The scourge of ‘bland influencer cadence’

Creator Natalya Toryanski’s impressions nail the current state of influencing.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

For a piece about the current state of finance influencing, check out my new profile of Mrs. Dow Jones! — Kate

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Last month, I wrote about how cool people are gentrifying the internet. This was inspired in part by a series of videos by Natalya Toryanski, a recent college grad who went viral on TikTok parodying something she calls the “bland influencer cadence.” You’ll recognize it when you hear it: simple words delivered with long pauses in between them because the person speaking (usually a tall, thin white woman) is distracted by their on-camera reflection. 

@natalyatoryanskiGooduh. Morning. Yew. Guise.

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The popularity of these videos is a key indicator of how exhausted many of us have grown with influencers. People are tired of watching successful creators who, having transcended the niche that initially attracted their following, no longer have anything to say or show us. This trajectory isn’t inevitable, but we are over-saturated with out-of-touch influencers, and that’s why Toryanski’s videos are so satisfying. 

This isn’t Toryanski’s first time going viral. In 2022, she satirized the meaningless ways that chronically online people talk to each other at parties with her first influencer character, Arianka. Her subsequent parodies include my favorite video of hers: Influencer finds out about the cold war.

Toryanski lampoons influencers, but she has a lot of respect for the work they do.

“As many bland influencers as there might be, there's also brilliant ingenious creators,” she says. “I think in every space it's important to be able to poke fun at things. I actually think it's kind of unhealthy when a certain group or class or something is so protected that you can't poke fun at them.”

Toryanski, who has a degree in marketing, is on her way to becoming a full-time creator herself. In this interview for paid subscribers, we talk about why people are becoming disenchanted with influencers, how they can avoid falling into traps of unrelatability, and why, exactly, “bland influencer cadence” is a thing.

How did the “bland influencer cadence” videos come about?