The Age of “Youtubers”

Thinking about quitting your day job? This may be some inspiration for you. Apparently, quite a few lifestyle “YouTubers” are raking in more money in a month than a lot of people make in a year. AdAge estimated the monthly earnings of some of the top vloggers (video-bloggers) on YouTube, and then ranked them. And, these video-bloggers,  many of them are twenty-something’s or younger, are pulling in insane cash flow.

Most of the more successful vloggers are focused on lifestyle, fitness, and beauty tutorials. On the beauty side,  a vlogger named Yuya is the top earner, making over $41,000 per month. By comparison, according to Fashionista’s 2014 survey on jobs in the fashion industry, a copy editor on a successful magazine makes a little more like $40,000 a year. Grav3yardgirl and Zoella, also female lifestyle vloggers, round out the top three, bringing home $32,000 and $27,000 monthly, respectively.

Every country has their own YouTube stars. There’s a similar trend in Asia with vloggers who make just as much money as the aforementioned ones in the US.

For example, Kanna and Akira are two Japanese sisters who, with their parents’ help, make videos of themselves playing with and using a variety of toys and make-it-yourself candy and baked goods.

These young YouTuber’s have an impressive $165,000-$1.65 million estimated yearly income after YouTube’s 45% cut, 265,000 total subscribers, and 403 million total views.

It’s incredible because a vlogger never really creates products unless they’re a DIY kind of vlogger, but they share tips and bascially build their own fan-base that follows them purely for their thoughts and tutorials and opinions.

A survey conducted by Variety last year found that YouTube stars scored significantly higher than traditional celebrities across a range of characteristics and were considered to have the “highest correlation to influencing purchases among teens. YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable”, the magazine reported.

Where does all this money come from? Aside from advertising, plenty of these vloggers have endorsement deals and side projects. Zoella, for example, released her first novel last year, with a second one already in progress. And, of course, there are all the paid placements and appearances. The vlogger industry is a difficult market to crack of course, but one that is incredibly lucrative once you do.

To put it simply, it’s really all about how many viewers you can draw in and YouTube pays these vloggers out based on their view count because they include ads in their uploads. Once these vloggers obtain a certain amount of channel subscribers and views per video, they also get to use facilities provided by YouTube to film their videos. Most of these viewers/fans are teenagers or women in their early 20’s gushing in their comments about how they want to be like the vlogger, meet them, or say all kinds of things anything to get these YouTuber’s to acknowledge them. Zoella can upload a video talking about her day, what she ate for dinner, what time she went to sleep last night, etc. and you can be sure that video will have more than a million views in a matter of a couple days. 

Valentí Sanjuan

On Thursday afternoon a guest speaker lead a discussion in Journalism 2.0. His name was Valení San Juan. We had conducted some research before he arrived, watched his videos, heard stories about his fearless escapades from our professor (Pipo Serrano), but nothing could have prepared us when we actually met Mr. San Juan.  Valentí San Juan walked into our classroom, pointed a camera at us, after asking permission, and began his discussion with our class asking us what his job title was, or what exactly he did for a living. I was immidiately intrigued. Blogger? Adventure Specialist? Journalist? T.V personality? I too, along with the rest of the class was stumped. I’d watched his videos, I knew what his work very well, but I couldn’t quite place my finger on what exactly it would be called.

Surprisingly, Google isn’t very helpful with this question either. When you look up Valentí you can see his repitiore of various videos and segments on “Visto Lo Visto (VLV), or his television show “Etiquetats” but nothing really tells you specifically what he does, or more importantly, what it took to get him there.

Valenti’s road to success was not a conventional one, nor was it easy. Some may think because he gets to pretty much work on his own schedule, and do “whatever he wants”, people may think he lives the dream life. And while that may all be true, he had to work much harder than one would imagine. There was a long journey, with many obstacles that lead to his current success. Starting off as a broadcast journalist on Catalunya Ràdio, to many cases of trial and error sampling multiple demographics and other various combinations of audiences, topics, and coworkers, to working alone, to spreading his talent worldwide using just his camera, Valenti’s career path is unlike any one else’s. Sanjuan has a total of four Youtube channels – vistolovistoTV with 135,956 subscribers, ETIQUETAGS with 10,660 subscribers, ValentiEstaLoco with 60,590 subscribers, and Mercè Sanjuan with 7,816 subscribers.When you see each of his videos you can see the true genius that is behind them. You can tell the detail that goes into every segment, the hours of film recorded and not used, the demographic tests, the countless sleepless nights that go into being one of the most successful “Youtube-ers” on the Internet.

