The Lonely Life of a Yacht Influencer

"Nah, I'm nobody you'd know," he assured me. "I'm here to take some pictures and post some video stories of the yacht, which a brokerage group is trying to sell. The watch is a loaner from a friend. I wear it, take a picture of my wrist and tag his company on my Instagram account. It's just a small part of the hustle."

The yacht hustle, I soon learned, was the all-consuming passion of Jimenez's life. He went from a guy who took Instagram pictures, always head-on yacht shots run through one of the generic filters, to a guy that yacht brokers paid to stay on their yachts in order to mention that said yachts were docked in a port and available for sale or charter. He was helicoptered from yacht to yacht, and slept in the smallest guest cabins. [...]

For Jimenez, Instagram is essentially a money tree that must be fertilized and harvested as much as possible before its popularity wanes. As another side hustle, he "plants" subsidiary yacht accounts, accounts with soundalike names and images, and uses cross-promotion from his primary account to grow them until they're large enough to sell to yacht brokers or manufacturers. "I build them up and then sell them off, and my client gets a ready-made account that has real followers and legitimate engagement," he told me. "I started focusing on that when I realized that this wasn't just a 'life of the party' job, that pushing social media is something you do all day and all night long.

"I fire off these posts while I'm sitting around on the yacht, when things are very slow. I'm not in this for the fun of it, I'm not posting silly stuff. I basically do sponsored advertisements that follow a set format. I watch Instagram like a hawk to see if anything is hampering the growth of these other accounts, and to see if I'm continuing to get the activity I need on my primary posts."

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