“Everyone always asks me: when are you going to quit your job and do this full time?” says Joe Rugg. He’s calling me during a free 20 minutes in his busy schedule, between pouring pints at the pub he owns, the Albion, and filming himself sinking them for his Instagram account, @pintsofsheffield. His answer, he tells me, is always the same: “I’m not, the audience is never going to grow to a stage where I can.” In Joe’s view, there’s an inherent cap on the success you can achieve as an influencer in this city. He insists this is not necessarily a bad thing.
While Joe is proud of his content — which includes his annual “battle of the boozers” competition on Instagram, highlighting local pubs, bars and microbreweries — he admits “there’s no value to it anywhere else but Sheffield”. He estimates that an influencer creating content about this city could only ever reach an audience of “half a million, max”, a subscriber base that’s far too small to attract enough brand deals to make a decent living. And yet, there are influencers in Sheffield. So, if they’re not doing it for money, why are they still at it?
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