YouTubers

How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars

Chris Stokel-Walker

• Publisher: Canbury
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912454242
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Jake Paul: cars, money and a burning swimming pool

Make your way the 100 metres or so up the gated driveway of a mountainside home in California and your eye is drawn to the rust-coloured statue in the middle of the front yard. Cast in metal, a stick man holds up four large boxes that appear to be toppling out of reach. Look left and you'll see a newly installed skate ramp on the front lawn. To the right of that you'll see the dirt ramp where the owner jumps his luxury cars, among them a Lamborghini Huracán Performante, a Tesla Model X P-100 D (nicknamed Bloodshark), and a tie-dyed Ford Focus RS called Rainbro.

But don't get distracted by the flashy motors and the general hullabaloo taking place in the grounds of this three-and-a-half acre property. Otherwise you'll miss the 15, 000-square-foot, eight-bedroom mansion, which has a custom-designed fish tank in the master bedroom and a 'merchandise shop' (which the public can't visit) showcasing a custom line of T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts.

The owner of this $6.9 million mansion is a high school dropout with a short attention span. A decade ago Jake Paul might have been consigned to a low-wage future scanning groceries in a supermarket in his native Ohio. Instead he is the modern face of YouTube; a boisterous millionaire with a frenetic lifestyle and a booming business. His story shows how YouTube is throwing jokers into the pack of modern media.

In 2014, Paul left school and the family home in Westlake, Ohio, aged 17, for the West Coast to upload videos to the internet. An early fan of sketch comedy channel Smosh (Paul and his older brother's first joint YouTube channel on the platform was called Zoosh, inspired by the Smosh name), he first came to real fame by doing jokey videos on Vine, the six-second social media video sharing app bought by Twitter. He bounded onto YouTube when Vine closed in late 2016. 'I was a savage from day one, ' he boasted in a video hyping his YouTube channel.

Certainly, he was too savage for some neighbours of the $17, 000-a-month home he was renting in Beverly Grove, California. For one 15-minute video, uploaded in July 2017, Paul decided to drive around in his newly souped-up truck, honking his extra-loud horn at passersby. One shopper, Ellis Barbacoff, later sued Paul, claiming that 'sustained shock and injuries to his body' had caused longstanding 'pain and suffering' and 'emotional distress'. (When this book went to press, the case was ongoing.) His neighbours threatened a class action lawsuit against him because of his outlandish behaviour – which included setting fire to his own swimming pool. You might wonder how someone would set fire to a swimming pool. The answer is: you throw a load of furniture into the empty pool, toss some lighter fluid over it, then set fire to it. If you have to ask why, then you don't understand Jake Paul.

His YouTube persona is the annoying, puckish person we all know and hate, with a whiny voice, attention-seeking attitude, bleached blond hair and gnat-like attention span – a Jedward for the online generation. This is how he introduces his YouTube channel:

WHATS UP?! Im Jake Paul.

Im 21, live in Los Angeles, & have a crazy life! Keep up: )

The squad 'Team 10' & I are always making comedy vids, acting, doing action sports, & going on crazy adventures.

Subscribe & watch daily to keep up with the madness

Paul is also – alongside his brother Logan, who is best known for uploading a video of a dead body hanging in a forest in Japan – one of the most successful YouTubers, with 17 million subscribers. He has interviewed a United States senator about gun control. He's been invited to – and illicitly stayed overnight in – the White House (the unexpected sleepover was a dare for a video, of course). He owns two absurdly expensive Audemars Piguet Swiss watches. He is estimated to earn anything between £250, 000 ($350, 000) and £4 million ($5.6 million) per year from advertising on his YouTube videos alone. He has done more with his life than many 52-year-olds, let alone other 22-year-olds from Ohio.

