Momfluencers: how the influencer dream went sour for audiences

Momfluencers: how the influencer dream went sour for audiences

Sal Morton 
Pippa Lowthorpe 

23rd May 2024

Motherhood is increasingly visible and commoditized online. One of the most sought after target markets, moms often make purchasing decisions on behalf of multiple people in a household. But the rise of the mom influencer, or ‘momfleuncer’, saw a cohort of mothers visibly transcend this role as passive consumers to take ownership of their interests and become critics, creators and arbiters in the decision-making of other moms.

This makes momfluencers a very influential group, and a key target for brand partnerships and sponsorships.

However, there’s an increasing image issue presenting itself: momfluencers are suffering from a brand reputation problem.

We delved into the online conversation around momfluencers, looking at over 107k mentions on X, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, blogs, forums, online news and radio.

Momfluencers are known for sharing aspects of their day-to-day lives, including parenting hacks, homeschooling, feeding their kids and balancing life as a parent. A natural progression of the ‘mommy blogger’ of blogging days gone by, this new generation of matriarch mavens produce high-virality content that’s often video-based followed by long - and dense - text captions.

 

 

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There’s a keen underlying tone across momfluencer content of a strong solidarity message for other moms who ‘want it all’. Like other types of influencers, their content creates parasocial relationships that are leveraged to sell either their own products and services or affiliate products and services. 

When influencers gain an online following, they create audiences who become accustomed to seeing - and want more of - their private lives. But unlike other kinds of influencers, momfluencers are bringing something else into the parasocial relationship: their children.

When we look into the conversation surrounding momfluencers online, we see that the welfare of children and families is a key talking point for audiences - drawing attention to the fact that mommy influencers are using their children for content, meaning that their kids’ lives are visible online for all to see.

Welfare questions come into play when audiences question the momfluencers’ intent in posting their family lives. This begins with cries of content manufacturing, faking, exploitation and lies - with audiences claiming that momfluencers are the new ‘momagers’, using their children to make money from their content.

MotherBus clearly messed up in her IG stories but posting both the unmuted & muted versions
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It’s due to this conflation of the personal and the professional, the candid and the manufactured that means momfluencers are attracting one of the most prolific types of online attention: backlash from from online ‘snarkers’.

‘Snarking’ is a term used to talk about hating on an influencer - in this case, a momfluencer (or parentfluencer or family of influencers). It’s so popular that ‘snark’ appears in just over 15% of the conversation in our search.

On Instagram and TikTok, #kidsarenotcontent is a hashtag used in conversation against momfluencers. On Reddit, the conversation draws more nuance, with users tackling specific issues, broad issues and individual influencers in detail.

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On Reddit, the conversation is overwhelmingly dominated on one particular subreddit in the conversation: r/parentsnark has over 18,000 posts in our search. Its 16k members post specifically to snark on parent influencers.

But outside of this centralized space, where else is the momfluencer conversation happening?

When we look at the other top subreddits in the momfluencer conversation, we see individual hate directed towards specific women, parents and families. For example, Love is Blind focus from r/loveisblindonnetflix and r/loveisblindnnetflix surrounds one of the contestants, Jess, whose social media influencing with her daughter has been criticized after the show.

Some subreddits are set up specifically to ‘snark’ specific types of influencers, such as r/ytvloggerfamilies - but there are also individualized subreddits created to snark on specific momfluencers from TV and social media, such as r/BatesSnark, one that didn’t make the top ten, whose subreddit description is:

 ‘NOT A PLACE FOR FANS. This is where people can safely snark on the Bates family, of Bringing Up Bates fame.’

This targeted and niche hate-posting - initially set up to call out bad or dangerous behavior - now poses a danger and bullying risk in itself as it’s descended into users discussing intimate details of momfluencers’ content and lives.

Anyone else find it peculiar…
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In the face of such vituperative criticism, you might be excused for thinking ‘momfleuncer’ is used solely as an insult. But in actual fact, momfluencers continue to self-identify as such - ‘momfluencer’ in their display name or user handle -a phenomenon not seen in other niches of influencers.

