"Professional model" is a common phrase that has nothing to do with licensing, just that someone is paid to appear in a photo.
Old: Manufacturers create advertising, including professional models. Journalists write reviews, but aren't generally in photographs of the items. Manufacturers try to build positive relations (influence) with journalists in various ways.
Social media influencers: Self-selected individuals produce content about products, often including themselves as the "models" in the product photos, hoping to build a following so they can get paid by sellers for publicizing products.
It's all marketing, and almost all of it is fake, and it requires finding voices you trust and agree with.
In other words, the difference between a livelihood and a pastime. Like I (and the dictionary) said. A "professional model" is someone who makes their living at it, and I challenge you to find an instance of a non-idiot using it to mean someone who only got paid a modest amount one time.
> it requires finding voices you trust and agree with.
Ideally, it also means those voices are trustworthy. Among other things, that means being honest about whether they're professionals or amateurs. That precludes "influencers" pretending to have genuine passion about something when in fact they're being paid to fake that passion. Encouraging and rewarding deceptive behavior is not a good thing, even in marketing.
So it's better to have professional models in ads being paid to fake that passion rather than self-educated hobbyists?
The difference isn't "paid vs not paid", it's "model" vs "someone who consistently produces content about a topic". They're both getting paid, but theyachtguy at least started out with some passion for the topic, and you have a chance to evaluate how well theyachtguy's opinions match yours.
> So it's better to have professional models in ads being paid to fake that passion rather than self-educated hobbyists?
If they're faking it then yes. You keep conflating "self-educated" with "hobbyist" and it's starting to seem a bit disingenuous. A self-educated person who is making a substantial portion of their income from promoting products is a professional. They shouldn't portray themselves otherwise, and if they do they're being dishonest. That's not a problem with professional models or actors who are clearly performing a role.
Since disclosure of interest is strictly relevant to the conversation, do you by any chance have a horse in this race? I don't. I barely even use Instagram, and my only experience with modeling was one charity fashion show when I was a child. I have never been paid to promote anything, nor do I wish to enter that line of work. Can you say the same?
You keep reading what you want to see in my statements.
You said you'd like theyachtguy to lose business. I contrasted his role starting out as a self-educated hobbyist with a paid model. He has migrated to a full-time job, because he produces content people like. I think that is still more useful than a paid model appearing in an ad (certainly not less useful).
I think we can agree that the problem isn't whether someone is self-educated or not, or what percentage of their income they derive from the activity, the problem is if they are claiming as true opinions positions that are really just paid positions. As we agreed above, disclosure is important.
As for me, I created an amazon affiliate account a dozen years ago but I don't think I ever got anything from it, not sure I have an instagram account, have maybe a couple of dozen social media posts in my life, and you're one up on me in modeling.
Old: Manufacturers create advertising, including professional models. Journalists write reviews, but aren't generally in photographs of the items. Manufacturers try to build positive relations (influence) with journalists in various ways.
Social media influencers: Self-selected individuals produce content about products, often including themselves as the "models" in the product photos, hoping to build a following so they can get paid by sellers for publicizing products.
It's all marketing, and almost all of it is fake, and it requires finding voices you trust and agree with.