In many ways, Paul is the most successful postmodern YouTuber, transparent about the transactional nature of the relationship between him and his fans. He is clear that the reason why he's quite so annoying is that he knows it will gain him notoriety, and consequently lucrative views. He finally moved out of Beverly Grove in October 2017, not because of the fires or the car horns or the savage behaviour, but on a technicality. He was banned from filming in the building without a shooting permit – preventing him from legally creating content without risking a six-month jail sentence.

Paul now lives in the mansion in Calabasas with members of Team 10, a ragtag gang of fellow YouTubers, all of whom are believed to have signed contracts giving him a cut of their earnings from the video sharing website. He is backed by a crew of agents, runners, producers, and general hangers-on, focused on the bottom line and squeezing out every penny from his often young fans.

His constantly shifting Team 10 can range in number from a handful to a dozen – including a toddler called Mini Jake Paul – depending on who's in town and happy to hang out at his McMansion. All of them know that the quid pro quo for living in his orbit and enjoying the lifestyle is the requirement that they appear in his videos, shot by a cameraman trailing him at every moment and often edited while he sleeps by a British-based video editor, Jack Bell. (Paul's team declined a request to speak to Bell about his life as the person responsible for Jake Paul's inimitable video style.)

Regardless of who the supporting cast members are, his videos have a common theme: chaos. Like many lifestyle vloggers, Paul goes about his life – which just so happens to be wild and wacky – and brings along the viewers for a ride. Sometimes he plays pranks on his friends within his mansion; other times he sets fire to things because he is bored. He has made a habit of taking his colourful cars for a spin to visit the nearest supermarket, where he wanders the aisles picking up supplies for his next stunt. The result is like a scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: the cartoon character, dressed head to toe in his own merchandise, or 'merch', stands out like a sore thumb, looking askance at packets of crisps and posters.

For all the antics, viewers are not in any doubt that Paul is running a business as well as living a lifestyle. Spend some time watching the videos he or his older brother Logan produce, and you'll find that they are driven by a messianic urge to make you buy their merch, including $42 shorts, and a windbreaker that costs $90. For this book I analysed 50 videos uploaded by Jake and Logan Paul in February and March 2018 – more than six hours of content – to see how often they mentioned their merchandise. On average, it was once every 142 seconds.

Nowhere is this desire to upsell you on… well, anything, more obvious than in Jake Paul's 2017 Christmas album. Litmas, the main track on the 18-minute album, is a vapid two-minute song with an industrial-sounding melody and a chorus that repeats the lines 'Christmas is lit/Christ-mas, lit-mas'. Even in a genre famous for its bad music, the Christmas single is a new low (comments on the video included 'This is easily the worst chorus to any song I have ever heard in my life'). No matter. Less than 24 hours after its release, it had been seen 2.4 million times.

A better glimpse into how modern-day YouTube works is Fanjoy to the World – a two-minute 16-second version of the Christmas classic Joy to the World with reworked lyrics. It starts by repeating 'Buy dat merch' seven times, adding: 'All I want for Christmas is that Jake Paul merch/All I want for Christmas is a Jake Paul shirt'. Later, Paul manages to incorporate the URL to his online merchandise store in the song, and tells the listener: 'Get in while you can/Before I sell it all' and 'Go tell your momma/She gotta buy it all'.

His approach is working. In 2018, Paul was the second highest-earning YouTuber, pulling in $21.5 million before management fees and taxes, according to Forbes. (The highest earning, who we'll meet later, was even younger. No, it's not Mini Jake Paul.)

Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of smaller scale Jake Pauls on YouTube, hoping to ape his success. Some of them even forked out $64 to learn more about Paul's business model through a dubious online course he set up called Edfluence.

How did Jake Paul happen? How did YouTube become a site where people create entire conceits so that they can pepper their videos with calls to buy their merchandise every two minutes? Where individual vloggers can command global audiences of millions and live in mansions, surrounded by sports cars and hangers-on? How did YouTubers start living the life which school children most want to lead?

Every story needs to start somewhere – and fittingly for YouTube, which can often seem like a madhouse full of party animals, it started in a zoo.

