If you were certain that the most popular Youtube personalities would be singers and TV hosts like Justin Bieber and Ellen, you’d be wrong. The most subscribed YouTube account is actually one by the name of PewDiePie, which features Swedish twenty-six year old Felix Kjiellberg – an individual you’ve presumably never heard of, even though statistically every human on Earth has watched at least two of his content videos. This insane popularity pushed him to an astounding $12 million net worth. He reached this fame and fortune by humorously commentating video games – which makes him a perfect example of a youtuber.
A youtuber, or vlogger (from video blogger), is a person who gathered a significant fanbase by regularly uploading original video content of any kind onto YouTube. Several creators managed to gain an audience so big that it prompted the site to share its revenue with them. However, vloggers haven’t stopped there, monetizing their success in every way possible – from ads and sponsorships to books and TV shows.
Money off videos
YouTube pays its creators by giving them a fraction of the money a company pays to have their brands advertised with creative video content. This works with the help of a program named AdSense. It lets the user choose the position and type of ads, while deciding the highest paying commercials for the type of video. It then pays the youtuber’s channel with a certain amount of money per thousand views – this amount is set according to how easy it is to reach your audience; the more niche your channel, the more appreciated will the your views be. There are also other ways to increase your revenue – the most obnoxious types of ads pay much better than quiet, embedded ones next to your video. If you can afford losing potential audience, a thirty second long commercial you cannot skip is the highest earning choice.
Youtubers can also use sponsorships as a way to earn money. The brands that have figured out the profitability of these sponsor deals are so few that they have taken complete charge over the market. Thus, every YouTube viewer will have heard of Audible, NatureBox, CrunchyRoll, and other similar sites because of the discount codes that vloggers keep giving out. Beauty channels, which already mention makeup products they like, are being sent so many free samples that they have the liberty to promote the ones they actually enjoy using, so as to not ruin the reliability of the opinions they share. Also, YouTube titles and thumbnails are required to have an indication that the certain video is sponsored, so that the channels cannot outright lie to their viewers.
If a creator wants to post and monetize their videos without worrying, they can always hire a manager or work with a multi-channel network (MCN). These are companies that offer assistance in a number of areas, including promoting, audience development, and digital rights management. Gleam Futures, for example, is an MCN that works with a web of British youtubers, promising to “develop, monetize, and protect”. However, such a network can take away from the vlogger’s liberty over their channel. This has lead to multiple scenarios – in one, like the “Gleam Team”, the videos of the different youtubers grow so similar that they become devoid of any individuality. In other situations, however, the outcome is more drastic; for example, American vlogger Grace Helbig had to start a whole new channel because of a row with her MCN, “My Damn Channel”. She left her old platform, “dailygrace”, on which she had acquired over a million subscribers, in the hands of her former managers – who began posting reruns of her videos (a first for YouTube, which is a website, not a TV station, thus rendering reruns completely unnecessary) and have now turned it into a collaboration channel. However, this scandal was definitely not unfounded; apparently, multi-channel networks are so infamous that YouTube itself warns you before you affiliate with any of them.
Creating a successful YouTube channel
Because of the changes made by Google over the years, the site brings a significant advantage to users who already have an audience. So potentially revolutionary video creators can be lost in the company of a sea of meaningless video content. As such the key is simple – hard work and patience. There’s no magical shortcut to years of determination and weekly content.
There are, though, certain formulae to optimize the presence of your videos in the search results. For example, doing popular challenges or tags that successful channels have done is a great way for their viewers to find you. However, you need to make sure you bring something new or entertaining to the challenges, because they can be as dumb as chugging a gallon of milk or guessing the body part your partner is shoving in your face. The trend that started the whole “tag craze” was the Cinnamon Challenge, which demonstrated to the whole YouTube community the dangers of eating a spoonful of the condiment. Since then, tags have based themselves on trends such as current technology, like the Macbook’s Photobooth effects or the Faceswap app. For beauty vloggers, makeup-themed popular challenges would be videos with titles such as “Five Minute Makeup Tag”, “No-Mirror Challenge” or “Boyfriend Does My Makeup”. These tags have become so popular that more creative youtubers have taken to transforming them into something new, such as filmmaker KickThePJ’s surrealist “What’s In My Bag” challenge (seriously, look it up).
Along with that, a great way to increase your audience is collaborations with other creators. Since the YouTube community is very tightly knit, collabs are by far the easiest and most enjoyable videos to film. This is why youtubers tend to group around in cities like Los Angeles, London and Brighton, even living together to make work easier. Tyler Oakley, a popular American vlogger, even does a yearly series of daily collaborations that he calls “Auguest”, labeling each with a cheesy portmanteau of his and the guest’s names. Joint channels are also popular, the amount of members ranging from two to seven or more.
Of course, for every business there are going to be people who lie or trick in order to make more money. Misleading titles and thumbnails have been discouraged by YouTube’s algorithm change in 2012, which now pays for watch time rather than view count. Therefore, click baiting is not profitable anymore. However, the new way in which to milk the algorithm is by drawing out your content to make sure people watch for a longer time. The “Gleam Team”, for example, has been advised to mention their sponsors and other information before getting into the topic. Other, more extreme cases, include YouTube channel LeafyIsHere – whose videos feature a nasal voice speaking over video game footage that has nothing to do with the topics he discusses (which usually involve making fun of children or, occasionally, mentally handicapped people). In order to get more money, he usually starts talking about the subject in the title after about four minutes of useless drabble. This (somehow) didn’t stop him from gaining over a million subscribers – go figure.
