Thing is, beauty product reviews on the web are the fakest part of the internet, a pastel mountain of bullshit driven by a relentless stream of cosmetics care packages from PR people and undisclosed affiliate marketing. It's practically impossible to find out if anything's good by googling it.
I could say the same for travel. 90% or more of the reviews you read are compensated in some way with, at least, free amenities added on. And every travel writer knows that the "buyer" is going to look at their past articles and if they have a habit of panning the destinations they visit, they don't get any more "media fam tours" (media familiarization tours).
>>they can still drive traffic
Meanwhile, "influencers" looking to travel for free pitch constantly. We've seen very little benefit from most. A vlogger with 2,000,000 followers got tons of views and drove a nice traffic bump, but of course his audience were not our audience and did not bring sales (in this case, though, he was passing by and just asked for free lodging and meals during a dead lull, so the actual cost for his two-day stay was only a few hundred dollars in meals and spa treatments and such, so it probably was worth it for us).
Otherwise, the bloggers who do match our demographic drive almost nothing for traffic. My co-workers and our not-so-savvy-at-the-time PR firm used to get excited by the pitches (and PR firm would claim a "vetting process" that was pretty vague) until I started pulling things like referral data for past bloggers, SEMRush and SpyFu data on their websites, crude engagement metrics (number of comments on their last 10 posts). What was funny was when I first did this, there was an "emperor has no clothes" moment. Some decision makers had been keeping quiet because they thought this was all BS, but they didn't know what evidence to provide. When they saw the above, they basically felt vindicated.
As one example, many of these "influencers" claim huge blog traffic numbers, which may be true, but some of them have thousands of posts. So as you all know, but as people who haven't looked at website stats a lot may not, there's a short tail of pillar content that accounts for most traffic and a long tail of thousands of articles with little traffic, and the new fluff piece is going to be in that long tail.
I expect the same realizations are coming to lots of small and medium companies all around the world. I would have thought the big companies (Maybeline) would have figured it out a long time ago, but then they probably have such huge marketing budgets they can still throw a lot of "influencer spaghetti" against the wall and see what happens.
- influencer spaghetti, n. Marketing efforts that pay so-called influencers to create fake reviews about their products in hopes that a small portion of said influencers' followers actually are over the age of 13 and spend actual money.
BTW, a friend has been on the other end and the savvy partners he works with make him a package deal. He posts X times to his 100,000+ followers *and* they get non-exclusive royalty-free use of the images he takes during the trip. This, I think, is the one case where it actually works out for everyone. He gets some cash, a nice trip and builds up his stock portfolio on someone else's dime. They get a cache of nice images they can use for years. The "influencer" benefit where he gets nice images to post and they get exposed to his followers is more the icing than the cake.