Crazy world where stars are born and plugs are changed
BROWSING through Youtube last weekend in search of a how-to video that would show me how to change a plug (it was either that, or call out an electrician), I was sidetracked, not for the first time, by the astonishing range of vlogging and documenting activities on the site. And the people who are making much of this are getting younger.
One trend is for teenage school pupils to post video tutorials on how to revise for exams. Several of them are young British women; the dozens of upbeat videos posted by three of them in particular have attracted a total of 25 million views. One of the trio said this week that her revenue stream, while not massive, is more than pocket money and that she is putting it towards the cost of a degree. Another spoke of the value of the videos to young people at exam time: “You can feel as a young person quite isolated. This way, they can feel they are not alone in the pressures they face.”
It’s an age thing, perhaps, but I’ve never quite grasped how many people are making a living from Youtube, aside from those with exceedingly high profiles, such as the beauty/fashion vlogger Zoella (12 million subscribers, more than a billion views) and Pewdiepie (real name, Felix Kjellberg), a Brightonbased Youtube star who has racked up more than 61million subscribers. In truth, I can’t sit through Pewdiepie’s videos for more than a few minutes without feeling a migraine coming on, but then he’s aiming at an indecently younger (and considerably more tech-savvy) audience, and has done pretty well out it, into the bargain.
Since 2009, the American entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk writes in his latest book, Crushing It!, millions of people have quit their job and started to make a living on Youtube. He cites the case of a father and his 11-year-old son who have become millionaires simply by creating a Youtube channel. Their chosen subject? They upload videos of themselves cutting things in half. The dad had been a pharmaceutical sales rep who had been looking for an outlet for his entrepreneurial instincts. He had tried a few things on Youtube before stumbling on the idea of, well, cutting things in half.
Mr Vaynerchuk himself used social media to turn his $4 million family business into a $60 million concern. He now runs, in his own words, a “massive digital media company”. His daughter, who is eight, wants to become a Youtuber when she grows up. And, he says, if you ask other school-age children what they want to be when they grow up, “many will reply that they, too, want to be Youtubers. Personal branding may not be an elementary school Career Day staple yet,” he adds, “but kids today know that making videos on Youtube, posting on Instagram, tweeting 280 characters, and snapping on Snapchat is a valid career path and that for some it can even bring fame and fortune. They dream,” he goes on, “of creating a popular online presence the way kids used to dream of becoming Hollywood stars.”
He makes an interesting point when he illustrates many parents’ reactions to their offspring’s dreams of Youtube stardom: polite bafflement, perhaps, or narrowminded cynicism. Even those who offer words of support secretly shake their heads at the sweet naïveté of youth. But this is to miss the point – such responses, he says, reveal a total lack of understanding about the kind of world we live in now.
His words affirm, in a sense, what Fiona Godsman, chief executive of the Scottish Institute for Enterprise, said on these pages a couple of days ago, namely that millennials are natural entrepreneurs. They have the ability to adapt quickly to changing environments, she added; they’re creative, flexible and quick to learn, and they want to make a positive impact on the world.
But it’s not just bright kids who are making headway by uploading videos to Youtube. Anything goes, really. All you need is something interesting to document, and the determination to stay the course when your videos aren’t receiving any hits.
There are, Mr Vaynerchuk observes, vloggers with disfiguring tumours, vloggers with disabilities, vloggers of all shapes and sizes. “Vlogging is a terrific way to document instead of create, which means that literally anyone can do it.” Lest we overlook the significance of the site, he also reminds us that, on an average day in the States, more 18-to-49-year-olds visit Youtube than any TV network. Even on mobile alone, Youtube is, he says, a monster. Pretty soon, everyone will be watching it on their TV screens. “Youtube will be television; television will be Youtube.”
It’s a pretty persuasive pitch.
More fool us, in other words, if we have a bright idea and shy away from promoting it on the site. Seize the day, and all that. Then again, he does concede that some people aren’t cut out for video. I know more than a few people who would recoil from the idea of conceiving a personal brand and finding the chutzpah to promote it on a global platform. Maybe it’s just us. Maybe there are people who feel a quiet sense of achievement when they browse Youtube and find a video that magically tells them, in a couple of minutes, how to change a plug.
I know more than a few people who would recoil from the idea of promoting a personal brand on a global platform