Vlogbrothers and Charity

over my past few posts, I’ve been talking about Youtube stars and responsibility. For a mini tl:dr of my last posts, When faced with this new faction of celebrity, web stars aren’t the most equipped to deal with it than traditional celebrities. There’s a level of responsibility that comes with the level of fame they face, (see my last post about how teens rank webstars rank with traditional celebrities) and they’re unsure how to handle it. While my last post focused on the evil, this one will focus on the good.

The Vlogbrothers channel was created in 2007 by John and Hank Green, two brothers from the American Midwest, so that they could communicate in an experimental project called Brotherhood 2.0. The Wiki page for the community online that surrounds their channel says this about Brotherhood 2.0…

“they filmed videos every weekday for the entire year, alternating days between the two of them, posting the videos on their YouTube channel (vlogbrothers). During the year, they were forbidden from communicating via literary means (email, text messaging, etc.), only communicating through the vlogbrothers channel and telephone. If they did communicate literarily, or if they missed a day, they would be punished.”

Within a year, a community sprung up around their interactions dubbed Nerdfighteria, based on the brothers (and their fans) love of nerdy culture. John Green puts it best with this quote that severs as the sort of mantra of Nerdfighteria…

“…because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff… Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”

Noticing this, in December of 2007 John and Hank came together to join youtube into a giant collaborative effort for charity called the “Project for Awesome”. Coining the phrase that would be it’s slogan to ‘decrease world suck’ , the objective was to flood the homepage of Youtube with videos about charities that needed funds. Popular Youtubers at the time would urge their subscribers to make videos as well. The Wikipedia article sums this up well saying…

“The movement was started to have YouTubers create innovative videos promoting their favorite charity and upload it by a certain deadline, with the aim that their promoted charity gains more awareness, and donations from audiences.”

 Now, every year some time in December, Hank and John host a 24 hour livestream in the style of a mock telethon, raising money through the reward of certain perks through an indiegogo campaign. Some prizes included the “Youtubers before Youtube!” calendar (featuring baby pictures of your favorite vloggers), A signed special edition of John Green’s book “The Fault in Our Stars”, Project for Awesome Nerdfighter socks and Nerdy Butterfly Art (high res pictures of butterfly wings).

so a basic tl;dr of the project for awesome is as follows:

“The Project for Awesome started back in 2007 when a bunch of video creators decided it would be good, for one day of the year, to take over YouTube in the interest of good. Here’s how we do it:

• Video creators all over the world create videos promoting their favorite charities.
• Video creators & community members donate items for Indiegogo perks.
• People donate money.
• The charities featured in the videos that the community collectively decides are the best of the year receive a portion of the proceeds of the Indiegogo campaign. The rest of the the funds go to charities working in global health & education chosen by the board of the Foundation to Decrease World Suck.

Our goal, of course, is to raise as much money as possible.”

John and Hank Green have turned their small internet experiment into a digital revolution by doing the very best they can with their fame. Other youtubers use their time and effort to participate in the  project, and even non web famous people can still make videos for the charities they believe in. This stresses the personal connection that new media stars have to their viewers in ways that traditional celebrities can’t compete with. It’s combining efforts for a greater good.

What is “Clickbait”? and what does it say about us?

On my Facebook page, nestled between a post my roommate from last year made about her parent’s anniversary and a friend from high school’s profile picture change, there it is.

Sitting, waiting for me to delve into it. I thought I’d unfollowed all the page who posted these. But there it was.

So what is clickbait? and why can’t people resist clicking on it?

Clickbait is described by the Oxford Dictionary as…

“(on the Internet) content, especially that of a sensational or provocative nature, whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page.”

Examples of popular phrases include…

In an age where media is profit more than substance, Clickbait is the addictive drug that internet users just keep coming back for more from. I know my mom can’t resist the story of any cute animal (“You’ll Never Believe What Happens When This Puppy and Bengal Tiger Meet!”) while my dad loves medical mysteries (“A Man Goes To The ER for Ear Pain, You’ll Never Believe What They Found!”). It’s addictive, you keep wanting to find out what happens. Do the tiger and puppy make friends? What do they pull out of his ear?! The suspense is what draws you in and keeps you there.

Let’s make one thing clear, I don’t care about Becky Smith. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know what she possibly could’ve gotten in her package and, being there person I am, i don’t care.

But the internet is not like me. My mom, aunt and some of my cousins would click on that article (video? listicle?) 100% because of the suspense. Humans don’t like not knowing things, it’s a common and basic instinct that we can’t really ignore.

