How iCarly prepared Millennial Influencers for real life

If you were born between the years of 1981 and 1996, then you are a Millennial. There is also a good chance you grew up watching iCarly. And while you may not have known it at the time, it was preparing you to not only become an influencer or entrepreneur, but for all the trouble one really does go through in everyday life.

iCarly is a Nickelodeon show about a young group of teenagers that start a web show together. Their web show reminds me of the Amanda Show, filled with fun sketches and funny characters. iCarly is full of laughs, fun, drama, friendship, and life as a teenager. Also, life as a young influencer.

The beginning of Internet Stardom

Before iCarly, I really don't think "being an influencer" was a big thing. No one really thought you could make a living off of YouTube, or by running a blog.

This show seems to have set the tone for people in my age group, anywhere from forty to twenty-five. Now, internet stardom is something that Gen-Z and Generation Alpha have and will grow up with being a common thing. It's not as odd to hear today that someone's full-time job is running their YouTube channel, or that they blog for a living.

iCarly prepared us for real influencer problems

Being a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur myself, I can say from experience that iCarly teaches you a lot about real life.

I am currently re-watching the series with my one-year-old son, and some of the episodes just make me laugh at both the accuracy and somewhat inflated portrayal of influencer life.

Here are some ways that iCarly really did teach us about life as entrepreneurs:

Affiliate Marketing and Sponsorships

Sometimes, affiliate product offers are janky.

As an influence, tons of companies will come to you asking you to advertise for them. And a lot of these deals sound really good!

In the episode "iPromote Techfoots", Carly and her friends take on a sponsorship for tennis shoes called Techfoots. The offer is that they will be paid if they say positive things about the shoes on iCarly. Carly, Sam, and Freddie immediately jump on this offer, because no one has ever offered to pay them for anything having to do with their show before.

Little did they know, the shoes are terrible. And they had told all their iCarly viewers the shoes were great! Now their audience is mad, they're mad, and they have to figure out how to fix this mess.

Lesson: Try the product yourself before signing anything.

You need to read the whole contract

In the season one episode "iCarly saves TV", the gang does not read their contract when asked to make iCarly a television series for kids.

The programming director continues to change things until the show no longer resembles the iCarly that Carly, Sam, and Freddie have worked so hard to create. He introduces a new co-host for Carly, throws in a blue dinosaur named Zeebo, and makes it just as boring and unappealing as the other shows on his network.

If they had read the contract before signing it, they could have claimed creative rights or nixed the deal altogether.

Lesson: Always read the contracts.

Others stealing your material

In the "iTake on Dingo" episode, material from iCarly gets stolen by a show on the Dingo Channel, a children's TV network that apparently can't come up with their own material.

Some kids at the iCarly gang's school let them know their skits are being ripped off on a show called Totally Teri.

This has happened to me on Pinterest.

You spend a lot of time making pins for your articles, and one day you are scrolling through and notice one of your pins with a URL to a site you don't own. Unfortunately, the best you can do is report it to Pinterest.

This can happen with YouTube video ideas, Pin images, blog content... you name it. Theft happens, even on the internet.

Lesson: Brand all your images, and report what you can. But always carry on if there isn't much you can do about it.

Always remember to renew your domain/hosting

The "iWant my website back" episode just got me. In episeode15 of season two, Carly, Sam, and Freddie lose the domain name for iCarly.com because Carly's brother Spencer canceled his credit card.

At one point in the episode, an old rival/enemy named Nevel buys their domain name.

This is something that can really happen if you forget to renew your website domain name, and while everything got resolved in the episode, it could cost you a lot of money to get your site back. Especially if it's a site that is doing well for itself.

Lesson: Always renew your hosting. Save yourself the pain and set a yearly reminder! And don't cancel the card it's under.

Thanks for showing us the way, iCarly team.

Like a lot of you out there, I had no idea I'd grow up to be present on the internet, influencing and working for myself. I didn't know that I would need a lot of these life lessons, but I did learn from them! We are all grateful for these golden gems of wisdom we didn't know we would need later on in life. Who knew after all that iCarly was educational?

You can now watch the first two seasons of iCarly on Netflix!

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