YouTubers

How YouTube shook up TV

and created a new generation of stars

Chris Stokel-Walker

Canbury Press

First published by Canbury Press 2019

This edition published 2019

Canbury Press

Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom

Cover: Rache Bowie

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

All rights reserved © Chris Stokel-Walker, 2019

The right of Chris Stokel-Walker to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77

of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of non-fiction.

The events and experiences detailed herein are true and have been

faithfully rendered to the best of the author’s ability.

ISBN: Hardback: 978-1-912454-21-1

Ebook: 978-1-912454-24-2

Audiobook: 978-1-912454-23-5

PART I. POWER AND BEGINNINGS

1.Uploading: Casey Neistat and the power of YouTube

One spring afternoon Casey Neistat uploaded a video lasting five minutes and twenty-two seconds to YouTube. In the style of so many YouTubers, he looked straight into the camera and aired his opinion on a matter of importance. As the elder statesman on the platform, Neistat’s words carry weight. He can make or break products and careers — and this video was no different. Seconds after he uploaded his video to YouTube via his superfast broadband at his creative headquarters in New York, it was available worldwide to four billion people: everyone on Earth with an internet connection. Millions of Neistat’s subscribers instantly received a notification telling them that one of YouTube’s most influential stars was again speaking directly to them.

Across the world in apartment blocks, restaurants, bedrooms and bathrooms, phones pinged, buzzed and beeped. Hundreds of thousands of people instantly watched what Neistat had to say. Wearing dark glasses, his hair streaked blond, Neistat vented his frustration at the way the media was second-guessing the motivations of YouTubers; and he wanted to single out one journalist in particular. In the comments section underneath his video his fans began discussing the question he posed: did people post videos on YouTube for the fame and fortune — or just to express themselves?

YouTube is a kaleidoscope of visual and audio content that mimics the richness, quirkiness, beauty and madness of human life. Every day its users upload videos on everything from pop music to politics, fashion to plumbing, and cars to fishing. The topics are as diverse (and as random) as the world itself. Want to watch racing pigeons, cut a perfect bob, discuss Che Guevara, speak Mandarin, or play guitar? YouTube can offer that, instantly. Want to relax while seeing boiled sweets made the old-fashioned way? Load up Lofty Pursuits. Have a hankering to watch a man meticulously scratch away the foil on 200 lottery playing cards to see if he can win back his outlay? Type ‘moorsey scratchcards’ into your search bar and reap the rewards.

Whether giving sex advice, posting football clips or simply splicing together footage to create an action-packed vlog, video makers want to communicate with and be seen by YouTube’s 1.9 billion registered users. Some hope that, like Casey Neistat, they too will one day set off pings across the world. For a few, notifications mean that millions of fans are watching them and their view counters are whirring upwards, along with their bank balances. Elite influencers are creative and dynamic and get to do what they want all day long. Unsurprisingly, becoming a YouTuber is the job children most covet.

They understand the platform’s extraordinary growth. YouTube is expanding so fast that outsiders can’t accurately measure its size. An estimated 576,000 hours of video are added daily to YouTube – vastly more than the new releases on Netflix. In October, November and December 2018, Netflix added 781 hours of original content, while 53 million hours of footage likely went onto YouTube. It would take you 35 days to watch the new Netflix content non-stop. You’d still be watching the YouTube uploads in the year 8069.

YouTube’s rise has been swift. In little more than a decade, it has moved from an oddity broadcast on bulky grey computer monitors to mass media entertainment viewed on ultra-thin, wall-mounted 55-inch televisions. In the past five years, YouTube viewing has rocketed from 100 million hours a day to one billion hours a day. It’s by far the most-watched video service worldwide, seen by 69% of all internet users every month. It’s the internet’s second most visited site, behind only Google (whom we ask about life), but ahead of Facebook (with whom we share our lives).

