After a day of classes and studying in high school there was nothing I enjoyed more than coming home and watching YouTube. More specifically, checking what new video’s were uploaded daily by some of the most-well known youtubers/vloggers of my teenage years. Back in the days I could easily spend up to 2-3 hours daily simply watching what other people did during the day. Right now, as I am trying to cut down my social media usage, I find it unbelievable that I could simply spend so many hours just looking at what other people do in their lives. With this blog I would like to bring back some memories to you from the time of famous youtubers.
Its stars are multi-millionaires: YouTube’s highest earner in 2019 was an eight-year-old called Ryan, who netted $26m
Chris Stokel-Walker | The Guardian
Youtuber types
There were, and still are, tons of videos and youtubers online on YouTube and they all posted very different content from each other. There were the game youtubers, such as PewDiePie who is actually the most famous youtuber of all time, with a current total of 110 million subscribers. Despite the fact he gets less viewers nowadays in comparison to the past years, all his recent videos still reach about 2-4 million viewers. There are the family vloggers who vlog their private life regularly, including the lives of their kids! Next to this, there are beauty vloggers, such as Nikki Tutorials and Michelle Phan. Simply put, they talk about hair, make-up and clothing. This was for sure the type of youtuber I watched the most during my teen years. Also, I enjoyed watching prank videos on YouTube, like the youtuber Joe Sugg. Can you believe that 11 million people watched a youtuber hide in a box just to scare his roommate?
Joe Sugg’s prank video:
The 2000-2010s on YouTube
The 2000s-2010s knew many great and popular youtubers. These people were able to make large amounts of money with their videos and often ended up creating their own merch and setting up brands. However, despite their success in the past, many youtubers are not (regularly) posting anymore on YouTube. Many simply grew up: they started a family and wish to have more privacy. I personally also think most of their viewers grew up and started watching less YouTube, resulting in having less of a hardcore group of viewers. Some youtubers left and have returned to their old accounts a few years later. Especially during covid-lockdowns, more people came back to YouTube as a form of entertainment. Nevertheless, the years of fame seem to be over for those who try to make a come-back to the website. Other says many youtubers got less viewers and ended up quitting YouTube completely after YouTube changed its interests. With the coming of streaming services, such as Netflix, YouTube had a new type of competition and therefore changed its algorithm to longer videos, rather than looking at the number of views per video. Next to this, due to a change in the algorithm adds were removed from videos, resulting in less income for youtubers. This was the moment many youtubers realised they could not life off of YouTube forever and had to find new sources of income. It seems that the best of YouTube and the best years for youtubers are over.
Despite not watching as much YouTube as I did a few years ago, I still find myself being on the website quite a lot. However, the type of videos I watch have changed. From beauty youtubers and daily vloggers to videos on university courses related topics, recipes and Russian language videos. What are the videos you watched during your teen years and did the content you watch change over the years?
Sources:
The golden age of YouTube is over – The Verge
YouTube at 15: what happened to some of the platform’s biggest early stars? | YouTube | The Guardian
i am pretty guilty of watching some vloggers in those years haha. joe sugg, caspar lee, zoella sometimes and many others in this similar range. i dont know when exactly i grew out of them, but now this type of content is very boring to me. i am not sure if my interests just realigned though. and i am not necessarily talking about these specific creators, as there are countless people who are popular now who sort of became this era’s ‘vloggers’. now i mostly gravitate towards gaming content, or specific personalities. not exactly sure how this development was made, but i think i am glad that it happened 😀
This is super accurate to how I used to view content in middle and high school – I subscribed to so many people who eventually stopped making videos for a few years. This is what I found interesting about young adults and teens who had massive vlogging platforms, many of them eventually created family vlog channels and are now posting with their significant others and/or children. Like there’s a girl named Acacia who used to be extremely well-known on Tumblr and youtube who fell of the internet for a few years, only to come back as a married mother of 3. I guess the internet really is a place for all kinds of people, and you can make content catered to any sort of audience.
I remember watching the English vlogger squad as a teen and then growing up and watching them all slowly disappear off my radar. For me, the same also happened to the Minecraft YouTubers I used to watch. They are still making videos but I have definitely lost interest. I now watch a lot more scientific and educational videos, as well as variety-gaming channels when I want to switch my brain off. But I doubt I will return to watching vloggers. I definitely feel the amount of platforms all asking my attention, making it hard to decide if I want to watch YouTube, Disney+ or Netflix.
Hey there, interesting choice of topic! I think another possible reason for diminishing interest in vlog-type content is the magnified emphasis on marketing and ad-revenue that has hit Youtube like a cyclone over the past few years. The ‘but first a few words from our sponsor’ segments in videos are becoming egregiously drawn out at this point with certain content creators spending longer on their sponsor shout-outs than the actual content itself, and I think this makes it clear to their fanbase that at the end of the day their channel is a business model, which detracts from the sense of intimacy that the early days of vlogging engendered. Also, I feel like a lot of the raw content that would previously be used in vlogs has been moved over to crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon, as this provides hardcore fans with ‘exclusivity’ and enables content creators to keep their Youtube presence very tight and focused lest they face the wrath of copywrite strikes and overzealous moderation.