Reach isn’t trust. An influencer sells the first; a KOL is paid because they’ve earned the second.
Academic study of influencer marketing formalised relatively recently alongside the platforms themselves. De Veirman, Cauberghe and Hudders’ widely-cited 2017 study on Instagram influencers found something counterintuitive: having more followers doesn’t straightforwardly make an endorsement more persuasive — past a certain point, a large following can actually read as less “one of us,” which lowers perceived likeability even as it raises perceived fame. Effectiveness turns out to hinge less on raw reach than on the audience’s sense that the endorsement is genuine.
This essay’s own aside — “I bet most influencers are making more from their Skool communities than actually selling these agents” — points at exactly that mechanism: an influencer’s real leverage isn’t necessarily the AI product they’re demonstrating, it’s the trust-based community they’ve built around themselves, which monetises independently of whatever they’re currently promoting.
Source: De Veirman, M., Cauberghe, V. & Hudders, L. (2017), “Marketing through Instagram influencers: The impact of number of followers and product divergence on brand attitude,” International Journal of Advertising, 36(5), 798–828.