Hawai‘i’s Social Media Stars
Six influencers describe how they gain followings and make money. It’s riches for a few and much harder for the rest.
The term influencer was only added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2019, but today it refers to the millions of people whose words and images on social media carry clout with their followers.
We’re not talking about athletes, actors or politicians whose fame generates millions of social media followers on their names alone. Influencers used social media to become well known and influential. A growing number make social media their full-time job, while most do it as a side gig. The vast majority gain little or nothing financially, though they may have many thousands of followers.
This article profiles a cross section of local influencers to see how they got started and gained their followings. Some prefer the label “content creator” over “influencer,” because they create unique content rather than just posting submissions from other people. All follower numbers are from early May.
Table of Contents
Hyram
5.7 million followers on TikTok; 4.47 million on YouTube; 777,000 on Instagram
Hyram Yarbro says his passion for skin care comes from his “own personal battle with not-so-great skin” while growing up on “a cattle ranch in Arizona in the middle of nowhere.” That fascination with skin care stayed with him even after his own skin cleared up.
Yarbro moved to O‘ahu in 2015 for classes at Brigham Young University-Hawaii in Lā‘ie. After dropping out of BYU-Hawaii, he stayed in the Islands and in 2017 created his own YouTube channel, where he continues to post videos about skin conditions and treatments, product reviews, reactions to celebrity skin care routines and the like.
“I saw that a lot of people were primarily getting skin care information from salespeople or would have to dish out a lot of money to go to a dermatologist or an aesthetician. … So that’s when I decided to start creating YouTube videos, because I want to help people navigate the product market a little bit easier so that they’re not spending as much money on products that are inevitably not meant for their skin or not going to give them the results that they want.”
Building an audience was a “slow burn” for the first year and a half, he says, but “once I started seeing the sense of community that was online when it came to skin care, that’s when I kind of had the light bulb moment of like, maybe this could be something that’s bigger than just a little side hobby.”
In 2019, he went from having 50,000 subscribers to 500,000 in less than two weeks; he hit a million by the end of the year. His growth continued to soar in 2020, amplified by people’s increased screen time and interest in skin care during the pandemic lockdown.
Yarbro says the income he generates from social media is “about 50% from sponsorships, about 30% from affiliate programs and about 20% from YouTube ads.” Sponsorships are when companies pay influencers to promote their products. Yarbro says he’s picky about the sponsorships he accepts, because, as the saying goes, trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and even more difficult to regain.
“I typically turn down about 90 to 95% of sponsorship requests because I really want to make sure that any company that I’m working with not only has quality products that I truly want to integrate into my daily routine, but also has formulations that would align with the skin concerns of my audience,” he says, adding that he’s turned down six-figure deals in the past because he couldn’t “in good faith” promote certain products.
He says his rate depends on the size of the sponsor, its prices, the length of the partnership and other factors. Although sponsorships with larger companies pay better, Yarbro says he’s open to working with smaller brands for lower rates if he loves their products.
Affiliate links are unique web addresses that pay commissions for referred purchases; affiliate programs connect creators to companies that are good matches.
“I am grateful to be with affiliate programs that partner with magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan,” says Yarbro. When he uses them, he includes the disclosure: “These are affiliate links that generate a small compensation that supports me and my channel. I would appreciate it if you used these links as you shop, but no pressure whatsoever!”
Yarbro also makes money through YouTube’s advertising program, which pays creators for running third-party advertisements before and during their videos. But many of these ads are skippable after a few seconds and creators are only compensated when the ad plays all the way through.
In 2021, Yarbro launched his own skin care product line, Selfless by Hyram. “This space tends to be very focused on self and beauty and looking amazing,” which he says motivated him to start a product line that “generates some positive global impact with every purchase.” For example, “we’ve been able to protect over 300,000 acres of rainforest through one of our partnerships.”