This video raises so many questions: What did Becky get in the mail? A live animal? A cute puppy, perhaps? or a rabid raccoon? why is she making that face in the thumbnail? Why did she order a dining room table off of eBay? Is Becky poor? Is there something she’s not telling us? Why is the surprise “Bizarre”? Did Becky’s solider husband return from war in the box for her dining room table? that’s usually how these things go.

Clickbait, in my opinion, is just dumbing down media. The story of Becky was covered by AOL, which besides providing the chat service you embarrassed yourself with as a preteen, should be covering reputable news, right? This is an age where internet is profit, so each click is a dollar amount in the pocket in the overflowing pockets of whatever website posted it. Most are from third party sights that you might even get a virus from hovering over, but some are from “trusted” news sites like BuzzFeed. Buzzfeed, home of the useless listicle.

And who can resist 6 puppy gifs that describe what exam week is like for you? or maybe 3 funny kittens describing the war on terror through hilarious mini clips? the possibilities are endless.

I know you’re curious, Becky got 40 bags of live fish due to a shipping error. I hope you feel as betrayed as I do.

Youtubers and Sponsorships

The topic i’ve chosen to focus on these next few posts ( a series, sort of) is youtubers. Being celebrities in this new media frontier, no guidelines have really been set with them on how to handle fame and everything that comes with it.

With traditional celebrities, theres a rapport that is followed about sponsorship deals, like you feature products on social media. Sometimes, Celebrities could get in trouble (Like Kim K.’s infamous morning sickness pill). But for Youtubers, until just recently, theres been little to no regulation for how they present their sponsorship deals.

In the UK several youtube content creators got slammed by their ad regulations administration, ironically, because of America’s Favorite Cookie.

Oreo hired Phil Lester aka AmazingPhil, Dan Howell aka Danisnotonfire and several other Youtubers to promote their cookie in a challenge called “The Oreo Lick Race”

An article about this topic from the Guardian says..

“The Advertising Standards Authority received a complaint from a BBC journalist challenging whether Mondelez had made clear that the video ads were actually marketing messages.”

The problem with this, the ASA argued, is that kids (as most of Dan & Phil’s audience are) should know when something is being sold to them. Phil, probably unintentionally, forgot to include the “#Ad” sign in the top of his thumbnail, and since then has deleted the video.

The article goes on to say…

“The ASA said the YouTubers’s video ads were very much in the style of their regular content posts and so it would not be immediately clear the Oreo clips were marketing communications.”

To be fair, this is true. Phil participates in challenges on his channel all the time, only a few examples being “The Not Milk Challenge”, “The Cheese Challenge” and “The Seven Second Challenge” (of his own creation, which he and Dan turned into their own app). A fun competition to see who can lick the creme out of an oreo cookie is not out of his pay grade.

The article concludes with…

“The regulator also said the disclosure statements, such as “Thanks to Oreo for making this video possible”, either in the video or in the text descriptions were “insufficient to make clear the marketing nature of the videos”.

“Because the statements did not fully establish the commercial intent of the videos, and because no disclosures were made before consumer engagement with the material, we concluded that the ads were not obviously identifiable as marketing communications,” the ASA concluded. “The ads must not appear again in their current form. We told Mondelez UK to ensure that future ads in this medium made their commercial intent clear prior to consumer engagement.””

This situation raises several questions for me. First, do Youtubers have a responsibility in saying which ad content is sponsored and which is not? Second, How could they make it more clear the videos are sponsored if they chose to? Some content creators use “#spon” or “#Ad” but is that and a sentence in the description enough? Lastly, is a Youtuber taking a sponsorship deal like “Selling Out” in traditional media?

Online Content Creators and Responsibility

Younger and younger in this age of technology, kids are gaining the resources and knowledge to use things like smartphones, tablets and laptops to go on the internet. More specifically, Youtube has become the new television.

Variety, the popular traditional media (and, as of late, online traversing) publication about celebrities took a survey in March 2014.

“…conducted for Variety by celebrity brand strategist Jeetendr Sehdev, asked 1,500 respondents a battery of questions assessing how 20 well-known personalities stacked up in terms of approachability, authenticity and other criteria considered aspects of their overall influence. Half the 20 were drawn from the English-language personalities with the most subscribers and video views on YouTube, the other half were represented by the celebrities with the highest Q scores among U.S. teens aged 13-17, as of March.“

and the results were less than surprising in proving that traditional media is dying with the new generation.

