It’s wild rewatching iCarly and kind of seeing how they were basically Twitch, Kick and YouTube streamers and content creators before streaming and content creation were even really a thing. The show premiered in 2007; YouTube was around, but it wasn’t really considered a career at the time. Live streaming was basically nonexistent at the time, and even though the show iCarly got millions of views, they didn’t make much. a lot of money on it and occasionally had to get jobs. They were still in a time when the Internet and social media weren’t as big as they are today. And making money off the Internet wasn’t as common as it is today. And even if the iCarly gang were making some money from their show, we don’t know how they would have gotten it since sites like Patreon, Cash App, or Venmo didn’t exist yet. It was the mid-2010s, and the word ‘influencer’ didn’t even exist yet.
iCarly aged pretty well, and it was ahead of its time.
Someone who was actually alive in 2007 here. Live streaming was definitely a thing in 2007. In fact, that was around the time it stared getting big with the launch of Justin.tv (later Twitch.tv and acquired by Amazon). You forget that the internet at the time wasn’t as centralised as today. So many creators simply had their own website where they could post videos and stream.
PayPal was more popular than it is today among other options at the time (like you know, using your card and making regular ass bank payments). Buying merch to support your favourite creators was common.
The word “influncer” did exist and there were tons of them on the “blogosphere” in the 00’s. Today largely replaced by Instagram.
So the internet just got worse