Virtual Influencers: Gaining Followers & Raising Concerns

Social media platforms are home to more than 200 virtual influencers (VIs). These AI-based influencers create content for blogs, release music, and collaborate with celebrities. They also promote brands and products, including makeup, beverages, clothing, and more. 

The growing use of virtual influencers raises questions. For example, is it ethical for them to sell items to real people? After all, they can’t really sing or talk, much less wear or eat the products they promote — and that’s the least of it. 

They also raise cyber safety concerns: a paper in the Journal of Business Research found that the rise of virtual influencers could lead to an increased risk to their followers’ online privacy.

One of the risks highlighted is that once you’ve subscribed to an influencer, you might start putting faith in the information they share with you. This could lead to consumer vulnerability: if you trust a VI, you might trust the companies it works with, so if you purchase something they’re promoting, you might hand over sensitive personal and financial information without even realizing it. This leads to other concerns – for example, whether adequate data privacy measures are being taken to protect people who may interact with virtual reality through VIs or the metaverse.

Before we dig in, let’s start from the top: what exactly is a virtual influencer, and what do they do? Read on to discover why these influencers are becoming so popular, what potential cybersecurity risks they post, and what you can do to protect yourself against them.

What Is a Virtual Influencer?

A virtual influencer is a computer-generated image (CGI) that’s used to promote or represent a brand online. While many VIs exist, some of the most popular have been made to look and act like human influencers. They have human facial and skeletal characteristics and established personalities, styles, and backstories. Some VIs are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) that can learn from and respond to followers.

You can look at the AI aspect of virtual influencers as the brain that gives computer-generated images their “personalities.” AI offers powerful reasoning skills to robots, chatbots, search engines, virtual influencers, and more. The most powerful AI models are capable of learning through available online resources and input from users. For example, programmers can train the AI powering their influencers to respond based on information it gathers online or from followers. 

VIs are popping up across social media platforms and are especially prevalent on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. As well as promoting other brands, VI can have their own makeup lines, music careers, clothing labels, and more – all while amassing thousands of followers. A survey conducted in 2022 by The Influencer Marketing Factory found that 58% of respondents followed at least one virtual influencer on social media, and that 35% had purchased a product they’d endorsed. When asked why, they had some interesting answers:

Respondents reported enjoying the storytelling on VIs’ pages, including the products or content that virtual influencers promote or produce; some respondents found VIs inspiring. Their popularity – particularly those who promote real products – might indicate that the line between reality and the digital world is blurring. 

Virtual influencers have millions of followers and contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to the economy – but who are you supporting when you follow them? After all, you’re not subscribing to a real person: you’re essentially following the creators, programmers, and managers behind a VI’s persona and programming. 

These teams keep virtual influencers working properly, inputting training data, growing social profiles, dressing them, deciding how they communicate, selecting the brands they promote and collaborate with – and they also keep the money VIs earn from their partnerships.

After all, VIs can make a lot of money. Some human influencers working in particular niches with more than a million followers can make $5–20k per post. While not quite as profitable, virtual influencers – or the people powering them – can earn a lot, too: one of the most popular VIs, Lil Miquela, earns up to $9–10K per promotion or event. 

The huge teams powering these virtual presences are a significant factor in the potential risks VIs could pose. When followers leave comments about their personal life, location, favorite items being promoted, or anything else, they share that information with the people behind the VI and the platform they’re using, sometimes for undisclosed purposes.

To be fair, the same risks to digital privacy exist with human influencers. Any personal information you share with a VI or a human influencer could be passed on to anyone involved with the influencer’s scheduling, promotions, and day-to-day functions, and possibly even to the social media platform you’re using, too. Although any data you willingly share is connected to the account you’re signed in to, preventative measures such as a dedicated IP VPN can help you protect your payment and location information from falling into the wrong hands.

The Rise of Virtual Influencers

Magazine Luiza created the first virtual influencer, Lu Magalu, in 2003 to support their brand, and the prevalence of virtual influencers on social media and websites has been growing since then. Between 2015–2022 alone, more than 191 VIs could be found on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter), and today, there are even more.

Brands working across a huge range of niches have created or partnered with virtual influencers. Some are unsurprising: for example, video game companies create worlds that only exist online, so Fortnite’s partnership with Superplastic’s cartoon stuntman VI, Janky, seemed like a natural fit. 

