How to Achieve 15 Minutes (or More) of Fame through YouTube

• Author: Liz Lavaveshkul
• Pages: 370-385

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How to Achieve 15 Minutes (or More) of Fame through YouTube

Liz Lavaveshkul

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Abstract.

YouTube is a video sharing website where people can upload, share, view, and

comment on origin ally created videos. It is an arena where ordinary people with little or no

funding ca n compete with mega corporations on an even playing field to achieve higher

viewership and a loyal following. This article takes a look at how a group of amateurs rose from

obscurity to become YouTube sensations with literally millions of fans and substantial earnings.

Using these YouTubers’ roadmap to success, this article lists practical suggestions for launching a

successful YouTube career.

© 2012 Liz Lavaveshkul. Published by JICLT. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

If someone told you they could give you a roadmap to a sure-fire way to become world-renown and earn

thousands of dollars a year doing what you loved to do through Yo uTube, would you be interested? If they

added that this venture required very little capital and could be launched within a fe w hours, would you be read y

to sign up? Are you ready to become the next YouTube sensation?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magic wand or crystal ball to guarantee success, but a tool exists that provides a

window to success. By looking into YouTube’s past and studying YouTube success stor ies, you can learn from

how and why things came to be and make reasonable choices that could favorably affect your future.

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a video sharing website where people can upload, share, view, and

comment on originally created videos. YouTube’s vision is “to give everyone a voice, to evolve video, and to

make our partners and advertisers successful.”

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YouTube was purchased b y Google in November 2006 and now

operates as a subsidiary of Google.

An average of 2 million videos per minute are viewed on YouTube,

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ranging from humor and entertainment

to science and technology and everything in between. On the average, users tend to spend a total of 2.9 billion

hours a month watching YouTube video s.

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Casual viewers, particularly those who only watch when a video link

is sent to them, might associate YouTube onl y with viral videos, such as Susan Boyle auditioning on Britain’s

Got Talent, dancing babies, or cute kittens. However, others have discovered the many uses of YouTube: it is a

search engine for viewing news updates (e.g., NASA Mars Rover landing on Mars), learning new things (e.g.,

courses from Harvard through YouTube EDU), finding “how to” videos (e.g., how to charge a car battery), and

enjoying an entertaining video. More ardent users subscribe to their favorite YouTube channels to be notified as

soon as a new video is uploaded.

1

http://www.youtube.com/t/faq (accessed August 9, 2012).

2

Fields, Matthew, “One Minute in Social Media (Infographic),” http://socialmediachimps.com/2012/one-minute-social-media-infographic/

(accessed August 11, 2012).

3

Bullas, Jess. “20 Stunning Social Media Statistics Plus Infographic,” http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/02/20-stunning-social-media-

statistics/ (accessed August 11, 2012).

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2. YouTube for “the Common Man”

If you want to create and share videos, YouTube gives you a voice; an opportunity and a venue to showcase

talent, to create original content, s hare an idea, express an o pinion, champion a cause, or even become famous,

all on a shoe-string budget. With luck, you might even make enoug h to earn a decent living on YouTube.

To upload videos on YouTub e, you must first set up an account and a YouTube channel. A YouTube channel is

the home page for an account. It shows your account name, account type, public videos you’ve uploaded, and

any user information you’ve entered.”4

With nothing more than a video camera and Internet access, you can upload a YouTube video that can

potentially be viewed by hundreds (or even millions) o f people. Some YouTubers, such as Kina Grannis and

David Choi, have uploaded videos of themselves singing and playing a guitar at home, with a camera on a

tripod, ambient lighting and little to no editi ng.

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Grannis and Choi now release more sophisticated videos and

have since risen to become top-favored musicians on YouTube and launched successful singing careers. They

have gone on world music concert tours, released solo albums, and been featured on shows on NBC, ABC, and

Disney.

In their YouTube video, Sandcastle Sensei – Behind the Scenes, Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch, two

popular YouTubers, opined that “you don’t need a super good camera or expensive software to make movies.”

In their video, they explained that T-Mobile challenged them to shoot a whole video on a c ell phone camera.

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In

response, Wo ng and Laatsch filmed Sandcastle Sensei,

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using a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S3 cell phone and

iMovie editing software to produce a good quality video.

3. Celebrities Discovered on YouTube

If you do a Google search on “famous people discovered on YouTube,” you will find a good number of

entertainers who have launched legitimate mainstream careers all because they were discovered on YouTube.

The most famous of these YouTube discoveries, of course, is Justin Bieber. He entere d a lo cal singing

competition in Stratford, Ontario, Canada in 2007, when he was 12 years old. In the same year, his mother

opened a YouTube account and began po sting his singing videos to share his performances with friends and

family. Soon, as other people discovered his videos, his YouT ube popularity grew.9

Scooter Braun, now Bieber’s manager, accidentall y discovered the young sen sation while searching for

another singer on YouTube. After meeting with Bieber and his mother a nd gaining their trust, Braun

strategically built Bieber’s YouTube channel before launching Bieber’s “mainstream” career. “[Bieber] had a

bigger YouTube channel before we even did a record deal with Usher,” Br aun disclosed. “All the statistics

pointed at the internet, and kids are spending more time on the internet as opposed to TV and radio, the

mainstream didn’t realize the impact because there wasn’t v alidity till Justin became big. YouTube is bare bones

and all we did was use a flip video camera. … At the end of the day, the secret to the marketing was to keep it

organic and authentic. Make t he kids realize that it’s theirs. Don’t overproduce the videos. Don’t try and put in

special editing. Just let the kids [sic] sing and play his guitar and if he’s t he real deal, the kids will run with it

4

Karch, Mariah, “Channel (YouTube),” http://google.about.com/od/k/g/YouTube_channel_Def.htm (accessed August 11, 2012).

5

KinaGrannis, “The Sukiaki Song – Acoustic Cover,” September 22, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibxsiq-i384 (accessed on

August 10, 2012).

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DavidChoiMusic, “Al Green – Let’s Stay Together – David Choi Cover,” May 15, 2008 , http://www.youtube.com/wat00ch?v=F6-

1Wp9XmjI (accessed on August 10, 2012).

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FreddieW2, “Sandcastle Sensei – Behind the Scenes,” July 26, 2012,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZDStYlgMLAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heZDStYlgMLA (accessed August 10, 2012).

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FreddieW, “Sandcastle Sensei,” July 26, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_QNBwvBV4Y (accessed August 10, 2012).

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Herrera, Monica, “’Time’ is right for teen singer Justin Bieber,” July 19, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/19/us-bieber-

idUSTRE56I2BM20090719 (accessed August 9, 2012).