“U.S. teenagers are more enamored with YouTube stars than they are the biggest celebrities in film, TV and music…That’s the surprising result of a survey Variety commissioned in July that found the five most influential figures among Americans ages 13-18 are all YouTube faves, eclipsing mainstream celebs including Jennifer Lawrence and Seth Rogen. The highest-ranking figures were Smosh, the online comedy team of Ian Andrew Hecox and Anthony Padilla, both 26.”

These results prove a point about the idea that kids would much rather spend time staring at computer screens than TV’s, but also brings up a discussion of the responsibility for the content they post. 13-17 are formative years, and more than likely people will admit that during these years they’ve made choices they regret when it comes to the way they dressed, music they listened to, the way they conducted themselves and the friends they made.

” YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable.”

It’s obvious that Youtubers are seen more as friends than celebrities. I’m sure that if Jennifer Lawrence was sitting crosslegged on her bed doing a makeup tutorial, teens would find her much more approachable than when she’s playing Katniss Everdeen. Youtubers can help these teens in times where they feel like they don’t have a friend. Markiplier, a popular Let’s Play vlogger (with 10 million subscribers as of late), is seen in one of his subscriber marker videos reflecting these feelings. After watching an emotional tribute compilation from his fans, and emotional Mark Fischbach says

“…the real thing we always need to remember about this community is we need to be here for each other, we have to be, because some people [in these videos] don’t have anyone else and they turn to me and anyone else who doesn’t have anyone…I want you guys to know that I’m an individual...I’m always going to be the same person and I’m always going to be honest with you. I really hope you guys believe me when I say I really care about what you do and who you are.”

At this point, he talks about how he can’t know every subscriber (8 million) at the time of the video, and starts to cry again.

“…and it tears me up inside, because I know theres people that need me to talk to them. but I can’t do that.”

Mark’s attitude is not unlike that of many other Youtubers, all who never thought they would even be famous in this new media age and struggle with knowing what to do with it. There’s a certain humble air that you’ll find in the Youtube community, young people who never really planned for this to be their day job.

But with this unknown fame, theres several different other unknowns, the one I’m choosing to focus on being the content they create. At ages 13-17, most kids still have parents regulating what they watch, who they hang out with, what kind of music they listen to. But with youtube, all that goes out the window. Some videos are caught under youtube’s explicit content filter, but most are not.

Pewdiepie, who’s the most subscribed Youtube in the world, uses explicit language and themes in almost all of his videos and he’s ranked third in the Variety survey. In my personal experience, I have a twelve year old cousin who lives with me who is not allowed to curse at all, yet he’s exposed to it each time he watches a video. Smosh, featured on the list at number one, use mature themes in their videos, shown in the thumbnails of their videos as “clickbait” for teenagers, mostly boys.

Four of smosh’s most recent videos feature thumbnail with questionable content.

In conclusion, the whole idea of this post is supposed to raise, not answer, questions about Youtube’s and their responsibility to their audience. It’s clear that kids see Youtube stars as friends, but is that negatively affecting how they’re exposed to content? Do these youtube stars have the obligation to post age appropriate content based on their audience? It really shows how exposure and desensitizing has changed in the digital age.

life after going viral: Rebecca Black and “Friday”

Alright, admit it, you’ve heard the song “Friday”. Whether it got stuck in your head when it first came out, you bought it on iTunes or you simply just mocked it with your friends, but you’ve heard that catchy and poorly sung chorus a million times over. Listen, I was 14 in March of 2011, I know how this song ripped through every middle schooler’s desktop computer, was shared over Facebook messages and posts, it was truly viral among my small town and the rest of the world.

If you’ve been living under a rock since 2011, the song (reuploaded, more on that later) can be viewed here.

Rebecca Black, the singer of said “ear shattering” song, is one of the many victims of unintentionally going viral…or was she?

Knowyourmeme.com, a very helpful resource on online meme culture, has this to say as a summary of it’s Rebecca Black article specifically regarding “Friday”:

“Rebecca Black is an amateur YouTube musician who soared into the public eye for her music video “Friday.” The song gained significant online notoriety in March 2011 for its monotonous lyrics accompanied by heavy use of auto-tune.”

Divulging deeper into this, once upon a time in California, Rebecca Black’s parents decided, either for a birthday present or just in general, to pay a company called the Ark Music Factory, (hereafter referred to as AMF) to produce a music video for their daughter.