YouTube revenue offline
YouTube being such an innovative platform, its users have had to deviate off it in search for more conventional and secure sources of income. One way to extend their brand onto the physical world is through selling merchandise. Whether it is mugs or clothing, youtuber merch usually features the vlogger’s logo or an inside joke, in order to be recognised by other members of the fanbase. Sometimes, earnings from these shops are even bigger than video revenue. Fan-made merchandise has also become increasingly popular, on sites like RedBubble, on which artists can sell shirts, posters, badges and so on.
These small but easily identifiable objects are especially useful during meetings and conventions. These events (such as VidCon, Playlist Live, or Summer in the City) are a great pretext for creators and viewers to bond together and talk to each other, during “meet and greets” – in which fans who pay large sums of money have to wait hours in line for two words and a selfie with their favourite youtubers. These conventions are also great for fellow viewers to bond with each other over a common interest, during the time in which they aren’t screaming their beanies off in the presence of their idols.
Another form of traditional entertainment that youtubers have launched themselves upon is books. This huge trend among vloggers benefits publishing houses as well as readers – the easily acquired revenue from novels written by famous YouTube personalities allows room for more intellectual or niche books to be sold, which satisfies both the publishing houses and the consumers and critics who are always on the lookout for them. Youtuber books can also be beneficial to the viewers who don’t usually read but have now gotten the hang of it with the help of their favourite stars. Besides, these publishing deals with vloggers can result in quality writing – such as aforementioned Tyler Oakley’s “Binge”, described by The Guardian as “a story that needed telling”, or best friends and frequent collaborators Dan Howell and Phil Lester’s “The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire”, labelled as “endearing and self-aware”. The biggest success was definitely John Green’s bestselling tragedy, “The Fault in Our Stars”, which was later adapted into a no. 1 box-office hit. However, not all youtubers’ novels receive positive feedback; examples include the book written by the one and only Felix Kjiellberg, or PewDiePie (the very top of the charts with an astounding 46 million subscribers and 12 billion views). Book critics find his written humour bitter, trite, and condescending. Even scandals have erupted from these book deals, regarding plagiarizing accusations directed towards YouTube’s power couple, Alfie Deyes and Zoe Sugg – important members of the “Gleam Team”. Cheesy entertainment vlogger Alfie’s interactive book was compared over and over with “Keri Smith’s spookily similar, marginally superior and significantly older ‘Wreck this Journal’, while the renowned beauty guru Zoella’s romance novel was revealed to be ghost-written. She did promise that the sequel would receive no help from anyone other than an editor (a statement received with suspicion), but the cost of that statement was doubling the price of the second book.
Youtubers have also organised tours to meet their viewers outside yearly conventions. Tyler Oakley’s “Slumber Party” tour, which involved onesies (one-piece animal costumes) and sleepover games, made such a sensation that it fuelled the content of a documentary, “Snervous”. Onesies seem to be a recurring pattern in these tours, since they also appeared in the “#NoFilterShow”, featuring American entertainment vloggers Hannah Hart, Mamrie Hart, and Grace Helbig. Sometimes, these tours have gotten so popular that they are extended to different areas of the world – comedy duo Dan and Phil (authors of “The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire”) have extended their UK tour “The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire” to the US, and now Australia. (Note: if you’re wondering about the absurd similarity between the tour name and book title, they both originate from a combination of the pair’s usernames: danisnotonfire and AmazingPhil)
These tours have often been organised for concerts, as many youtubers have used their fame to propel their music. Since many of the site’s uploaders started with singing before switching to entertainment, it makes sense for them to return to their origins – take, for example, Emma Blackery, an Essex vlogger with ever-changing hair colour who started with punk rock covers before switching to comedy, and has now launched her third EP (she’s made a hilarious video about it, in which her “singer” and “youtuber” selves argue over a catchy beat). Moreover, Australian twenty-year-old Troye Sivan has topped the iTunes chart with his album, “Blue Neighbourhood”, which enabled him to feature in TV shows such as Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show”.
Television has also been an empty canvas for the growing popularity of vloggers – the most notable instance being a show on E! whose protagonist was Grace Helbig, member of the “#NoFilterShow” . The show was cancelled due to low success rates, which may have been caused by the tacky editing clearly imposed on her by E!, whose producers probably have no idea how to actually appeal to younger viewers. The success of the youtuber’s channel and self-run projects, such as her podcast, stayed intact – Grace clearly benefitting from the liberty she was given. Video bloggers have also been featured on BBC Radio 1 – Dan and Phil have even been granted a weekly one-hour show, which was so successful that it prompted a monthly “Internet Takeover” segment involving several other youtubers.
Ultimately, vloggers are successful business people who manage to sell entertainment all by themselves. On the basis of only a strong, trusting relationship with their audience, they have gathered a staggering amount of popularity and corresponding fortunes. Therefore, despite often being underestimated, youtubers shouldn’t be discredited from the hard work and the business skills that come with the money they earn.
By Kira Atanasiu