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.