The rise of user-generated content has led to the inevitable: a new generation of celebrities. They started out in their bedrooms and basements, creating something unique and personal – and have ridden the wave to success amongst their peers and beyond.
These are the stars of YouTube.
According to StatisticBrain.com, some 1.3 billion people use YouTube, with almost 5 billion videos viewed daily, and 3.25 billion hours viewed every month. But, as we have seen since the rise of Justin Bieber, it’s possible to stand out and make it big.
Miranda Sings is one of the more intriguing recent success stories, in that the character — an intentionally annoying, talentless, arrogant, prudish singer with awful, overdrawn red lips — has developed before our eyes over several years. Creator Colleen Ballinger-Evans, 29, posted the first video of herself as quirky Miranda in 2008 as an inside joke, as a satirical poke at bad singers and untalented performers with misguided dreams of fame.
Yet the character caught on and has been built into a franchise, leading to Evans to perform the character in various mainstream media outlets and landing her a Netflix series titled “Haters Back Off.”
She also leveraged the Miranda character by building a parallel career path for herself – as actress, comedienne, and singer. Her most recent tour was through a series of small venues in the U.S. with her husband Josh Evans, attracting audiences consisting primarily of tween and teen girls, in which she displayed her many talents, including an impressive vocal range.
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The show and her real-life persona, as well as that of Miranda, also contained something rarely seen in popular culture – positive and inclusive values. The show, which loosely tracks the couple’s romance, focuses on being true to oneself, reaching for the stars, and not letting obstacles get in the way.
The London Evening Standard also observed that “[the show] is deeper than it initially appears. … She is funny and a strong role model, with a healthy disdain for pop’s over-sexualization. … The satire is not exactly mind-blowing but the message is undeniably positive.”
What is Miranda’s appeal? As explained by one of her fans, Amanda Meyers, 14, “She’s funny in kind of an unexpected way. It’s hilarious that some random girl makes up a character that is deliberately annoying but that being annoying is what’s funny.” Yet Amanda is equally, if not more, interested in Evans’ real life. “She’s real. She’s authentic. She puts her whole life out there for everyone to see, so it’s almost like we know her.”
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It’s this authentic, albeit virtual, relationship that makes many such YouTube celebrities relatable, especially to a generation steeped in mobile and desktop communication that so effectively connects the personalities and the viewers. Disingenuousness gets sniffed out in a heartbeat. While being outgoing and authentic, Evans has seized the opportunity to present positive values.
The same can be said for many others. YouTube star Meredith Foster is a 20-year-old whose channel is “all about being confident in your own skin and loving who you are.” The content is light, airy stuff, but comedic, sweet and inviting. Since 2009, Bethany Mota, 20, has been offering style, makeup and self-esteem tips and encouraging her fans, whom she calls “Mota-vators.” Her honesty also helped her draw big audiences.
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What’s key is the sizable amount of interaction between the YouTube celebrities and their fan base, another unique feature of the “citizen celeb” culture. This is social media, after all, and regular interaction only enhances audience identification. Tween fan Jessica Meyers, 12, enjoys person-to-person interactions with Foster, and views her as “almost a friend, someone on the internet that’s a lot like me, who enjoys the same things, and has the same sense of humor.”
Perhaps most impressively, YouTube has permitted these individuals to forge their own businesses, to become media entrepreneurs delivering content that they entirely control. Not only does YouTube have advertising partnerships that anyone can take advantage of, but it allows these same individuals to build brands before our very eyes, and leverage them.
Hollywood, beware: The days of the untouchable movie star are dying.
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