Not all of his content is focused on skin care. He recently posted a video supporting Millie Bobby Brown, a 21-year-old actress whom the tabloid media criticized for supposedly looking older than her age. “The normalization of using a skin care routine and taking care of yourself, it’s kind of forming these new age beauty standards that I think can be super unhealthy, and … it’s affecting the way that we talk about other people’s appearance.”
hhhnewz
227,000 followers on Instagram
One of three news curators on this list, Isaac “HUNGRYHUNGRYHAWAIIAN” Scharsch reposts videos, images and tips sent in from the public and clips from local news networks on his Instagram account, hhhnewz.
His page features posts about politics, thefts, drugs, car accidents, weather, scams, homelessness, the search for missing people, assaults and other news. “All hours of the day, people send in all kinds of stuff going on around the Islands,” says Scharsch. But he also posts more lighthearted content “to show the other side of Hawai‘i,” including his own scenic drone footage.
Scharsch says he started hhhnewz in 2013, while he was working in Waikīkī and witnessing all sorts of debauchery, like “people getting arrested, police chases, fights. … So I started just recording everything and posting it, and then I did some voiceover comedy. People just started sending the same kind of content in and then it kind of blew up from there.” Today, hhhnewz has over 8,000 posts.
On average, Scharsch says he receives about 50 tips a day from the public and sometimes he gets over 100. “Some days it’s really slow, which is good. I never hope for it to be busy, because that means there’s bad stuff happening,” he says. “There’s a lot of people that send me things that they would like to see me post, like Palestine stuff and Trump, [but] I just try to stick with what’s going on locally.”
Nearly half of his Instagram feed is promotional content that he posts to his page and on his story. Scharsch says his advertising rate for local companies is donation-based – they give what they can, but he charges anyone that’s not kama‘āina more. “All the funds that I get from the page only goes to the growth of the page. I don’t use this money at all for my life,” says Scharsch, adding that he teaches surf lessons to pay the bills.
Unlike on Instagram, the content on his website (hohungryhungryhawaiian.com) is uncensored and sometimes contains nudity, including lewd public acts. The homepage states that “Hungry Hungry Hawaiian started as an Instagram page to bring awareness to the grim reality the residents of Hawaii are faced with on a daily basis and has become a movement to show the major housing crisis and drug epidemic. … The people of the Kingdom of Hawaii deserve so much better. We are here to bring people together to talk about the tough topics.” Below that is an “I’m 18 years old, ENTER” button, which takes you to the content.
Most videos posted on his website receive ratings, ranging from “funny” to “serious” to “hardcore” to “XXX.” “Hopefully in the future, there will be more people putting out more positive and better behaviors for kids to follow on social media,” he says. “I’ve been trying to navigate that myself.”
But there’s no getting around the negative behaviors. They’re real. “I grew up around a lot of stuff like that, a lot of mental illness, suicide, drugs, you know, substance abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence,” Scharsch says. “So I’m kind of used to it.”
Sharing sensitive information and content that some find disturbing has led to controversy: “Some things, by posting, will just make the situation worse. Before, I didn’t really think about that kind of stuff. … I’m not perfect and I do make mistakes.” Scharsch says he tries to be “really transparent” when he does screw up.
Rather than running his account anonymously, Scharsch says, “I actually decided to go public with my identity because I knew it would make me have to be more responsible and hold myself accountable for what I post. … And it has, so far, kept me responsible and accountable.”
He says his main motivation for running hhhnewz is to help his community. That could mean facilitating animal adoptions, providing information when people go missing and sharing GoFundMe pages for local causes.
“I reach out to people all the time, and I should have been keeping track of how many people I’ve helped in specific, personal situations because there’s been so many,” says Scharsch. “I don’t really care about [building a following], and I never really did. But then recently, I’ve been thinking, more views, more followers, more people I can help.”
The Hawaii Vacation Guide
137,000 followers and over 400 videos on YouTube
Married couple Erica Gellerman and Jordan Fromholz met through mutual friends at a Super Bowl party during their last semester at UC Santa Barbara. After graduation, she worked as a freelance writer for accounting companies and he as a chemical engineer. Gellerman came to the Islands to do work for First Hawaiian Bank and Fromholz tagged along.