The Wikipedia page for the now dissolved AMF says this on the process of how Ark really works:

“Ark’s business centers on the recruitment/discovery of new young singers. The artists (or their parents) pay a $2,000 to $4,000 fee to Ark, and Ark then writes and produces music in collaboration with these artists, often producing music videos and promotion of the songs. The singer owns the master recording, and Ark retains publishing rights to the song and all the sales from the song.^[1]”

Black’s parents paid the fee and Friday was recored, filmed and posted onto the (now deleted) AMF youtube page on February 10th 2011. The video received little feedback until March 11th 2011 when a website called “The Daily What” reposted it ( a link, not the whole video) and it gained viral attention.

Knowyourmeme catalogs it’s fame after the Daily What post:

From The Daily What, “Friday” M/V was subsequently reblogged by other popular blogs like Tosh.0^[4], Urlesque^[5], Huffington Post^[6], Buzzfeed^[7] and shared on Tumblr^[8], Twitter^[9], Memebase^[10] and various other discussion forums. On March 14th, 2011, “Rebecca Black” emerged to the top trending topics on Twitter. By March 15th, the video had reached over 3 million views and by March 17th it reached 10 million views with the single reaching the Top 100 on iTunes

Basically, you pay them money to write and record your kids song and a video for it, not a bad deal. The only problem being the content of the song was absolute garbage. Ark Music Factory went on after Black to produce hits like My Jeans by Jenna Rose featuring the classic line “Ha ha ha ha, jack my swag”, and Chinese Food by Alison Gold with it’s vaguely racist video. Ark had a good formula, they just made some terribly awful choices in subject material and marketing. The appearance of one of the cofounders as the rap hook of the video has been described as “pedophilic” by Urban Dictionary definitions.

By definition, Rebecca went viral. Though she meant to get famous by real merits of talent and substance in her music, she got famous through how bad her autotune was and the sheer terrible quality to her song. Throughout the years, from this fame, she’s gotten major cash from endorsements and deals.

Fast forward to 2015, she’s 18 now and surprisingly, she’s still famous. Boasting 1.2 million followers on twitter, she’s well above the average follower account for most teens. But how did she retain the fame? Not from her follow up song, Saturday or her EP after. Some might even debate that her fame isn’t from her “lifestyle” youtube videos (to which she boasts 1,209,415 subscribers).  Rebecca is the definition of a viral success story. She took an all time internet low and turned it into a brand, making her a champion of life after going viral.

She made a video of herself reacting to Friday in which she cringes through the entire thing, but says that she doesn’t regret making Friday, because of the opportunities it’s presented her ($$$) and the friends she’s made. After a video goes viral, it’s so easy for the subject to want to hide in obscurity, but Rebecca really has made a name for herself.

And if you’re anything like me, that’s all you really want for this poor, embarrassed teenage auto-tuned singer who went viral.

the history of going viral

I found a really cool website in my internet research travels this week called, aptly, the history of viral content. The website is set up like a helpful infographic and dates back the history of “viral” content all the way back to chain mail (which “actually could have began as early as 1795”! how cool is that?). It’s pretty interesting and really got my gears working on the idea of this type of content itself.

it’s easiest, with the subject matter i’m covering on this blog, to start at Youtube. (instead of emails or chain mail, although there’s a couple cool links throughout the chainmail and email sections about how your content could go viral before the internet that are worth checking out.) DataDial (referred to after this for convenience as “The Article”) states that:

“The first video posted to the site was a video of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego zoo. It’s titled “Me at the zoo” and was posted on 23 April 2005. You can still view the video. It has 11,542,637 views.”

Because it’s the first video, obviously going to go viral, just because in a lot of cases the first piece of content on a site says plenty about it’s past and future. “Me at the zoo” is really an essentially pointless video, but it set the framework for a multitude of millions of videos to follow without even realizing it’s magnitude at the time.

Youtube was purchased by Google in November of 2006 and, since then, The Article reports that

“The most viewed User-Generated Video of all time is ‘Charlie bit my finger – again!'”.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the video can be seen here, but the gist is just one cute little British baby biting the finger of his older brother. Babies and cannibalism, what’s not to love? This capitalized off a trend that the traditional media had been using for ages: cute kids doing/saying weird things for entertainment. The article goes on to say

“[the video] was posted 22 May 2007 and has been viewed 531,352,130 times.” and that was in 2014 when the site was last updated.

