Meet the Amazon ‘influencers’ making money off everything they own

Amazon’s army of side-hustlers turns to video reviews of kettle bells and rubber duckies for cash

By Caroline O'Donovan
February 26, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EST

When she wasn’t at work or asleep last summer, Heidi Leatherby was filming videos about products sold on Amazon. She made videos about coffee makers and electric fences, tea bags and vitamin supplements, kettlebells and rubber duckies — more than 2,200 in six months. ... “I took all lunch hours, all waking hours of my weekend, piling things up I had in the house,” she said. “That was my life this last summer until there was nothing left.”

Leatherby’s videos have appeared next to Amazon listings for an Etch A Sketch, HP printer ink cartridges and Cherry Pie flavor Larabars, among other products. For every Amazon customer who watches her video and buys the product, she earns a commission. Since July, the 41-year-old technology company manager from Montana says she’s made about $14,000.

Leatherby is an “Amazon Influencer,” an increasingly popular side hustle that pays regular people to promote products on the e-commerce website. The program, started in 2017, was initially aimed at driving customers from social media to Amazon’s site. As Amazon continued to recapture online shoppers from sites like Instagram and TikTok, it’s been flooded by applicants looking to take advantage of new features that make it easy for regular people who don’t have big follower counts to make money.

But the program also serves another purpose: Expanding Amazon’s role as a platform where anyone with enough gumption can make some extra cash. ... “Whatever your business is, we’d love for you to grow with us,” Amazon says on its website, offering entry points for people looking to sell stuff, publish books, stream video games, deliver packages — or make videos. Many Influencer Program participants are also Amazon sellers, drop shippers and Kindle publishers looking to tap into the site’s massive audience of consumers and ride the tech behemoth’s coattails to wealth and glory.

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By Caroline O'Donovan
Caroline O'Donovan covers Amazon for the tech team. Before joining The Washington Post, she covered tech and labor for BuzzFeed News. Twitter https://twitter.com/ceodonovan