“He decided he liked Hawai‘i so much he wanted to move there, and a job opportunity presented itself,” says Gellerman. They jumped at their chance and lived together on O‘ahu, “but then the job transferred him away.” Yearning to return, Fromholz took a sabbatical from the company he was with after 15 years and Gellerman continued freelance writing. The couple moved back to Hawai‘i, this time to Maui, in 2019.
“As we started looking for things to do with our son, we realized there was a lot of information, but it felt like a lot of it was not great or outdated or faceless information, so you didn’t really know if somebody was actually doing this stuff,” Gellerman says. Seeing a need, they started sharing information shaped by their own experiences, which led to the creation of The Hawaii Vacation Guide two months after they arrived on Maui. Their content covers the unique characteristics and personalities of each island, along with recommendations for beaches, hikes, hotels, tours and restaurants, plus more practical advice for prospective travelers.
They began with a website and then expanded to YouTube a few months before the pandemic hit, which made for a rocky start. Fromholz contributed to The Hawaii Vacation Guide full time from the get-go, while Gellerman continued freelance writing. She says they started to see growth in summer 2021, when travel started picking back up.
Their posts touch on typical “touristy Hawai‘i” attractions as well as experiences that reflect the authentic culture of the Islands. “For years, we were hesitant to recommend lū‘aus,” Fromholz says. Gellerman finishes the thought: Then, “somebody told me this quote – ‘You have to give people what they want, and then you can give them what they need.’ ” Fromholz says they try to balance their more touristy suggestions with “other cultural activities, like visit Bishop Museum, go out on an outrigger canoe ride, go visit a heiau, there’s amazing national monuments and parks.”
As they gained more subscribers and engagement in 2021, Gellerman decided to pivot her career towards running The Hawaii Vacation Guide full time alongside her husband. While Fromholz mainly focuses on the YouTube side, including capturing drone footage and editing, Gellerman contributes most of the writing and administrative work.
“Never did we think, ‘This is gonna be our job,’ ” says Gellerman, to which Fromholz adds, “It started out as a hobby, sharing our experiences and trying to give the best advice possible, just having fun with it.”
They moved to California at the end of 2022 to be closer to Gellerman’s parents, but Fromholz says they still visit Hawai‘i “four or five times a year.” Operating costs are expensive, factoring in flights and hotels, and Gellerman says they pay for “95% of the activities that we do.” They say this gives them the ability to speak honestly, but Fromholz says they avoid publishing negative reviews even when they have poor experiences.
“We make like $3,000 a month on YouTube through advertising. So that doesn’t even cover the cost of doing this stuff.” They also earn commissions when they post affiliate links to rental car services, tours and hotels, and they sell crafted itineraries for cruises and visits to O‘ahu, Hawai‘i Island, Maui and Kaua‘i, for $37.
“We’re not living a lavish life, but we can support ourselves and our two kids,” says Gellerman. She says they build their savings through other side hustles.
808 Viral
438,000 followers on Instagram
Daniela Stolfi first started posting funny videos in 2014 on Vine – an app that allowed users to make and share videos no longer than six seconds – and formed friendships with other local creators.
Despite its popularity, Vine shut down in 2017. “We had all this great content that I downloaded from Vine that I wanted to keep alive, and so I started a Facebook page originally. I started posting things we had all done, whether it was like friends of mine or things I had done.” 808 Viral was born.
The page gained traction with a post about a fictitious Spam-flavored Oreo. “That went really viral, like, ridiculously viral, to the point where Snopes had to debunk it and Nabisco had to make a statement. It was totally a joke, but I guess people took it seriously. We got 30,000 followers just from that.” Stolfi has since expanded to YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
As 808 Viral developed, Stolfi says she not only saw an opportunity to share creative and comedic content about Hawai‘i, but also to capture local people’s perspectives: “I made sure that we always had all kinds of representation in our group – Hawaiians, Tongans, Samoans, LGBTQ – so they’re a little bit of everything. And I think that’s why it did so well, because everybody saw themselves in the content.”
Today, Stolfi manages the 808 Viral page almost entirely by herself and it’s grown into something much bigger than just a comedy page. Mixed in with silly videos are posts about community events, news items, archived footage of the Islands, things related to Hawaiian culture and more.
