How Molly-Mae Set the Gold Standard for Influencing in 2020 (2024)

The most gripping film I saw this year was not Tenet or Rebecca, or anything on an actual big screen. It was an 18-and-a-half minute-long YouTube video depicting former Love Island star and UK über-influencer Molly-Mae Hague having a walk-in wardrobe installed in her home.This clip has everything: suspense, visuals and an astonishing reveal about two-thirds of the way through, where Molly-Mae states completely offhandedly that she’s doing the renovation without her landlord’s knowledge.

It is an amazing watch, in that it feels utterly divorced from my reality –I do not even own a real wardrobe, let alone a room to transform into one –and yet is still completely enthralling. Part of that comes from the fact that most of what I want from my entertainment is total escapism, and watching this video tickles the same bit of my brain as Real Housewives and the Instagram accounts of expensive dogs who have the word “official” in their handles. But the other part comes from the specific je ne sais quoi of Miss Molly-Mae, influencer extraordinaire.Molly-Mae is everywhere. In a way that no other Love Island alumna has quite managed, she has become a social media behemoth in the UK aged only 21, having amassed 5 million Instagram followers, over a million YouTube subscribers, a boxer/reality star boyfriend, Tommy Fury, a clothing deal with PrettyLittleThing, another brand deal with EGO shoes, a partnership with hair extension brand BeautyWorks and her own fake tan business. Even in the face of a global pandemic, she’s managed to make internet headlines with what feels like her every move,from launching an Instagram giveaway for £8,000 worth of prizes, all of which she’d paid for herself, to calling Italian food “grim” on her Instagram story.But how does she do it? Why do fans and brands alike love her? Why can’t social media stop discussing her? And how has Molly-Mae’s specific blend of personal style, consistent aesthetic and almost-accessible aspirational content become the secret sauce that has kept her on top for over a year?

To talk about Molly-Mae, we first have to talk about influencers in general. Born in their current form alongside Instagram itself in 2010, trust in influencers has basically declined steadily since then, as conversations about the relationships between social media and reality have become more prevalent, and – let’s be honest – people have got more and more sick of being sold sh*t when they just want to open Insta to look at memes.So, to be a success, an influencer has to be “authentic”. Their audience has to believe that their recommendations are genuine, for example, rather than motivated entirely by financial gain; and they have to let their followers into their lives a little too, to gain their trust. Molly-Mae is highly skilled at both. She constantly states across her content that she never endorses products or brands that she herself isn’t interested in (differentiating her from the typical “charcoal toothpaste and slimming tea” influencer grift), and posts fairly candidly about the details of her real life, most recently discussing a skin cancer scare on her YouTube account.Canadian fan Kylie tells me she appreciates the transparency: “She is super real and raw,” Kylie says, when I ask her why Molly-Mae appeals to her. “She isn’t afraid to say what’s on her mind and always keeps everyone updated, even when she’s going through struggles. It helps everyone feel a little more normal – it’s nice to see that even the people that may seem so put together do still struggle themselves, like us all.”

Molly-Mae gives fans a 360-degree view of her life via her multiple platforms, so that her offering is more than just glamorous Insta grid shots of her standing on golden beaches dripping in designer gear (though it certainly helps that she meets basically every Western beauty standard it’s possible to name). This, says Dr Sophie Bishop, a Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities, is an example of how the influencer as a type has evolved over the years, merging Instagram and YouTube into one big nebulous influencing space.“There’s a new group of influencers who are a bit more adept at being cross-platform –using stories, using IGTV, in addition to YouTube,” Dr Bishop says. “I think these young women do have an advantage. With [someone like] Zoella, when she was starting out, she genuinely didn’t know that this was a career or that it could blow up. It must have been 2011, 2012. It became apparent, but she didn’t know, whereas these new girls work with management much earlier on. They have a clearer understanding of what, if they are going to subscribe to this as a job, it’s going to entail.”Molly-Mae, it seems, has had an exceptionally good grasp of what being a successful influencer involves since the moment she first became known to the British public. After all, there are plenty of influencers like her, who have used various platforms to build a brand – but the difference is that, in 2019, Molly-Mae had a Love Island-sized leg-up, and her career went into overdrive from there. In May of this year, she filmed a YouTube video where she noted that she had entered Love Island as a “business move”. It’s easily the savviest thing she could have done.