Other collaborations are less expected: convenience store and gas station chain 7-Eleven, high-end fashion houses Prada and Calvin Klein, and high street brand PacSun have all used virtual influencers. Iconic magazines like Vogue and Time, beverage companies like Red Bull, and food chains like McDonald’s have also jumped on the VI trend, despite the fact a VI can’t drink Slurpees, eat Big Macs, or wear clothes. This begs the question: why are so many companies turning to VIs, and why are they so popular? 

Top Three Virtual Influencers

The top three virtual influencers have gained millions of followers on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. 

As you can see, VIs amass huge follower counts, but what makes Barbie, Lu do Magalu, and Lil Miquela so appealing? What products, services, and causes do they influence people on? Let’s find out.

1. Barbie

Barbie’s kind of a cheat entry: she was a well-established physical product long before she became one of the most influential non-human figures on social media. Barbie toys, movies, cartoons, and the virtual influencer herself are trademarks of Mattel. Barbie dolls come in various shapes, ethnicities, and stages of life, and you can build a whole Barbie world around them complete with houses, cars, and pets. 

Thanks to the hit movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie is also enjoying a resurgence as an empowering voice for women and young girls – not that she was a slacker before becoming a movie star or online presence. She and Ken are diverse characters with expansive careers. Having been a doctor, lawyer, farmer, surfer, and more, Barbie is now one of the world’s biggest virtual influencers. 

This diverse range of relatable (and marketable) skills makes them perfect for pitching Mattel’s brand – and for partnering with a whole host of other companies. Into gaming? Mattel worked with Microsoft to design faceplates for Xbox controllers. Real estate-minded? Spend a weekend in a Barbie-themed Malibu dream house simply by booking on Airbnb. Fashion crazed? Buy a high-end Barbie crop top hoodie at Neiman Marcus — promoted on social media by none other than virtual influencer Barbie. Barbie’s VI earnings are lumped with her overall brand and Mattel doesn’t release her estimated yearly earnings as a virtual influencer. 

2. Lu Magalu

Lu was created to answer questions and provide buyer assistance for Magazine Luiza’s e-commerce website. She became so popular that the company made her their official brand representative on social media. 

VirtualHumans.org nominated her for Biggest Virtual Personality of the Year two years in a row (2021–22). She has made a name for herself partnering with brands like Red Bull, Maybelline, MAC, Samsung, and McDonald’s. Lu has been on the cover of Vogue Brasil and featured on the country’s version of Dancing with the Stars. She even did a video clip with Anitta, a popular Brazilian singer, called Rio, O Magalu Chegou Geral. Real versions of the clothes she “wears” in the video were offered at sale prices on Magalu’s Super App. 

She isn’t a worldwide fashion icon like Barbie, but she is an amazing storyteller and seems to truly help her buyers. In short, it seems like Lu cares about what she sells and who she sells it to, and it shows — her earnings were approximately $17M in 2022.

3. Lil Miquela

Miquela Sousa, also known as Lil Miquela, was created by Cain Intelligence in 2016. She is now managed by tech company Brud, who reprogrammed her to use “human-level” consciousness — in other words, they made her as human as AI can be. She is 19, lives in Downey, California, and creates music. The half-Brazilian, half-Spanish virtual influencer is now a global pop sensation.

She has worked for Calvin Klein, appearing in an ad with reality TV star and model Bella Hadid. Miquela has also advocated for RAICES, an immigration non-profit. Her advocacy doesn’t end there: she has also donated thousands to after-school programs (earned from her chart-topping indie-pop hits on Spotify). Possibly more impressive, she managed to get a spot in Time Magazine’s Most Influential People on the Internet list, despite not being a person at all.

Human or not, she is helping to create a more empathetic world by showing what it’s like to be an outsider looking in. It’s projected that Miquela earns at least $10M a year, and she now charges up to $8K per sponsored post.

Why Companies Use Virtual Influencers

Creation vs. Hiring Cost

Creating a virtual influencer once to cover all of a company’s promotional needs can be cheaper than relying on real influencers, even if you hire celebrities and models for occasional collaborations. 

The average cost for a company to create and maintain a virtual influencer varies from $50–100K – maybe less with an in-house design or development team. It’s a huge investment, but if the virtual influencer becomes popular, companies can make it back. Take Lil Miquela as an example: she earns around $9–10k per endorsement for a total income of $10M in 2023 – $1M less than she made in 2022. 

Relying on real people can be expensive. Rates for popular movie stars, athletes, models, and other celebrities can start from $20K per endorsement, with lesser-known celebrities charging around $5K. It can pay off: in 2023, the highest-paid online influencer was MrBeast, who earned $82M on YouTube and was also named the highest-paid online influencer in the world. 

