Thursday 18 June 2015

Sort of another rant. Pwow, pwow!


I flew to New Zealand a few weeks ago and in a fit of stupidity, read the inflight magazine. There was an article in the 'Business' section about rising stars on YouTube.

(I tore the article out but I can't find it and it's driving me nuts. I would have written about this two weeks ago if I hadn't been spending all that time going through the clothes I wore on that flight.)

Essentially, the first half summarised how Australians such as Troye SivanLauren Curtis and Elise Strachan have risen to fame through their videos (in order) on being a teenager and coming out in WA, makeup tutorials, and cupcake addictions. Then it guesstimated at how much they were earning and how many avenues of income there were on YouTube. And amongst all of it, there was this severely, eye-twitchingly irritating sentence linking the two halves of the article along the lines of, 'In essence though, these Australians have done the same thing all successful business models achieve: identifying a gap in the market and targeting that market.'

Excuse me!? You really think that's what attracted people to these YouTube channels? That they went, 'Oh great, I've been looking for a video on coming out as a teenage boy in Perth, why wasn't this need catered to earlier?' 

No. NO! These YouTube stars had something they cared about, it was all they thought about in their free time, and they wanted to share it with others. They filmed and shared their passion for the sake of it, not to 'find a gap in the market', and then their honesty and human-ness found an audience. Simple. 

Simple unless all you think about is making money. 

I wonder if the person who wrote this article really believed Troye Sivan had a business model or whether they just had a deadline to fill. Nonetheless, I'd much rather have read an article about how to live more authentically every day rather than how to try and copy the authenticity of others who in order to make money.*

*Less angry posts will follow soon, I promise.

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