We are addicted. YouTube is the first thing many of us wake up to on our mobile phone screens, and the last thing we watch at night before turning off the television. It’s what we watch when we’re bored in our lunch hour, when we hear about the latest gossip, or when we want to listen to the latest pop song (or want to know how to get rid of a wasps’ nest). In one month alone, November 2017, YouTube was watched by an estimated 91 million Americans and by 21 million people in Britain. Many of them watched for hour after hour. Shortly after 9pm on 1 March 2018, one of them was my friend, Simon Coward. He opened up Facebook Messenger and tapped out a message: ‘So you’ve just been mentioned by one of the biggest YouTubers there is.’

Though only 38, Casey Neistat is something of the grand old man of YouTube. He became a viral sensation in 2003 when he uncovered Apple’s attempts to keep people locked into buying its products by making batteries in its iPods irreplaceable – and quick to wear out. He parlayed that into making independent films and an eight-part television show for American cable network HBO. He joined YouTube in 2010 and is approached by its executives when they want to publicly admit to and atone for transgressions against the community. He has 10 million subscribers, but his power eclipses even that vast number.

Filmed at 368 Broadway in New York, the location of an independent co-working studio space for YouTubers he set up, Neistat’s video discussed a story I had written for Bloomberg explaining how 96% of those who upload to YouTube don’t make enough money from adverts alone to break through the US poverty line. As a tech writer fascinated by YouTube – its stars, its ecosystem, its finance, its everything – I wanted to let people know that YouTube is not quite the gold mine that some aspiring vloggers believe it to be. Neistat’s beef was that people didn’t just go on YouTube to make money – they did it because they wanted to create. And because Neistat is a good human being and acutely aware of the power he holds over his subscriber base he ended with the message: ‘Please do not send the author of this article any negativity.’

Some couldn’t resist. As I sat in my bedroom 3,332 miles away in Newcastle in Britain, a Canadian basketball coach, Allen Harrington, sent me a private tweet stating that I was a horrible person as well as a horrible reporter. A teenage girl called me a ‘pussy’ and said she was going to make a YouTube video about me. ‘Diss track with Rice comin soon,’ she wrote, referencing one of her favourites, YouTuber Brian ‘RiceGum’ Le. A third fan protested: ‘Your look on shit is complete crap. I could make a better counter-argument article.’ (He didn’t.)

In the end, two million people watched the video. I had learnt some home truths. Among them were just how fast and direct the connection between YouTubers and viewers is, how passionate those fans can be – and how a video can spread around the world in minutes.

YouTube is different to a conventional media company: its reach is wider, its diversity broader, its demographic younger, and its power stronger. All that has caught the attention of big business. Unsurprisingly for such a sweeping force, YouTube has transformed advertising. Corporations from big carmakers like Ford and Audi to toiletries giants like Procter & Gamble no longer have to display their message in the breaks during scheduled TV shows. They can speak personally to a specific audience, either directly through their own YouTube channel or through a creator who has a direct connection with their fans. Want to see a hands-on review of the latest iPhone model? You may have to head to YouTube. Apple has started entrusting the few review copies of its latest devices to YouTubers rather than traditional media. It’s a stark (and visual) demonstration of how significantly the balance of power has shifted from traditional broadcasters towards YouTube.

It is, in fact, a revolution. In the past, Hollywood studios, television networks and newspaper publishers were top-down, professionalised industries. ‘You were a consumer, not a producer, of content,’ points out communication academic Cynthia Meyers, of New York’s College of Mount Saint Vincent. No longer, she says:

‘Social media makes every single person that participates in it a content producer as well as consumer. Content flow is no longer coming out of TV networks: it’s coming out of users.’

Most incredibly, this fundamental change has slipped almost unnoticed and without oversight into our everyday lives. On the few occasions YouTube bursts onto the pages of newspapers, it’s in simplistic tones or wonder, with little understanding or analysis as to what its explosive growth means to our economy and to our lives. It’...