry-specific information

Pinterest is right for you... if you are in a highly visual industry

deeply interested in a subject that can be visually represented

particularly appealing to "information junkies"

As with Facebook, Twitter is more effective when it is a two-way platform in which you respond to and engage with followers

visual aspect to what you do

Given Instagram's appeal to specific ethnic segments and its popularity among urbanites

Tumblr, which tends to attract a younger and less affluent audience overall

BI also looked at Google , which it found to be very male-dominated

71%+ +

18% + +

17% + + +

Twitter news consumers are significantly younger than news consumers on Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn.

And Facebook news consumers are significantly more likely to be female than news consumers on YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.