“I run a large, organic media page that is independent. We keep our pulse on the community, and we try to support it in any way we can, with humor and education, and I take it really seriously,” says Stolfi.
Stolfi sometimes monetizes her content through Instagram’s invite-only Reels Bonuses, where earnings are based on the number of bonus plays or post views. She also makes money by selling 808 Viral merchandise and occasionally gets paid to post promos on her page.
But Stolfi’s biggest moneymaker is social media consulting. “I’ll take over a brand. I’ll help them get their sites up and situated, get their entire digital presence done and then teach their people internally how to do it. And I manage some people’s social media for short amounts of time.”
Running social media accounts is not all rainbows and sunshine, however. Stolfi admits there’s a dark side to being chronically online and she sometimes has “blackouts,” or periods where she refrains from social media activity. She warns that a lot of platforms “are not here to help us and it’s making people crazy. … I’ve watched friends of mine that I had to separate from because they got so wound up in social media that it changed who they were and made them go down these like crazy rabbit holes to where they weren’t even speaking sensibly anymore.”
But still, she says, a lot of good can come from social media when it’s done right. And that motivates her to continue. “I worked at the city and county for years, and I saw firsthand how posting and getting people behind certain things and pushing for legislation and for change was what had to happen to make things work.”
Stolfi helped found Hawai‘i Creators, today a group of 224 Hawai‘i content creators, which she considers the “chamber of commerce for creators.” Its community of creators get together to talk about how much to charge and to share knowledge with each other.
“We wanted to bring them together and try to set some kind of standard, not only to protect businesses because they’re getting ripped off a lot by scammer influencers,” but also to protect influencers, making sure that they’re charging enough and that they have standards that make sense. “It helps when you have a community of other people now that kind of understand what it’s like to be on social media. … If something goes wrong, we all come on and we vent about it, or we help share information.”
She says that when creators use their pages to support businesses for free, or when they undervalue their services, nobody gets paid properly.
Amanda & Felix Eats
63,700 subscribers on YouTube
Seven years into dating, the now-husband-and-wife team of Amanda Yee and Felix Le turned their love for food into a YouTube channel, Amanda & Felix Eats. “I used to work in the tourism industry. So when the pandemic hit, I was furloughed and had nothing to do,” says Yee. “I realized during that time that I’m kind of an artistic person that likes making videos.”
Driven by a desire to help eateries survive the pandemic, the couple began documenting their takeout dining experiences. “We were trying to encourage friends and families to also support local, so we wanted to combine our love for food and our home, and put ourselves out there,” Yee says. According to Le, they pay for 90% of their meals, which mitigates any conflicts of interest and makes it easier to give honest reviews. It also means they’re putting their money where their mouth is, Yee says, since their channel encourages people to support local businesses.
“We started in September of 2020 and then we hit the 1K subscriber benchmark I want to say in January of the next year,” Yee says.
Amanda & Felix Eats’ top two performing videos, which each have over 200,000 views, were filmed in Japan. Their other most popular videos, with over 100,000 views, include “Old School Eateries in Hawaii,” “Hawaii Street Food Tour!” and “Full Day of Eating Filipino Food in Hawaii!”
Both Yee and Le contribute to running their channel, but Yee takes on more responsibilities since Le still works full time as a radiologist. “I do all the editing, most of the filming and thumbnails, the uploading, most of the social media, and then Felix does a lot more of the research and the planning, because he really loves those low-key spots,” Yee says.
Le says planning is essential since they need to work around his busy work schedule. For example, if they leave town to film content on O‘ahu’s North Shore, they’ll try to hit several food outlets to maximize productivity.
Although Yee says their videos haven’t reached viral status, “we kind of pride ourselves in having a closeness with our foodie ‘ohana.” She cites frequent commenters who leave positive feedback and who they’ve built a rapport with. In other words, she says, they focus on engagement “quality” over “quantity.”
