YouTube and the “human factor”
Anthony Mayfield from iCrossing in his lecture ‘Journalism in the Age of Networks’ discussed the three ways a company can achieve online success. They must:
- understand the networks within which they operate
- be useful to them i.e. find the niche
- and be live in their networks – putting out and receiving information
And from that I jump to YouTube. One of the biggest internet phenomena of the last few years and a platform that has in turn spawned other internet phenomena from laughing babies to ‘rickrolling’.
Many YouTube success stories are mind-boggling. People have risen from obscurity and forged a brand for themselves and from what… a few home videos.
What is shocking about YouTube is that if you look at the ‘top subscribers’ list the majority of it is comprised of people who were not famous before the site came along. The number one most subscribed channel of all time is ‘Fred’ - videos about a fictional six year old called Fred Fingelhorn with anger management issues and an alcoholic mother.
The boy behind the world-famous infant is Lucas Cruikshank a 15 year old from Nebraska. A 15 year old from Nebraska. It is hard to believe. Within two months of beginning his channel he had 250,000 subscribers. He now has 680,151.
Out of the first 20 most subscribed videos 16 are created by ‘ordinary’ people and only four by famous people like Miley Cyrus or companies like Universal Studios. Perhaps then the companies could learn a little about online success from your every day average Joes.
With this I turn to the case of Lauren Luke – one of the UK’s biggest YouTube success stories. She is the second most subscribed video in the UK beating the BBC and Leona Lewis’s channel – not bad for a shy, single mother from Southshields.
Her videos are makeup tutorials – an area in which she has no official training. Why then is she so successful?
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Firstly, and of course, she is simply naturally talented. The content has to be top notch for a successful brand.
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Secondly, there is a lot of makeup advice online but little of it utilises the medium of film which is, of course, much more effective for makeup tutorials. Major sites like makeuptip have not yet harnessed the power of video.
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She performs live on camera and uploads the video without any editing and it is this rawness that I believe is key to her success. She is competing with makeup sites and professional videos where renowned makeup artists makeover models. She is, on the other hand, just a normal woman using affordable makeup and achievable effects. She appeals to all the other ‘normal’ women out there. It makes her tips more believable i.e. if it can work on her it can work on me…
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Of particular importance, she interacts with her followers. Her videos are always responses to ‘requests’ in messages on her wall from YouTubers addressing what ‘looks’ people want to see and she talks casually with the viewers throughout her videos.
She adheres to Anthony Mayfield’s principles and then goes beyond them. It is the ‘human factor’ that Anthony did not emphasise but I have no doubt he is completely aware of. After all, when he discussed the work iCrossing did with More Than insurance company he explained how they employed journalists to keep a blog of relevant news in order to connect with the general public. It benefited the company no end.
Ultimately what the company did was to extend a hand to its readers, person to person. This is what the successful YouTubers do – they are a new wave of celebrity that engages with their viewers on their level. With such close proximity they can understand exactly what their users want. They can read their audience like old friends. In the age of the ‘reader wants what the reader gets’, companies need to come close enough to hear the requests whispered in their ear.
It is a trick that the bigger players are beginning to realise now. Enter: the sudden rise of political YouTube channels like the UK Labour Party or BarackObama.com. Politicians can now pretend they are normal people like the rest of us.
Here are a few responses for magazine journalism students to what makes a successful YouTube video:
