For the past eight years Wired.co.uk has been quietly watching a
community die. Almost a decade ago YouTube hosted a small group of
content creators and consumers with a desire to communicate and
experiment with the future of modern media. The "vloggers" of
"YouTubia" provided a new and erratic video-sharing website with an
initial purpose it didn't know it had and an audience it didn't
know it could acquire. Along the way those involved saw their share
of successes, failures, celebrities, scandals, fights, friendships,
deaths and love affairs -- but as the years passed, an inexorable
autophagy took hold, destroying everything that gave life to a
community that was responsible for begetting the YouTube we know today.
Thus spoke Renetto
Paul Robinett -- one of YouTube's first celebrities -- began his
YouTube career posting videos as "Renetto", a bizarre and
sometimes grotesque character he created to amuse his business
partner at the time. Within days Paul was featured on the front
page, having amassed hundreds of thousands of views. A later
success was his "Diet Coke and Mentos" video, currently standing at
14 million views, in which he suggested he was seriously injured by
ingesting large amounts of Coke and Mentos (an American sweet).
Although these videos amused Paul, he soon realised he was wasting
the potential to turn this platform into something more
constructive, so he retired his Renetto character and began engaging with his audience.
This, he tells me, was life changing.
"There's so much power in being a video blogger because you're
believable and you're authentic and when you say something, it
matters. At its height, it was even more fun than I can explain.
When I first started getting my comments and views coming in, I was
shaking. It was like winning the lottery."
Paul was not only hooked, he was convinced he was part of a new
medium that would change the face of media, "It was like the whole
world at our fingertips. We couldn't even believe we were doing it.
We knew that we were sitting on the platform and pushing the
buttons and getting to be at the beginning stages of the future of
media, not just social media, but media."
As Paul's YouTube career began to blossom, so did an emerging
community of fans and contributors, all eager to share their lives
with anyone who cared to listen. The average video contained very
little content in the traditional sense. Video blogging was
different and stood on almost entirely uncontested ground -- no one
knew what he or she was doing and there was no one to provide any
real guidance. Vlogs were often 9 minutes long (the longest YouTube
would allow for a single video), there was little to no editing,
people frequently made mistakes, rambled and discussed nothing in
particular. But like Seinfeld, the show about nothing, it
was an unexpected success, drawing in a net audience of
millions.
Some of the big movers and shakers at the time included the now
forgotten Renetto, Paperlilies, Boh3m3, Kimberleigh, FilthyWhore,
TheHill88, and
Crossmack.
A fierce, loyal and passionate community surrounded these
personalities, whilst the then founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and
Steve Chen (who have sinced left the company), looked silently on,
unsure of how to manage their website's unpredicted course.
"I truly believe that Chad and Steve got the fuck out of YouTube
Town as fast as they could because they had no i-fucking-dea what
was going on." Explained Paul, "They tried to sell it to dating
sites, to eBay, you name it -- which I think means they didn't know
what to do with it. Suddenly YouTube goes off in a whole different
direction to one they were expecting and then a guy like me stands
up and screams THIS IS A REVOLUTION and all of a sudden they're
like, 'what he said!'"
Paul wasn't alone in detecting the founders were perhaps as
clueless as the bloggers. Bryony Matthewman, known as Paperlilies, was
the first female celebrity YouTuber from the UK. Reflecting on her
past fame, she felt similarly to Paul, "The thing is, the community
was never expected. For us it was really exciting but for YouTube
it was more like, oh, that's cool, but who cares. But that's what I
loved about it, that it was so organic. It sounds so cheesy but I
talk to people from back then and we talk about it as if it was the
golden age of YouTube, but it really felt like it was."
Whilst Bryony seemed to be becoming the UK voice of YouTube,
often talking exclusively about British peculiarities, Paul became
the unofficial spokesperson for the whole site. He was the
everyman, constantly praising YouTube and encouraging others to get
involved, he truly believed a revolution was just around the corner
and it wasn't long before hundreds of thousands joined him.
Revolution and the old media
Paul began receiving offers from TV shows, but he rejected them on
the grounds that he had the potential to get higher viewing figures
than Bill O'Reilly and Jon Stewart put together, "I got the fuckin'
internet!" he screams over Skype. For Paul, it's the intimacy and
authenticity that YouTube offered that made it so attractive to
viewers.Whilst he admitted that the overall quality might not be as
good, the authenticity was a key attraction: "Thanks to YouTube,
you know me, so who the fuck do you want to get your news from?!
BOOM. DONE. REVOLUTION."
Ian Crossland, known as Crossmack at the time, also envisioned
revolution. The frequently shirtless actor from
LA achieved notoriety for his good looks, extreme flights of
fancy and wild assertions, such as the Sun being made of salt
water. His most viewed videos sit at half a million hits.
"There's this desire to help people in me," explained Ian, "I came
at it with a lot of extremity -- my videos would get so
real." When Crossland broke up with his girlfriend she hit
him; he continued making his videos with a black eye, against the
wishes of his management team at CBS. CBS eventually dropped
him.
Convinced YouTube was the right career path for
him, Ian carried on undeterred. YouTube was his new Hollywood -- it
provided a bigger potential audience, allowed him to help people
and encouraged healthy debate and communication, which he craved.
However, what Ian wasn't ready for was the negative fallout of his
increasing fame and the constant hateful comments.
"Oh, it was horrible. Just horrible. I'll still go back and
watch an old video from 2007 or something and I'll look at comments
and I'll see something like 'fuck you faggot' or 'I wanna lick your
pretty pink asshole' and it just, I mean… what? That was the bad
side of the community."
Worse still, Ian was battling with a drug problem, which was
fuelled and maintained by his YouTube fame, "Being in the spotlight
whilst on YouTube was really taxing. I remember feeling like I
couldn't make a video unless I was high, like, I wouldn't be
interesting or something. And that was a slow decline into
apathy."
As Ian continued to attempt to help and engage with the
community, and as Paul continued to encourage others to participate
in the new media revolution, YouTube started having ideas of its
own. Seeing the potential for audience sizes that would be unheard
of in TV, YouTube invited stars from the old media to join the
party. Oprah was first; the community was not happy.
"I remember Chad and Steve parading celebrities onto YouTube
which made the community go fucking ape-shit," said Paul. "We
completely mobbed their videos with shitty comments and the
corporations said, fuck this! We're out. The community for one
second knew that we were YouTube. Everyone had to go
through us, because we owned that bitch." And for a very
brief moment, that "bitch" was indeed owned by the content creators
-- until Chad and Steve sold YouTube to Google.
Google's arrival, the BBC and 'whoreish'
behaviour
"Google came in and said, well how are we gonna pay for all this?"
explained Paul, "These are great pipe dreams and everything, but
guys, we gotta clean this place up, or Oprah won't ever come back.
They were worried that anybody could say anything they wanted about
any of their brands. They worried they might not even get as many
views as me -- some dumbass climbing up on his roof, blowing
himself up with Diet Coke and Mentos."
Google's attempted to "clean the place up" by introducing its
partner programme, which allowed channel owners to make money from
advertising for the first time. This was something Paul
occasionally flirted with, but making money from the community
seemed to be a troubling notion for him and by the time he became
comfortable with the idea, it was almost too late.
Other high profile users weren't as hostile towards the idea of
mixing with old media. Bryony was approached by Hat Trick
Productions, which was looking to make an interactive show with BBC
3 aimed at a young audience. They came up with the idea of making a
zombie movie out of small clips from individual YouTube users.
After several meetings, Bryony was offered £11,000 to do the
show, the most money she had ever earned for a single job -- she
took it. It was agreed that she would be the star, but the show
itself would rely on her YouTube fame to acquire short homemade
zombie clips, which would be strung to together to make a zombie
movie out of what was now a thriving community of video
bloggers.
Unfortunately, too many people were enchanted by the prospect of
working for the BBC, which attracted a semi-professional interest,
destroying the DIY video blogging ideal that Bryony was so
passionate about. "So we had this really impressive camera guy and
a guy from a really expensive editing company who all offered to do
it for free because it meant they'd get their name on a BBC
show. It ended up being slightly too professional at the end
and it wasn't really what I, or anyone, wanted. I felt like I
wasn't in control of the whole thing really."
When the production of the show ran into an already booked and
paid-for holiday with her family and boyfriend, the editors were
not kind, portraying Bryony as unreliable or fickle. "Whilst I was
on holiday I had to set up a giant camera they gave me to record
vlogs of my time. It was all really contrived. It wasn't real and
it was really depressing. I didn't enjoy it at all. I think that
was when I finally thought I just didn't care about YouTube
anymore."
This was a turning point for both Bryony and the wider YouTube
community, who were becoming disenchanted with the direction the
website was heading. It seemed to many involved that everything was
moving backwards, vlogs were becoming monetised and videos were
becoming more like TV again. Bryony's videos were often sponsored
by companies who would offer her up to £1000 for subtly mentioning
their products a move she describes as "whoreish": "I felt like I
was really selling myself," she said, adding that she found herself
professing her love for products she didn't actually like, "but I
needed the money as I was really poor at that point. It was a bad
time."
In 2012 YouTube changed its slogan from "YouTube: Broadcast
Yourself!" to simply "YouTube". Bryony thinks this was "sad" but
just "another straw on the camel's back". "Back in the old days,
when I really cared about YouTube, I would have been upset, but
now? I just don't care. YouTube killed itself and now I don't
care."
YouTube ignores the old community, embraces the
new
By this point, YouTube had even started abandoning its evangelical
supporter, Paul, who gave up his business to become a full-time
video blogger and who regularly promoted the company with seemingly
endless energy and entirely off his own back. His contemporaries
who were happy to increase production quality, indulge in
aggressive self-promotion and flirt with the old media were
becoming increasingly successful, whilst his mode of blogging
started to seem old and out-dated.
"What happened to me? Why were others successful and not me?"
Paul asked himself, "I think I have the answer: I was the YouTube
evangelist and when YouTube didn't need an evangelist any longer,
they didn't need me. Mean time, all these other guys are going out
there saying 'SUBSCRIBE! RATE! COMMENT!' and they've got theme
songs and going full blast. But I couldn't do it. I just couldn't
do the transition and so I became irrelevant."
Paul was so passionate about protecting his community that he
sometimes lashed out, biting the hand and souring relations with
the company, often goading the founders into deleting his channel
as a form of self-sacrifice if he felt his viewers had been
wronged.
But what frustrated Paul more than anything, he explained, was
when people didn't realise the extent to which he cared, and still
does care, about YouTube. After a brief and impromptu meeting with
a YouTube employee known by the community as "Big Joe", Paul finally began to understand why the powers that
be were keeping him at arm's length. "So we start talking and Joe
says, 'You know who you are? You're the Joseph Goebbels of
YouTube'. And I said, what the fuck? He said 'You're a propaganda
machine. Half the people at YouTube hate you. Half the people love
you.' And I'm sitting there thinking you have got to be
fucking with me. I mean, yeah I'm fuckin' with YouTube but that's
because I fucking love it. If YouTube would have just given that
much, that fuckin' much... but they didn't."
The injustices, intentional or coincidental, kept on coming for
Paul. The first YouTube awards show took place in 2007 -- he wasn't
invited. "Nobody, stood up for me. Nobody invited me out to the
show. I've never been asked to speak, talk, present, sit on a panel
in any conference anywhere, ever. I felt completely forgotten."
Paul had become surplus to requirement, even though he wasn't
done. He had a lot more to say, but there was, tragically, no one
left to listen. "I want to carry on video blogging but how do I
keep my authenticity and still achieve my dreams?" He asked
Wired.co.uk as he began to break down. He describes sitting with
his parents and reading out some of the positive messages he'd
receive through YouTube from strangers saying things like "I wish I
had a dad like you" or "your inspire me". He pauses to hold back
the tears. "Just the kind of good stuff you get when you put
yourself out there," he adds. As he's reading them out, his father
say to him, "If I ever did anything in my life and somebody cared
that much about it, I wouldn't have to think twice about what I
wanted to do with the rest of my life."
Old media takes hold, YouTube kills off crucial
features
As large production companies began to flood YouTube, Paul,
Bryony, Ian and many others like them not only lost their fame, but
far more importantly, they lost their community -- video bloggers
hadn't died out, far from it, they were thriving like never before.
But it was a new kind of video blogging and they couldn't keep up.
The new YouTube was business-driven, slick, meticulously planned
and in bed with all the right people. I told Bryony that YouTube
had recently removed the ability for users to post video responses
to other users, one of the most treasured and crucial features of
the "golden age" of YouTube, "Really?! Oh my god… really? That's so
sad. Oh. That's really depressing."
It seems that with the removal of the "Broadcast Yourself"
slogan and the video response feature, YouTube decided that it
cares more about a certain kind of video response, which means
veteran users like Bryony don't even bother to use the website
anymore. "I really don't watch a lot of YouTube video blogs anymore
because they're very specifically like a video blog. It has become
a particular type of media that doesn't really appeal to me.
What I liked about YouTube was getting a sense that you were
actually experiencing that person as a person, rather than it being
a performance."
Paul remained positive, but it was a difficult transition for
him to make, one that he's only just beginning to acclimatise to:
"Here's how it goes -- social entertainment can't work beyond
social limitations. The future is everybody has their own audience.
Every chef, every mechanic, everyone will have an audience of
people that want to learn his or her trade from him or her. Because
with wearable tech we are all going to become video bloggers."
Ian is less optimistic about YouTube and has stopped making
videos. He felt like he was getting out of touch with his
surroundings, "I was so into the internet space that my
relationships were suffering and I was like, what am I even doing
with my life? My life became like a TV show and it was weird, it
was so fucking weird." He's now thinking about getting the gang
back together in June with his new company, Minds.com.
Bryony is perhaps the most pessimistic and has lost all
interest. She says: "I went through a period of being really poor.
I felt like I had given so much to YouTube, and then I'd spent all
this time making crappy videos because I got paid for them before
realising that even that wasn't enough money to get by, so I had to
try and find a regular job -- I guess I sometimes felt like I threw
my life away for YouTube. I kept asking myself what did I actually
do? I should have just stayed in my job."
"And I'm not the only one -- look at TheHill88 [a
popular YouTube celebrity at the time], she went to New York to
make videos for a company over there and lived in a massive
apartment that was like $4000 a month. She was living the dream!
And now she's back in Australia at university and working as a
waitress. I think the same is maybe true for a few other YouTubers
from back then." Bryony went on to stress that TheHill88 (real name
Caitlin) is probably completely happy with her current
curcumstances and she wouldn't want to make any assumptions.
However, her story demonstrates perfectly the dramatic change of
events that occured to some of the high profile YouTubers over a
short period of time.
Google: Vlogging is a business, but there's room for
intimacy too
Wired.co.uk Spoke to Sara Mormino, director of YouTube Global
Content Operations, about the issues voiced by Paul, Bryony, Ian
and the community that once surrounded them. "To be honest I
haven't seen the changes that you're describing. I still feel
there's a very strong sense of community. We've invested in
educating them on how to develop better looking channels, how to
brand themselves, how to grow and develop their audience and by
introducing the Creator
Space we've also helped them understand how to add more value
on the production, editorial and programming side of things"
Sara explained that the community is quite demonstrably healthy
and that we need only look at the frequent collaboration videos
created by one or more partners to leverage each other's audience
to see this. "That's an indication to me that the community is
alive, thriving and supportive."
But in order to collaborate and actively add more value to your
content by using the creator space, you need to have a minimum of
5,000 subscribers. Doesn't this suggest precisely the kind of
elitism that the old YouTube community were so passionately
against? "We could probably do a better job in terms of being more
transparent about the resources and the opportunities that we
provide partners." Explained Sara, "the reason why we enforce 5,000
subscribers is we want partners and creators to showcase a certain
commitment to the platform. You need to have demonstrated that
you're actually willing to engage."
And what of the changes to features that were so fundamental to
the older generation of YouTube content creators, such as video
responses, anonymous commenting and the now defunct YouTube Slogan
"Broadcast Yourself"? "First of all people have a hard time to
adapt to change in general, hence when you take away something
people are used to for a long time there's always a reaction to it
and sometimes it's just a perception that you've taken something
very important away from them. But in the instance of the video
responses, it was actually one of the least used features from
creators and users -- so there was a lot of uproar but in reality
it wasn't used that much."
A small percentage of users might not sound like much but when
it apparently maintained something so crucial i.e. the ability to
communicate with other video bloggers in a direct manner, it seems
a shame to remove it. Its unofficial replacement, it was suggested,
was the new comment system, "We removed video responses but we
subsequently followed with the new commenting system. Arguably, the
initial launch wasn't executed very well, but the intent is to gain
a lot more transparency and to provide both users and creators the
ability to interact in a different matter". Sara also explained
that the logo had to change in order to "represent the variety of
voices YouTube now hosts."
But what of the "death" of the old style of video blogging and
the community that went with it? Does YouTube see these early
adopters as pioneers and do they feel they have abandoned them?
"They definitely created it. They were definitely pioneers. This
developed organically. YouTube as a platform with the
characteristics it has, the commenting system, the ability to
interact with audience, the simplicity of uploading videos, all
this obviously enabled them to facilitate it, but it definitely is
something that developed without us having any sort of
intervention. Maybe the individuals that you spoke to are no longer
as successful as they used to be, but vlogging is still very core
to YouTube."
"In terms of not recognising the pioneers, as you put it," said
Sara, as our meeting concluded, "I think the recognition is the
fact that these formats that they pioneered are becoming
increasingly successful on YouTube and continue to be successful.
If they want to continue engaging with the platform, the
opportunity is there for them, it's still there."
Vlogging is now without question a business first and a hobby
second. There is nothing wrong with this and it's crucial to
highlight that there were countless members of the old community
who don't feel rejected and went on to huge success within the
evolving framework, such as Charlie McDonnell, Philip DeFranco or Natalie
Tran. But what happened to the intimacy? To the "DIY" feel of
seven years ago and to the feeling that any dorky, lonely kid could
pick up a camera and engage with a community of thousands? There's
still a place for that, says Google, but that's not where the money
is and money -- it seems -- comes first.
It remains true then, that many of early YouTubers who were once
famous and core members of a significant online community were
undoubtedly pioneers of a new medium. They made the bizarre notion
of video blogging acceptable by simply being regular people who
made mistakes and shared intimate moments of their lives with
whomever cared to listen. YouTube was never originally designed for
the community that appropriated it, a community whose success was
partly responsible for its own undoing, paving the way for what is
now a well refined and lucrative business. Left behind is the husk
of a once substantial and influential collective; those who
normalised what is now successfully monetised have since been
thrown on the scrapheap -- their methods old, outdated, clunky,
ineffective -- and there's something terribly sad about them all
becoming quite so resolutely irrelevant.