Thursday, January 21, 2021

Tavi Gevinson talks about the awkward business of "Rookie" and her ongoing value as an influencer

From an interview promoting her new podcast series:

I wish I'd been that willing to be open earlier on. I'm like, “Oh, surely if you had just posted like, ‘Hey, we're struggling. Donate to our Kickstarter,’ donations would have poured in.” I didn't realize how much shame I actually had about how it was going behind the scenes, and I wish I'd felt a little more able to share that with people. But that's also our culture. The irony is that I never made money from Rookie. I lost money from Rookie, and in a way, after a certain point I was bankrolling Rookie with money I made from influencer gigs where my job was to look like a successful girl boss. I had a lot of shame about that, but now I'm also able to see, well, that's the world we live in. 

...

My friend was like, "Cool. Now you can just be, like, a skate brand, and you can do these little one-off things." I don't actually have anything else in mind beyond this show. So enjoy this one because it might be the only one! I'm not really thinking about that.

I do know that the website still gets nearly half a million uniques a month, which is wild. It took on this aura in its afterlife, for better or worse. Really what I would love to do with that is get some ads on the site and donate all of that money as it comes in. But I haven't been able to figure out how to do that. Again, maybe just ask for help and see if there are any like nerds out there who can figure it out.