ALVA Woodpeckers build home in Alva woman’s house You may have heard of squatters, but this woman is dealing with squawkers. Who needs a rooster to wake up when you have woodpeckers?
FORT MYERS Man claims he was trapped in a high-rise for 5 days A 77-year-old man wants justice after he claims he spent days trapped on the 24th floor of a high-rise apartment building.
PUNTA GORDA Charlotte Correctional prisoner arrested for death of another inmate State Attorney Amira Fox convened a grand jury, which decided to move forward with a case against a Charlotte Correctional inmate.
SANIBEL Construction near Dairy Queen eagle nest on Sanibel raises concerns While many eagle nests may be a bit difficult to see, one nest has always been a favorite for Sanibel residents and tourists.
The environmental effects of artificial sweeteners Experts are studying how the foods we eat affect the environment, especially after we flush our waste down the toilet.
Victim reacts to man exposing himself to her Ring camera You get a notification on your phone from your ring camera app that someone is at the door, only to find out it is someone exposing themselves. It’s the last thing victim Maria Kivi wanted or expected to see last week.
LEE COUNTY The art of capturing your eye and drawing you in How do you capture young, hip, trendy, fun, movers and shakers, all in a pose? We take you behind the scenes of a Gulfshore Life cover shoot.
FORT MYERS The lives of two SJC Boxers changed in the ring Two SJC Boxers, Mario Nunez and Arbon Kurtishi, help each other in the ring as each of them had their lives changed because of boxing.
FORT MYERS Chlamydia cases rising sharply in Lee County If you think about a crowded space- something with more than 250 people- if it’s in Lee county, statistically one person has chlamydia.
SANIBEL Sanibel resort day passes hope to get more business on the island A pass will allow vacationers to hang out at a Sanibel beach club for a day in hopes of drumming up some business.
Voting equipment tested ahead of Lee County elections Voting equipment is being tested in Lee County. This is to ensure all ballots are printed and counted correctly for the upcoming election.
Collier County teen assaulted after leaving party The teen has been charged and the sheriff’s office said they’re aware that many believe felony charges are in order, but under Florida law, there are very specific criteria that must be met for felony charges to be filed.
WINK weather team watching tropical wave over Atlantic Ocean The Weather Authority is watching a tropical disturbance over the Central Atlantic Ocean.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral drug bust leads investigators to fake fentanyl, cash and guns Cape Coral man arrest on drug charges. Investigators said they found, guns, drugs, and more than $32,000 in Richard Riley’s home.
NAPLES Naples youth flag football team to compete in Ohio tournament This weekend, the Naples Lunatics Green will compete in the Superhero Sports tournament in Canton, Ohio.
ALVA Woodpeckers build home in Alva woman’s house You may have heard of squatters, but this woman is dealing with squawkers. Who needs a rooster to wake up when you have woodpeckers?
FORT MYERS Man claims he was trapped in a high-rise for 5 days A 77-year-old man wants justice after he claims he spent days trapped on the 24th floor of a high-rise apartment building.
PUNTA GORDA Charlotte Correctional prisoner arrested for death of another inmate State Attorney Amira Fox convened a grand jury, which decided to move forward with a case against a Charlotte Correctional inmate.
SANIBEL Construction near Dairy Queen eagle nest on Sanibel raises concerns While many eagle nests may be a bit difficult to see, one nest has always been a favorite for Sanibel residents and tourists.
The environmental effects of artificial sweeteners Experts are studying how the foods we eat affect the environment, especially after we flush our waste down the toilet.
Victim reacts to man exposing himself to her Ring camera You get a notification on your phone from your ring camera app that someone is at the door, only to find out it is someone exposing themselves. It’s the last thing victim Maria Kivi wanted or expected to see last week.
LEE COUNTY The art of capturing your eye and drawing you in How do you capture young, hip, trendy, fun, movers and shakers, all in a pose? We take you behind the scenes of a Gulfshore Life cover shoot.
FORT MYERS The lives of two SJC Boxers changed in the ring Two SJC Boxers, Mario Nunez and Arbon Kurtishi, help each other in the ring as each of them had their lives changed because of boxing.
FORT MYERS Chlamydia cases rising sharply in Lee County If you think about a crowded space- something with more than 250 people- if it’s in Lee county, statistically one person has chlamydia.
SANIBEL Sanibel resort day passes hope to get more business on the island A pass will allow vacationers to hang out at a Sanibel beach club for a day in hopes of drumming up some business.