Part of the reason why so many momfluencers are willing to identify with the portmanteau nickname is the sense of pride an identity tag that is frequently under fire can bring. The proud display of #momfluencer in a bio goes a long way towards removing its slander.

The culture wars present i the momfluencer conversation, pitting snarking against cries of ‘mom-shaming’ pushes some momfluencers into the more polar extremes of mom identity, with the increased presence of tradwives, fundamentalist religious parents and alternative parenting methods influencers.

Many critiques are not driven by simply malicious pleasure or gossip but rather by an honest concern for children. One Reddit user replying to a post about an influencer not installing a carseat correctly in a video claims “it's not mom shaming if it's abuse, neglect, or endangerment.”

Let’s turn our attention to the audiences posting about Momfluencers.

Here we visualize the sub-audiences and their interconnectivity, showing distinct groups and how they behave with each other around a certain topic. The bigger the node is, the more connected it is to the rest of members in the audience analyzed.The lines represent interconnections between the different members of the segments.

The communities in the momfluencer conversation

Here we can see that the conversation skews towards liberal audiences with LGBTQ, democrat and intersectional feminist audiences taking up a large proportion of the conversation. We can see a conservative presence in the Trump-Loving Americans, though we unsurprisingly see less of an interconnectedness between it and the other communities.

Queer Pop Culturistas create memes about momfluencers, often posing them as the butt of a joke, but in a harmless manner without targeted backlash. This group link momfluencing with Mormonism, QAnon and cults and have a skeptic attitude overall.

The third-biggest sub-audience, Trump-loving Americans, focus heavily on child endangerment from online predators by momfluencers posting their kids on social media. A lot of anger is directed towards these mommy influencers for doing this, though some praise momfluencers for promoting motherhood, parenthood and natalism in a world of falling birth rates.

One audience doesn’t share criticism at all: Small Business Owners. This small community isn’t very well connected to the rest of the conversation on the platform and primarily consists of people marketing their products to moms generally. Momfluencers themselves are most present within this group, doing much of the selling - evidence of the underlying economic activity between moms happening under the backlash.

Media Buffs, the second biggest group, are an outlier in the X conversation - their level of criticism against momfluencers is very high. This group shares impassioned general criticisms that range from righteous indignation to bullying.

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It’s clear that different audiences and communities have differing attitudes towards the backlash against momfluencers - let’s take a look at how the sub-audiences of X and Reddit differ in their criticism.

Here we see that in most spaces, criticism is taking the form of concern for children rather than outright signals of hating on a momfluencer because of their personality, or being annoyed by them as an individual.

Of course, this doesn’t come without precedent. There have been some high-profile cases of momfluencers exploiting their children in sinister or criminal ways, such as ex-YouTube momfluencer Ruby Franke’s being found to have malnourished and injured her children.

The Franke case has been taken by ABC and turned into an 80-minute documentary released in March 2024 about her influencing, abuse, arrest and her imprisonment in February 2024.

With Franke, ABC is capitalizing on audience desires for true crime, coupled with the downfall of a powerful online mom influencer.

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The audience crossover between momfluencers, mom audiences and true crime is extremely notable, as we found in our deep-dive into the audience of popular true crime podcast ‘My Favorite Murder’.

At the time of writing, Ruby Franke’s house was the most viewed on Realtor.com – marking the epitome of what influencer voyeurism can be. It’s clear to see that what was once an easy method for brands to speak to mom audiences by engaging momfluencers has become an area where brands could be exposing themselves to risk.

Of course, momfluencers aren’t a new phenomenon – original TV mom-influencers such Kate Gosselin of ‘Jon & Kate Plus 8’, Sharon Osbourne of ‘The Osbournes’ paved the way, with an influx of recent TV momfluencers such as Katy Price, the Faiers sisters and even Milf Manor.

But the fact that the modern momfleuncer exists in an always-on digital space, means that the level of access is often unprecedented, the competition for audiences and brand deals more intense, and the backlash more visible. 

The rise of online snarking and criticism has dimmed the once-spotless glow of these digital matriarchs - and brands who once saw momfluencers as a shortcut to a key target audience must be aware of the dangers of intervening in a space that they don’t entirely understand. 

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