The one about YouTube.
Last post I write about millenials and the technological world we lived in. Today almost everything is involved with social media; nowadays, even churches are on Facebook. But without a doubt one social platform that changes the way we see and use the Internet is YouTube.
Basically, YouTube is a website in which users upload and share videos. You can find movie clips, TV shows, music videos and amateur content in the form of videoblogs. It`s hard to think of someone close to you that doesn`t know what YouTube is or at least hasn’t seen a YouTube video.
One of the most popular content on YouTube is the videoblog. In the simplest form a videoblog consist of one or more persons talking about any subject in front of a camera. And the people talking to the camera are called Youtubers, and those are the ones I want to talk about today.
Youtubers have (like a TV) channels, in which they upload their content and people can view it as many times as they want. The variety of shows are immense: you can find anything form makeup tutorials, cooking recipes, gameplays (footage of someone playing a videogame) math lessons, instructions to build a robot, traveling tips, and some really random things, like a dancing man wearing a horse mask while cooking wild mushrooms.
You may wonder, what do Youtubers obtain form uploading this videos every week? At first, it was just for the opportunity to share with the world the thoughts in their heads, and then it became something like a popularity contest and a very profitable business. Each person subscribed to a channel and every time a video is reproduced it becomes a profit for the Youtubers, if they agree to enter in some sort of partnership deal with an advertiser (mostly for publicity proposes).
Here is when things get interesting. One of the famous Youtubers is a Norwegian guy who uploads videos of himself playing videogames, and he has more than 42 millions subscribers and in 2014 he made more than 27 million dollars in revenue from his YouTube videos. I mean, 42 million subscribers, that’s almost the same population as Colombia, Argentina or Sudan. And the amount of money he earned just in 2014 is impressive but that is not the point I want to make in this post. I want to focus in the exposure these people have in the world. Just think about it, they have access to millions and millions of people every week. Some of them even have more influence or acceptance than the President or the Prime minister of many countries.
In my opinion some Youtubers haven’t used this privileged position effectively: to share meaningful messages to a youth that desperately needs them.
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