“Honestly, I truly feel like a huge loser,” said Joanna Spicer in a TikTok video in September. Spicer is not the kind of influencer who often weeps on camera for clout, but, over the past few months, she’d hit a breaking point. The brand deals that had scaffolded her career for the past decade had dried up, and her husband lost his job. “I don’t know why brands don’t want me anymore,” she said. “Because it’s not trendy to be plus size anymore? Because I’m 35? I don’t know, but it’s been hard not to have this huge identity crisis about it.”
Spicer, who lives in Los Angeles, has been a full-time content creator since 2016, back when the concept of “body positivity” was still gaining steam in the popular lexicon. In the years since, she’s published vlogs, get ready with mes, and makeup tutorials to a devoted audience of more than 100,000 on both TikTok and YouTube, which has historically earned her around two or three brand deals per month, which easily added up to a six-figure salary each year from sponsorships alone.
That all changed in the spring of 2024, when suddenly, Spicer didn’t get a single brand deal for several months in a row. “It was an abrupt shift. It wasn’t something that was like, ‘Oh no, it’s trickling down.’ All of a sudden it went from two or three a month to then nothing,” she says. Coincidentally, it was also around the same time as her wedding. “I remember being like, ‘Am I gonna pay for this wedding and then be broke?’” Nearly two years later, the deals are still inconsistent. They average about one every other month, and often the brands don’t pay her full rate (Spicer declined to share her exact rates). She estimates that her income from brand deals has fallen by 50 percent. To compensate, she’s had to rely more heavily on her side businesses, selling ceramics, custom gel press-on nails, and T-shirts, though it only accounts for around a third of her overall income.
If Spicer was the only plus-size content creator to fear for her financial prospects, it might be more of a mystery. But she isn’t — she’s just one of the few brave enough to post publicly about it.