Using a television-type-format his show looks just like a high quality program on television with a live audience (200 online viewers per month). He has created a new frontier of what one is capable of or what the internet today is capable of. There are so many career paths like Valenti’s that have not yet been discovered. So many people that are too afraid to take the leaps of faith that Valentí did to get to where he is. So many people told him no, as he explained, but he didn’t listen.

Even after his contract wasn’t renewed for Catalunya Ràdio, he persevered. Rather than broadcasting his show on the radio, he streamed it through the Internet, he knew the product had to change in order to attract financial funding. This was Sanjuan’s first step in joining the worlds of radio and television.
He knew his dream, maybe not in a job title or within the bounds of what is considered “acceptable” in society, but he knew what he was meant to do and he went out and did it.

So many people today have dreams outside the realm of doctor, or lawyer, or other more common professions. What a dream it is to be able to create your own brand, be an “adventurer”, to be able to run thousands of miles in honor of your mother, to complete an Iron Man, to fly to New York to do an ad for Turkish Airlines, to do an ad for Coca-Cola.

 To be able to spread your message to so many people, to be your own boss creating your own site, to truly live your own manifested dream, rather than what someone else envisioned for you. And, more than that, to be able to not just settle for one job title. Valenti gets to have at least seven jobs at once and, according to his website, by combining his various projects, Sanjuan has over 7 million YouTube views each month and nearly 3 million followers on his combined social networks. With such a wide reach and ability to influence that many people, he is an expert at digital marketing any brand, whether his own or another company’s.This knowledge and experience catalyzed the creation of Sanjuan’s own media agency/production company called Gordon Seen. Gordon Seen marries people like Youtuber’s, Bloggers, Instagrammer’s, with companies who want their content produced. It seems as if his work is limitless, like he can do anything he sets his mind to and encourages others to do so too without fear of failure or rejection.That is purely “a part of the journey”, as he so astutely explained in class. He is a true inspiration and example of how lucky we are to be a part of this generation and what we have access to. So often we use just the minimal amount and don’t understand the true impact we can have or people we can reach with one Youtube post or keeping a video diary. Our adventures, like Sanjuan’s, can motivate and inspire so many other people, we have so much more power than we realize and Valenti is a true leader of that concept.

Multimedia and Storytelling

From a ship in the South China Sea, to the cost of health care in the United States, to various company websites, the range of subjects is broad, but the common thread is the form of multimedia storytelling: a somewhat new integration of text, video, photography and graphics.

These features, for the most part created in the hours and days after the events, answer the most basic questions (i.e. what and where and when) but also to demonstrate the scale of the news but in a completely new, more efficient way and make information through websites or blogs easily and efficiently accessible to the public.

The visual explanations come in all forms, including video, motion graphics and hand-drawn metaphors. The images and interactivity in these features are the central elements around which the stories are built. Covering nearly any subject, charts, maps, diagrams and tutorials fit into this grouping of visualization features.

Multimedia storytelling, as we learned in class, is definitely not the easiest thing to do but it seems most successful websites and most aesthetically pleasing layouts have an aspect of digital storytelling incorporated in some way. Including video, or voice recording largely enhances the way a story is told which is one reason multimedia storytelling is so impactful. It takes journalism to an entirely new level; it is, in my opinion the new frontier for journalism of all kinds.

There are thousands of examples of multimedia storytelling on the internet. We see them every single day and probably don’t even notice. I know I certainly did not before learning about it, now I notice it everywhere. For example, this past February marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and there was no shortage of compelling multimedia to pay tribute to those who died there. Perhaps one of the most innovative was an interactive video developed by BBC News. The presentation includes dramatic footage, compelling narrative and interactive features that allow viewers to choose which parts of the story they want to explore further. It’s worth noting that BBC editors couldn’t have picked a better story for this format because the enhanced interactivity creates a dramatic sense of connectedness, changing video viewing from a passive experience to one of deeper physical and emotional engagement.

Citizen Journalism

In January 2011, a news release from Jamaica’s Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) stated that a man who attacked the police had been shot and killed. It was not long after, however, that a citizen of the country began circulating video footage which told an entirely different story. The footage showed the man who was said to have attacked the police, seemingly writhing in pain, being beaten with a police baton and finally shot and killed while still down and unarmed.

