TECHNOLOGY: Members of Generation Y create an entirely new job market through YouTube.
By Antonio Serros, Diversions Editor
Nestled somewhere between grandparents and babies lies not a lost generation but a generation lost to technology. Once dubbed “the next great generation,” Generation Y has traded in the nine-to-five job of staring at a computer screen for one starring on the screen. Faced with house-sized college tuitions, survival-of-the-fittest job markets and meager starting salaries, Generation Y found a new calling on YouTube.com.
Growing up during the technological revolution, members of Generation Y—people born between 1980 and 2000—have always been within reaching distance of pagers, computers, tablets or phones. From the futuristic gadgets on Power Rangers to the very first Gameboy Color, Generation Y grew up with technology quite literally in the palm of its hand. So it seems only appropriate that Generation Y should now be dubbed Generation YouTube.
What started in 2005 as a means to share videos, YouTube has since grown prolifically, now accumulating nearly 100 million video views each day. But it wasn’t just the humble idea of video sharing that drew global attention to YouTube—it was the people behind the screens.
Michelle Phan, Grace Helbig, Pewdiepie, Smosh. The list of YouTubers who reached a unique level of success known as “YouTube fame” is seemingly endless. From beauty tutorials to video blogging to gaming walk-throughs and beyond, the one element linking these elite YouTubers is the generation in which they grew up—Generation Y. What commonly started as posting videos for fun, quickly turned into hundreds and thousands of views, sponsorships and contracts with companies that range anywhere from Tarte Cosmetics to Best Buy.
With this unprecedented level of success, YouTubers like Michelle Phan, YouTube’s original beauty guru, have built entire empires from the concise, five-minute-long videos they upload. I can still remember the first time I saw a Michelle Phan video. Presumably recorded by the camera on her MacBook, Phan sat doe-eyed in front of the camera, demonstrating how to achieve Lady Gaga’s iconic “Bad Romance” look. 47 million views later, Phan has certainly upgraded from her MacBook. In the past four years, Phan was featured in Vogue magazine and started her own makeup brand, Em Cosmetics.
Despite all of Phan’s accolades and success, Pewdiepie remains YouTube’s reigning supreme, well known for his his pseudo-comedic commentary on video games. Born Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, Pewdiepie tops off YouTube’s elite with a net 31 million subscribers. He attended Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden but left in 2011 to focus on his increasingly popular and ever-entertaining YouTube channel.
The allure of this YouTube fame is enough to make anyone join. The process is simple: quit your job or drop out of school, buy a camera and become a YouTuber. The execution, however, is not. There is a certain level of risk that comes with a career (if you could even call it that) on YouTube. Maybe you won’t become famous. Maybe you aren’t funny enough or attractive enough. Maybe you won’t get sponsorships. The list goes on as long as the ads before YouTube videos do, and as avid YouTube-watcher Mae Johnson (12) notes, an occupation with YouTube is “not realistic enough to seriously pursue.”
And although some YouTubers like Pewdiepie have secured a steady stream of income through sponsorships alone, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for Generation YouTube. Are audiences going to remain loyal ten or fifteen years down the line? Poly student Alejandro Quintero (10) shared that while he may return to YouTube in years to come to watch trivial “fail” videos, it would be “just to have a laugh.” As television history reveals, all great shows come to an end. YouTube channels are essentially a new form of television channels that subscribers tune in to watch on a daily, weekly or bi-weekly basis. Now, it’s only a matter of time before we see our favorite YouTubers amongst a stack of Friends and Seinfeld reruns.
It’s the prospect of uncertainty that could place Generation YouTube amongst Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as some of the greatest businessmen and women of history, but the outcome of that uncertainty is something only time will reveal.