Influencers who click with lobsters and sheep
WINTER HARBOR, Maine — It was another busy day for the crew of the Rest-Ashoar, a lobster fishing boat that works the waters off the rocky coast of Winter Harbor, Maine. The captain, Jacob Knowles, had gotten up at 3 a.m. on a brisk October morning and taken his vessel 10 miles into the ocean.
Using a hydraulic hauler, buoys and ropes, Knowles, Keith Potter (the stern man) and Coty White (the third man) hauled up 400 wire traps over the next 10 hours. They pulled legal-size lobsters — at least 3.25 inches but not over 5 inches, from its eye to the back of its shell — from each baited cage and tossed back the smaller ones. As the boat listed in the rolling waves, they heaved the empty traps back overboard.
Even while doing the grueling work of commercial fishermen, the crew was engaged in another job: filming a video.
Over the past two years, Knowles, 30, has amassed a large audience on social media by sharing snippets of his workday with his 2.5 million followers on TikTok and nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram. Wearing an orange Grundens rubber fishing bib and a matching coat, he stands on the deck and, in a Down East accent, gives tutorials about, say, lobster reproductivity, or how to remove barnacles from the shells of crabs.
In September, the RestAshoar added a fourth crew member: Griffin Buckwalter, 20, a videographer. On fishing trips, he often sits in the cabin, editing footage on a laptop.
Knowles is one of several people in what are considered blue-collar jobs who use social media to offer a window into their lives. Their videos are about as far as you can get from the “get ready with me” makeup videos that are a TikTok staple, resembling instead a social media version of “Dirty Jobs,” the long-running show on the Discovery Channel. In some cases, as with Knowles, these hardworking influencers have signed sponsorship deals with brands, giving them an additional source of income.
Another popular online figure who works outdoors is Adam Perry, a tree trimmer in England, who has racked up 245,000 followers on Instagram by posting videos of himself scaling trees with a chain saw and tying knots with names like double Portuguese bowline and clove hitch. There is also Hannah Jackson, who herds sheep in the rolling hills of Cumbria, England, and goes by theredshepherdess on TikTok, where she has 100,000 followers. A recent post introduced her new herding dog, Mick.
Jackson, 31, said her feed appeals to “people who are in a little more of a townie setting.” “Probably because I explain farming in a really easy way,” she said. “People feel quite comfortable that they can ask questions and not feel stupid.”
With her red hair and cheeky humor, Jackson is a striking presence, and she has parlayed her online success into a memoir that was a bestseller in England. She has also appeared on the BBC show “Countryfile” and signed sponsorship deals with Can-Am, which makes off-road vehicles, and other companies.
“It really helps support the farm,” she said of the money she earns through posting.
The audience for these creators includes people who do their jobs from their desks. Michael Williams, who runs A Continuous Lean, the men’s style site turned newsletter, said he follows the social media accounts of a mechanic, an electrician and a long-haul truck driver.
He said he especially liked the posts of Robert Allen, a pilot with nearly 400,000 TikTok followers whose videos spotlight a niche of the aviation industry. Allen, known online as CaptainBob, is a founder of Nomadic Aviation, a company that ferries planes around the world when they are sold, brought in for maintenance or converted from commercial airliners into cargo jets.
“He’s in all these weird places in the world, doing a cargo conversion,” Williams said. “If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s very compelling.”
The lobsterman, the shepherd and the pilot have little in common with the young fashion and lifestyle creators who rose to prominence more than a decade ago. These earlier online influencers built their followings by showcasing their personal style or by offering beauty, decorating or parenting tips. The savviest among them turned online fame into cash through brand partnerships.
“When we think of influencers, we think of a blond woman wearing a two-piece outfit, holding a designer purse and posed on a hotel balcony,” said Alice Marwick, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose research focuses on social media.
That’s largely because Instagram was suited to promoting aspirational lifestyle content when it arrived as a photo sharing app in 2010. “It has an aesthetic quality that lends itself to beauty, lifestyle, travel, food — these very curated, highly visual areas,” Marwick said.
A parallel strain of social media fame centered on male YouTubers such as Jake Paul and MrBeast, who relied on spectacle, quick-cut editing and bluster to build large followings, especially among young men.
When TikTok took off, its short-form videos were rawer, more unfiltered, and people could go viral just because they were able to say interesting things to the smartphone camera or had an unusual lifestyle. “That’s where we’re getting these blue-collar influencers,” Marwick
said. “We know these jobs exist, but we don’t really know what it’s like behind the scenes.”
Jackson said that, while growing up, she didn’t know farming was something you could do for a living without being born into it, and she had no female role models. She frequently hears from women from all walks of life who thank her for showing her day-to-day life. “It’s women in general being a bit more brave and trying things society thinks they shouldn’t,” Jackson said.
Authenticity seems to be another draw. The blue-collar creators don’t live in content houses in Los Angeles, their feeds aren’t (yet) cluttered with sponsored posts, and they don’t appear to be using social media as a springboard to internet fame, given that they have dedicated years to working a trade.
Despite his job and remote location, Knowles, whose family has been in the lobster business for generations, is something of an online veteran. He said he started posting videos to YouTube about his hunting and fishing adventures in northern Maine as a teenager. Three months ago, he signed with Greenlight Group, a talent management company.
“We monitor creators who are homespun and blue-collar, like Jacob,” said Doug Landers, a founder of the agency.