But they also come to her to engage with a normal girl with normal interests, like clothes and makeup, who just happens to have an extraordinary life. Dr Bishop explains how Molly-Mae achieves this in practice, on a day-to-day level, building a relationship with her followers: “There’s something about relatability –being willing to showcase aspects of your life that are a bit mundane, but also being able to toe that line with that aspirational side,” she says. “You can show your gorgeous rental in Manchester, but you can also show that it’s a mess. I think it really takes a special skill to sell that.”Chloe, aged 20, is from Preston. Like Kylie and millions of others, she’s a fan of Molly-Mae, and agrees that her appeal lies in her relatability: “I first heard of her on Love Island and followed her from there,” Chloe tells me. “I thought she was really down to earth and seemed like a normal girl around my own age that I’d love to be friends with. I also enjoy seeing her and Tommy’s relationship, as it seems very real.”

“Molly-Mae is pretty popular with our readers – I think there are some who are interested on a simple ‘showbiz’ level, and there’s also a group who are fascinated at more of an ‘intellectual’ level, almost as a case study of peak influencing, or what can be achieved by appearing on a reality show these days,” Evans explains. “I think our readers are so savvy now about the deals, Instagram followers and endorsem*nts Love Island contestants can expect that they’re always interested in something deeper than just those showbiz updates –how it’s all working, what’s going on behind the scenes.”

I asked Yallop, an expert in influencer marketing, to break down the numbers accumulated by Molly Mae’s giveaway – which, she says “made many marketers who had previously scoffed at the efficacy of influencers sit up”.“Her competition went viral, with 1,182,730 likes on her original post –spawning Twitter fights, memes and eventually causing Molly to retreat from Twitter – but the real winner was Molly herself,” she explains. “For an £8,000 outlay, she generated over 1 million followers across her social media accounts, including for her fake tan brand, which is a return on investment of less than 1p per follower.”Of course, when you crack the screen of the internet, as Molly-Mae did with her giveaway (and has done multiple times throughout her 18 months in the public eye, most recently by slagging off critically acclaimed A24 movies, as well as after her aforementioned condemnation of the almost universally beloved, revered and respected cuisine of Italy), it’s inevitable that you will receive backlash. But she seems to anticipate that this is all part of the job.Discussing the giveaway, Yallop says, “It passed the ultimate litmus test for internet popularity: becoming a meme. When someone tweeted ‘£5 to any lass who's not put the molly mae giveaway thing on their instagram story,’ she subtweeted him back: ‘£10 to any boy that’s not tweeted “£10 to any girl thats not entered Molly-Mae’s giveaway”..... terms and conditions apply x.’ She leans into her own mythology, and isn’t afraid to engage in internet discourse either.”

Molly-Mae tends to engage with, rather than shy away from, online discussion about her, whether that’s regarding silly things like her notoriously bad cooking, or more serious accusations, such as charges of racial insensitivity last year, after she used a foundation much darker than her actual skin tone in a YouTube video (in a subsequent video, she stated that she had changed her foundation shade following the response, though did so without really addressing the actual issue at hand). In her willingness to approach the discussion around her, she’s a deeply contemporary celebrity: put simply, she really knows how to use the internet.

Molly-Mae engages with the discourse to stay ahead of it, often – as Smith notes – opting to tell her own stories via her YouTube channel, so “she can override whatever agenda the media might want to set by doing it herself”. She knows that her life is newsworthy, so she reserves it for her own platforms rather than traditional media. Over the next decade, this will probably be what the most pervasive type of fame looks like, and Molly-Mae, for better or worse, has already mastered it.