The “Charlie bit my finger” family has now made a largely successful brand off of this video, but examining life after going viral will come at a later time.

Since then, notable viral videos for each year are as follows:

• 2006- The Evolution of Dance– a man’s business conference dance routine goes viral as he transcends a plethora of decades through their signature dance moves. Highlights include: a playlist that transcends you and your mom’s favorite jams.
• 2007- Charlie bit my finger -again!
• 2008- Bill O’Reilly flips out– the famous news anchor has a major meltdown. Highlights include: wondering if a man can actually explode from being too angry.
• 2009- David after Dentist– brings around the kid cuteness factor once again as a young boy reacts to anesthesia for the first time after dental work. Highlights include: the famous quote “Is this real life?” and the time where he pushes himself out of his car seat to scream.
• 2010- Old Spice: Your Man Could Smell Like This– with a Super Bowl lead in, this commercial is cut from an obscure advertising cloth that made it an instant hit. Highlights include: “I’m on a Horse” and a dreamy guy we all wish our boyfriends would turn into if they used Old Spice.
• 2011- Friday– one of the most bad viral videos that everyone loves to hate, Rebecca Black’s sugar-coated, poorly preformed, pop factory music video is a staple in internet culture. Rebecca is one of the people I’ll be studying in my life after going viral post, as well. Highlights include: several quotable moments that all your friends knew like “gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal” and “we we we so excited” plus that poor girl in the pink dress who’s trying too hard to dance. (also the rap interlude by the creepy older guy is enough to send shivers down anyones spine)
• 2012- Gangnam Style– this music video from korean artist Psy was just weird enough to cross international waters onto the screens of everyone around the world. Highlights include: Psy screaming at the behind of a dancing girl, the parking garage dance battle and the weird, horse-riding style dance move that was frequented at many a sweet 16 from then on.
• 2013- What Does The Fox Say?-possibly one of the strangest one hit wonders of all time, this video is one of the weirdest you’ll ever see. Highlights include: the plot twist of the pop beat to the unnatural noises that come out of the singers mouth and the costumes. oh boy, the costumes.
• 2014- A Tiny Hamster Eats Tiny Burritos– this video will help you even in your darkest days. It is exactly what it sounds like, a tiny hamster eats a tiny burrito that is crafted just for him. Highlights include: the whole thing, it’s a tiny hamster eating a burrito.

2015 is somewhat far from being over, so there’s not much coverage on what the major viral video this year is, but what this list proves is that content can still move to go viral. Most of these went viral accidentally, but it cements the idea that content can be spread very quickly, even back in the internet dark ages when youtube was first created. Nowadays theres so many other modes of your content to spread to go viral, but we’ll all know it started with “me at the zoo”.

going viral: what does it mean?

To even remotely start a discussion on how web fame is changing the entertainment and arts industry alike, one really has to understand how to become famous on the internet.

I refer back to this article from Smart Savy Social (which can be found under the terms of a Google search of “What does it mean to go viral?” which is what I did.) and it pretty much sums up, to a T, the modern day definition of going viral. It’s written very simply, but in this time of new internet terms that pop up on a daily, the language it uses can be helpful for someone who doesn’t spend every waking moment of their free time on the internet. (unlike cough, me, cough)

The article sums up the idea of traffic nicely with this quote, “When something goes viral, it is viewed by a very high number of people in just a short period of time. This is in contrast to content…that is only viewed by a relatively small number of people or viewed by lots of people over months or years.” The idea of going viral is all about traffic or, how many views the video actually gets. “Going viral typically means lots of exposure and tons of traffic, without costing you any extra effort. Increased exposure for your business can only mean more connections, more sales and more influence over your audience.” Traffic is good whether or not your career is completely online or not, but if you’re trying to make a business of of your online persona, this is your kickstart. “Essentially, if it’s relevant to a high number of people, interesting and sharable, it has potential.” Its own to the basic notion that if the internet thinks it’s worth watching, it will go viral.

Every person that blogs for a living has a common theme, they all had one video or post that went viral. People saw this bit of content and decided that it was worth watching enough over and over again for the person to be famous, whether the content itself is actually good or bad. (The definition of good and bad content will be explained with examples in later posts.) Theres several stories of people taking “bad” internet fame and reworking it into a career, which really is the type of power move that can gain respect in some regards. But the main point is that each “web star” has had one viral video that propelled them into this fame.

The article puts it simply with the quote “Just about anything can go viral.”