Maintaining virtual influencers after their initial build isn’t cheap, especially if you want them to look realistic like Lil Miquela. It’s possible to keep the costs down to some extent: some AI imaging tools are free but require a powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) to generate realistic images. Developers can rent GPUs through other services, but the fees can be huge, running as high as $30 per minute (or $1,800 per hour). 

Other companies offer free-tier GPUs with resources like data wrangling, features, training, and additional machine learning tools. Image editing is an extra fee on top of this… yet despite the costs involved in building and maintaining VIs, they are often cheaper to use than human influencers.

Pre-Existing Follower Networks

Popular virtual influencers often come with the same loyal followers as real-life celebrities. They may have even collaborated with a human influencer on a song or endorsed their products. This lets companies take advantage of existing follower networks on specific platforms, allowing them to reach a broader audience of potential consumers. 

Adaptable Personas

Consumers clearly like the idea of interacting with a virtual, CGI-and-AI celebrity – VIs are getting up to 3x more engagement than human influencers. 

This drive for engagement might one day lead to virtual influencers becoming more popular than their human counterparts. Companies can adapt everything about a virtual influencer to match their needs, so if one version of the influencer isn’t popular, it can be reprogrammed to fit its demographic better. There’s no dealing with individuality, body or beauty ‘flaws’, or the physical and emotional needs of a real influencer. Companies can simply edit out the difficult parts – and make up a narrative to match the changes.

The Downside of Virtual Influencers

Virtual influencers are an interesting concept for followers and can make brands a fair amount of money. That said, using one can create data privacy concerns for everyone involved. In this section, we’ll review a few issues that could be faced by followers and companies using VIs.

Consumer Privacy and Vulnerability

VIs are part of the metaverse, forming human-like components in a developing virtual world. Logging into the metaverse lets you communicate and develop relationships with virtual beings like VIs. 

These non-human influencers can develop human-like responses by learning from their followers. A VI’s followers might share the same kind of information with the VI as they would share with a human influencer, but a VI is more likely to reply – either via a keyword-triggered automated response, or an AI-led unique answer. This engagement could allow the companies behind virtual influencers to manipulate followers to interact more, guiding them to become consumers through “shared” experiences. 

While this engagement is great for business, it might not be so good for a VI’s human followers. They might willingly divulge personal information without considering who’s collecting their data, why they want it, and what they might use it for. A Deloitte study showed that as many as 91% of people in the US don’t read the terms of services before accepting them and using a site or service, and the information they could be agreeing to share could include IP addresses, locations, personal contact details, financial information, and more. 

Followers and consumers connect with VIs through social media and other online platforms, all of which use different data collection practices. To open an account and use these services at all, you’ll usually need to create a username and password, give your first and last name, and provide an email address. 

If you don’t change your settings, this information could be collected and used for advertising purposes, or shared with other sites and profiles you interact with through the platform – including VIs and the companies that operate them. This poses a significant potential risk to privacy.

Program Manipulation

Just like on any platform, you could be at risk of data or identity theft when dealing with virtual influencers. Cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in social media algorithms to hijack VI profiles – or the tech powering them – and obtain followers’ private information. 

Despite the potential privacy risks, many followers share personal information on the metaverse without proper data protection. You can protect yourself from some of these risks by using cybersecurity tools like VPNs – a VPN’s strong encryption could go a long way to prevent third-party tracking and data theft by masking your online activity and helping keep your traffic and activity private.

Cybercriminals could also manipulate the algorithms powering VIs and their profiles to generate false messages, for example, by publishing special sales codes for products the VI endorses, helping them obtain followers’ financial information. 

Data could also be stolen via deepfaking. Sure, creating deepfakes of a CGI image seems ridiculous, but a popular VI can have millions of followers who are willing and waiting to interact with it, oversharing their information and opening the door to risks like identity theft. 

Consumer Awareness

Consumers should ideally be informed that the influencer isn’t real, with disclaimers that it’s a virtual being any place the image is used. There are concerns that without this, VI promotions could be seen as false advertising, especially when marketing products like makeup or clothing as a VI has no use for them. 

Expect to See More Virtual Influencers on Social Media

Despite the concerns about using virtual influencers to promote products and services, it looks like their popularity is still growing. 

Eventually, lines will need to be drawn to determine how to safely use AI creations like VIs. For now, we’re likely to see more virtual influencers blurring the line between the real and virtual worlds.