Yee says they started accepting PayPal and Venmo donations because “subscribers were asking us, ‘Hey, like, we want to treat you to a coffee,’ or ‘How can we treat you to a meal?’ kind of thing.” But that’s a very small portion of the funds they raise, she says, adding that “99% of our money is through YouTube ads.”
So just how much money do they generate from their channel? “We just finished our taxes for last year, and we didn’t make any money. We actually overspent. … All the money we make on YouTube via ads, it just goes straight back to making content, whether it’s paying for food or upgrading our gear – video cameras, tripods, hard drives, computers, microphones, all of these things we upgrade every couple of years.”
And while they haven’t yet figured out how to turn a profit from their channel, Yee and Le still find the work fulfilling. “Every now and then we would revisit these businesses and actually get to talk to the owners,” Yee says. “Making friends with them and hearing their story about how our video made an impact is very rewarding for us. It’s gratifying to know that we helped them in some way.”
My Kailua
108,000 followers on Facebook and 87,700 on Instagram
Daniel Casler says he created My Kailua first as a Facebook page to reconnect with the community he grew up in after moving to California and touring the world with his rock ’n’ roll band, Pennywise. Casler visited Hawai‘i frequently during that whirlwind chapter of his life before eventually settling down on O‘ahu.
“I think Kailua is such a magical place. Growing up, being in waterfalls and rivers and surfing and paddling out to the Mokes, and just having that life was like, ‘God, I wish everybody could experience that,’ you know?” Casler says. So, he created an account dedicated to the east side of O‘ahu, which he considers everything from Kahuku to Hawai‘i Kai.
“Sometimes I post stuff that’s outside of the community if I think it’s important because it brings awareness to a situation, but I try and really focus on Kailua and the Windward Side,” says Casler.
Casler says he used to run free advertisements on his page, but that ended when the pandemic led to the demise of the Pacific Ink & Art Expo, one of his moneymaking ventures. After the expo was cancelled, he says “local businesses started coming to me and being like, ‘Hey, you really helped my business through the years. … I saw that your business is shut down, and I really want to help you.’ ”
Casler says he didn’t want to accept money at first, but reluctantly agreed after his wife told him “they’re blessing you, and you bless them.” And once he received his first $500 for helping a company with its own social media – he used the money to support his two newborn babies – he recognized that the community was willing to pay for social media help.
He and his wife now help other businesses with social media, marketing and even responding to Google and Yelp reviews. They charge based on what the business needs help with.
“It can be very simple, or it can be way more involved,” Casler says. “That’s where I’ve kind of grown into, I don’t want to call it an agency, but me and my wife have grown and understood how to work this social media thing and so it’s enabled us to be a proxy of these businesses and help them run their business.”
One of their clients, Ali‘i Animal Hospital, started with one location and, since working with Casler, has added five more locations, with further expansion expected. “That’s what social media can do,” he says. “When you work with the right people – not saying we are – but if you work with the right people that can really get your message out there to the demographic that you’re trying to reach, you can have a lot of success with that.”
Like hhhnewz and 808 Viral, My Kailua mostly posts items sent in from the community, along with original and promotional content. Although their feeds are comparable, they each have their own flare – hhhnewz posts more graphic content and 808 Viral more comedy, while My Kailua posts a lot of scenic photos and videos.
“Over the years, it became a very powerful networking and news sharing site,” says Casler. And he says it’s led him to connect with leaders in the community, including some of the state’s highest officials. “Next thing you know, I’m sitting with the governor and the mayor, and we’re talking about what we can do with policy,” he says.
Politicians aren’t the only ones who see the benefit of connecting with local news content curators. “It’s also attractive to law enforcement, because they’re like, ‘Hey, you’re getting information that way. So how do we partner?’ ” says Casler, who adds that he often meets with law enforcement officials behind the scenes. “It’s a part of My Kailua that nobody really knows about.”
Casler says My Kailua “changed my life because it gave me a perspective, to see different sides of my community that I didn’t know existed, to meet different individuals I would have never met. Like, I’m just a regular guy, but now I’m sitting with different organizations of the government. I’m sitting with the mayor and the governor and then I’m meeting like the historic families of my town that I would have never met before.”
