On YouTube, Amateur Is the New Pro
By ROB WALKER
June 28, 2012
A kid from Nebraska shows up in New York City to make it big. This
kid was Bryan Odell, a 21-year-old college dropout who lived with his
parents. Gangly, with curly blond hair, he looked and talked as if
he arrived straight from central casting. ("I was just a kid from
Nebraska," he says.) But central casting had nothing to do with it.
As an aspiring YouTuber, he cast himself.
Odell's destination was the Manhattan office of Google Inc.,
YouTube's corporate parent. He was among the 25 winners of a
competition called Next Up, which is aimed at "accelerating the
growth of the next big YouTube stars," as an official YouTube blog
explained. The prize included four days of tips and training from
"YouTube experts" in New York. It also included a $35,000 check, no
strings attached.
Founded in 2005 and owned by Google since 2007, YouTube today
contains multitudes: 72 hours of video are uploaded onto the service
every minute. For some, it is an infinite museum of moving images:
Patti Smith singing "You Light Up My Life" on a 1970s kids' show;
Mike Wallace puffing Luckys through an interview with Salvador Dalí;
forgotten teenage dance shows. For others, this is the medium of the
one-off "viral" video - the often accidentally funny home movie or
blooper that is e-mailed, linked and tweeted into collective
consciousness. There is also an endless variety of produced material:
"supercut" mash-ups, TED Talks, book trailers, brand campaigns.
Then there are the YouTube stars - people like Ray William Johnson,
Mystery Guitar Man, Smosh, Michelle Phan, the ShayTards, Jenna
Marbles, Freddie Wong, What the Buck or Philip DeFranco. If these
names mean nothing to you, trust me: these are famous, successful
YouTubers. Their videos get millions of views, and because they get a
share of the resulting ad revenue, they are almost certainly among
the "hundreds" that the company says earn six figures or better from
their videos.
YouTube executives sometimes refer to such YouTube stars as having
been "born on the platform": they built careers through skillful use
of YouTube itself. Given the numbers of viewers involved, it makes
sense that YouTube, which places revenue-generating ads on videos,
might take an interest in creating more of these stars. This was the
goal of Next Up, to which several hundred YouTubers applied. While
the final selection process was murky, I was told that the winners
were chosen based more on metrics (views per video, subscriber growth
rate, uploads per month) and ability to whip up fan support than with
some entertainment executive's opinion about quality.
The winners were a curious mix. Aside from Odell, who interviewed the
members of touring metal bands, there was Meghan Camarena, a sweet
young woman from Modesto, Calif., who made the grade with her video
blogging and lip-synced pop songs. J. Brent Coble created
college-humorish skit videos in Denton, Tex. Richard Ryan, originally
from small-town Tennessee, destroyed high-tech gadgets with guns and
explosives in the Southern California desert. Franchesca Ramsey made
comedic videos, and Meghan Tonjes sang earnest songs into her webcam.
Others uploaded travelogues, cooking shows, makeup tips, craft
tutorials, basketball lessons and stop-motion videos of Lego
figurines.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/on-youtube-amateur-is-the-new-pro.html
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