Voting equipment tested ahead of Lee County elections Voting equipment is being tested in Lee County. This is to ensure all ballots are printed and counted correctly for the upcoming election.
Collier County teen assaulted after leaving party The teen has been charged and the sheriff’s office said they’re aware that many believe felony charges are in order, but under Florida law, there are very specific criteria that must be met for felony charges to be filed.
WINK weather team watching tropical wave over Atlantic Ocean The Weather Authority is watching a tropical disturbance over the Central Atlantic Ocean.
CAPE CORAL Cape Coral drug bust leads investigators to fake fentanyl, cash and guns Cape Coral man arrest on drug charges. Investigators said they found, guns, drugs, and more than $32,000 in Richard Riley’s home.
NAPLES Naples youth flag football team to compete in Ohio tournament This weekend, the Naples Lunatics Green will compete in the Superhero Sports tournament in Canton, Ohio.
Influencer marketing fraud will cost brands $1.3 billion in 2019. (Credit: CBS News) Influencer marketing through social media followings is attractive but increasingly perilous advertising terrain for corporate brands. Influencer fraud, including purchasing fake followers and creating fake personas, is expected to cost businesses $1.3 billion this year, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Cheq. And those are just the calculable costs of fake influencer marketing. “The indirect costs are much harder to measure,” said economist Roberto Cavazos, a professor at the University of Baltimore who conducted the analysis for Cheq. Companies spend an estimated $8.5 billion annually to persuade influencers — people with large social media followings whose tastes in consumer goods and services are held in high esteem by their fans — to market their products, according to influencer marketing firm Mediakix. On a good day, roughly 15% of the corporate dollars spent are lost to fraud, Cavazos estimates, because influencers don’t always have as many real followers as they claim. “It’s a huge waste,” Cavazos said, noting his estimate is conservative. Influencer marketing has become a key part of many consumer brands’ promotional strategies as it is considered more appealing to digital audiences than traditional advertising. According to Edelman’s 2019 Trust Barometer, 63% of consumers trust influencers more than brands’ own advertising. “Influencers are much, much more powerful — six times more powerful — than celebrities,” Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of the public relations firm, recently told CBSN. “People are saying, ‘I want to hear it from someone who I identify with, not somebody who is just famous.’ ” Brands typically pay influencers based on their reach, as measured by their number of followers. The snag, however, is that influencers sometimes buy fake followers, or continue to count followers who no longer engage on a given platform, meaning brands pay for eyeballs that essentially don’t exist. “The influencer marketing industry has grown and become a more complex ecosystem, and the more intrinsically complex an ecosystem becomes, the more opportunities for fraud arise,” said Cheq’s chief strategy officer, Daniel Avital. “It used to be that advertisers picked up the phone and called Kylie Jenner,” he said. “Today, people are approaching influencers and buying followers through tech platforms. This is immediately an invitation to anyone in the ad-fraud business to create fake accounts and start meddling.” Mega-influencers, whose follower counts are in the millions, can earn up to $250,000 per social media post, about $37,500 of which is lost to fraud, according to Cavazos. “Many influencers have no access to 90% of their audience simply because it no longer uses the social network where they were followed. This doesn’t stop them from touting millions of followers, who will, of course, never see your content,” the Cheq report noted. Rampant fraud can erode companies’ trust in influencers — and influencer marketing as practice, Cavazos said. “Everybody does social media and you see the influencers and a person is saying this is a great product and you form an affinity. As this becomes more popular, and as fraud increases, you start to get a loss of trust,” he said. Companies then have to devote more time and resources to vetting influencers before engaging them. “Once they understand that this is a problem, in terms of fake numbers of influencers, the monitoring costs are higher because you have to spend more time checking people out,” Cavazos said. Companies also become more reticent to shell out for this kind of advertising. “Because of this perception, they won’t pay as much for influencer marketing anymore because of the assumption of fraud,” he said. Red flags for fraud include recently created accounts with many followers but little engagement, Cheq’s Avital said. “The easiest thing to do is look at discrepancies between how many followers the influencer has and how much engagement they get on the page, because followers are easy to generate, but creating engagement is harder,” he said. “If you see 1 million followers on Instagram but posts have 80 or 100 likes, that is immediately suspicious.” Social media platforms need to automate their vetting processes, Avital added. “For the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, they need to create technology that can automatically, autonomously find fake accounts and disable them,” he said. “This process is primarily manual, and it’s a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles are popping up at a much faster rate than anyone is able to whack them.”