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In August 2018, celebrity vlogger Logan Paul confirmed his global celebrity status as 20,000 spectators and a pay-per-view audience of one million watched his much hyped boxing match against rival vlogger KSI at the Manchester Arena.
The huge commercial success of the fight was the latest example of how an elite group of vloggers have amassed huge influence, power and riches by leveraging the commercial opportunities from the video streaming website YouTube. Logan Paul currently has 18 million YouTube subscribers; still a long way behind the world’s biggest vlogger PewDiePie’s 65 million followers, with an estimated 18 billion views for his videos.
Vloggers have made their names through a variety of different genres: comedy skits, pranks and confessional or lifestyle videos. Some have been known to deliberately court controversy; in one notorious and widely criticised video, Logan Paul visits Japan's 'suicide forest’ and shows an apparent suicide victim.
The emergence and culture of YouTube’s professional content creators is the focus of Zoë Glatt’s PhD research at LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. The project combines online and offline ethnography, interviews with content creators, and autoethnography, with Zoë becoming a vlogger herself.
Zoë was drawn to the world of vloggers shortly after YouTube was founded in 2005, fascinated by the opportunities the platform created for new forms of creative expression and community. During the site’s life, she has seen vlogging culture transform, as it has become a viable and desirable career path for many young people and attracted major corporate interests, brand deals and talent agents.
In the early years of the site, creators didn’t have financial motivations for posting videos. As content creators have become professionalised, a number of new concerns have come into play. It is now common for creators to engage in branded and sponsored videos, promoting products in exchange for payment. Zoë says: “When content creators started to earn money from their videos, it meant that the type of content and people’s motivations for posting changed.”
With 500 hours of video uploaded every minute and one billion hours of content being watched on the site every day, creators are encouraged by YouTube’s algorithms to upload longer videos, more regularly, and with catchier titles in order to remain visible on the platform.
Additionally, YouTube promotes channels that sustain engaged audiences, encouraging creators to pursue a narrower range of topics that are more searchable. As YouTube’s audience tends to be younger, vloggers’ content inevitably skews towards their tastes.
Zoë says: “The standard of content is very mixed in terms of quality. Creators often copy popular of trending content so that theirs becomes more searchable. In this way, YouTube arguably disincentives original content.”
The opaque and secretive nature of how YouTube’s algorithms work means that it isn’t clear what videos are going to be successful. “YouTube has a lot of power. The mystery around the way its algorithms work causes a lot of anxiety amongst content producers, who find it difficult to predict how well their channel will perform from one day to the next, or anticipate their income.”
Zoë says her work with vloggers has highlighted how many successful vloggers are unhappy with the ways the platform architecture governs their content. And for the vast majority who do not achieve the size of audience that enables them to build a career as a content creator, achieving a breakthrough appears almost impossible.
“Vloggers with smaller audiences protest that the way YouTube is structured; it stops talent coming through and doesn’t reward creativity or originality.”
Zoë adds that YouTube could change the ways its algorithms work, which would have a significant impact on its content creators: “YouTube could easily influence vloggers content. For example, they could prioritise channels that create videos once a week, and only five minutes long rather than multiple longer uploads per week. Or it could commit to showcasing smaller channels on the front page, rather than or as well as trending and popular content.
“YouTube’s role in what gets seen by these huge audiences is as significant as the vloggers that make the videos. My research is looking at how content creators understand and navigate the algorithms, structures and affordances of YouTube and other platforms in the nascent social media entertainment industry.”