The identity of that citizen who videotaped those images resulting in the arrest of the two policemen was never revealed, despite appeals from law enforcement officials. The action by that Jamaican citizen brought into focus the fact that information and communication tools, such as cell phones and the Internet, are bringing about a level of access to information that is unprecedented in daily life. Blogs, forums, uploading of pictures or videos to the Internet, are now being labelled ‘citizen journalism’ as distinct from raditional, mainstream or professional journalism.

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional or formal training in journalism have an opportunity to use the tools of modern technology and the seemingly limitless reach of the Internet in order to create certain content that would otherwise not be revealed, because this kind of journalism is able to go far beyond the reach of professional journalism.

By definition, “citizen journalism, or “participatory journalism” as it is also called, is the act of a citizen or group of citizens involved in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and distributing news and other forms of information.” The objective of this type of journalism is to provide independent, wide-ranging and relevant information that is crucial to informing societies.”

Journalist Peter Dooley suggests that “traditional journalism is the outside looking in. Citizen journalism is the inside looking out. In order to get the complete story, it helps to have both points of view.” Dooley’s argument suggests that there is a place for this emerging phenomenon called citizen journalism, as well as for the profession that has been practised for decades called mainstream or traditional journalism.

Citizen journalism, as we know it now, was popularised in the late 1990s as more and more people, in both the developed and developing worlds, became connected to the Internet. The term is viewed as an umbrella term that covers blogging as well as other institutional practices such as the opportunity mentioned before, provided by one of Jamaica’s three free-to-air television stations, CVM Television. CVM’s “I-Watch Report” segment allows viewers to send in reports of events or activities in their location. Other definitions include any form of user-generated content or contribution to the debate that is taking place in the public. These would include postings on personal websites and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.  Nationwide news stations and networks , have made these sites a regular part of their commentary as they solicit views, in forms of videos, or tweets from listeners and incorporate these in their current affairs programs.

Blogging meets Street Art

Needless to say, we are a generation essentially centralized around a phenomena known as “social media”. Everyone is connected, constantly, through websites and apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. More so even than in person; these aforementioned mediums around which our entire generational society orbits, are perhaps the most prominent forms of day-to-day social interaction; Through most of these social media tools one makes a profile, chooses a username, selects a picture, all to identify them as an individual. It’s who they want to be, or how they wish to be presented to society, to their “friends”. But how true is this representation?

Along with this trend of social media people often discuss how behind a computer, behind this façade, people are fearless. People are more inclined to say things they never would out loud, parade themselves in a way you would never see in person, all because they are masqueraded behind this computer screen. I agree, that perhaps when I make a profile or writing a tweet, I feel somewhat protected in the semi-veiled podium. But, at the same time, I see social media as the least anonymous form of communication possible. I absolutely see it as the most warped, meaning you can be whomever you’d like, put your “best self” forward, post the most “artsy photos”, portray an imagine of your life that may or may not be true.

Sure, I believe that there is a freedom to, in a way, trick those around you in to believing in an identity that may not be what they’d see in person. But, to me, social media is the most vulnerable trend in the world. When you take the provided mask of a computer, those non face-to-face interactions, you tend to allow yourself to write or post your most false statements. But, you at the same time, more often, may post your most inner truth. You may take the anonymity of social media to tweet your most inner thoughts, Snapchat exactly what you’re doing at one particular moment, and who you’re doing it with. The “veil” of social media is much more transparent than opaque. Blogging particularly.

When I first learned we’d be creating a blog, I’d be lying if I said a certain surge of panic didn’t rush through me. I thought choosing one subject to write about every week, one subject to identify me as a person, very daunting. I’d never really thought about what an “internet identity” meant and I felt intimidating by the thought of having to create one. But that’s what lead me to think. Why would I feel so exposed blogging? Why did I prefer to be hidden from the judging eyes of other computer users?

I realized that, to me, blogging meant exposing myself as a person and as a writer, something I’d avoided in the past. That is precisely why I chose to write about street art. Because when I pass graffiti on walls, initials carved into street signs, ambiguous stickers posted everywhere, nameless art of all kinds framing the walls of cities around the world with no known owner: that is the new frontier. I love the idea of pairing what I view as the most exposed form of social media (Blogging), with the most mysterious wonderment of street art. Blogging forces you to state an opinion, share a story, publicize your interests, your likes and dislikes, and create an identity. While street art, for the most part, happens in the dark of night, is essentially nameless, yet has the largest audience of public who see this art and judge it or view it as they please.