There is a new wave of what I like to call self made reality TV shows on Youtube. People are filming their mundane lives and putting them on the web for the world to see. I believe this is an incredibility weird thing to do but the secret behind it is that these people are making a lot of money out of it. For a number of people and families in the US this is their main source of income!
2 Vlogs that are at the forefront of this movement are;
The Shaytards
The main character here is Shay and he is from Pocatello, Idaho. The show follows him and his wife Mammytard and his children BabyTard , PrincessTard , and SonTard. Shay never says their real names to protect their identity (so he playfully and quite disturbingly calls his family “tards”). The show has amassed an amazing following and he has 734,081 subscribers on his Youtube channel and since the shows inception it has had 261,668,303 Million views!!! The reason the show has become so popular is simply because Shay is such a likeable person, a typical episode would be 15 minutes long and would feature him and his family just going to the park and playing with their dogs and that would still get half a million views!
The show has meant Shay could quit his job and him and his family now live on ad sales from Youtube, Merchandise of the show and public appearances.
Shay has subsequently joined a Youtube sketch comedy show called “The Station” which brings together fellow Youtube "celebrities" to make comedy skits.
Internet Killed Television
Another "home-made reality show" is, the show with the inspired name, Internet Killed Television. This follows Charles Trippy and his fiancée Alli Speed. The episode on which Charles proposed has been feature on numerous chat shows and it won the 2009 Mashable Open Web Award for the Youtube Video of the Year. The future Trippy’s are now on to their second year of making a video every day. They have amassed 137,745,288 total views and they are the 36th most subscribed comedy channel on Youtube. That’s quite an amazing achievement for normal people that just decided one day to film themselves.
They now run 4 Youtube channels;
- The Internet Killed Televsion channel.
- Charles own channel.
- Alli's own channel.
- Charles iphone 4 channel.
Very interesting post. I apparently people are making a living (if not fortunes) through video blogging (or vlogging). I imagine this will be trendy in the very near future (if not already). We've already seen musicians making careers online (via Youtube, Reverbnation, etc..) as independent artist, as well as film makers. This reality thing will inevitably follow the same trend. Thanks for sharing Cian.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback Rahim; I find it a fascinating topic.
ReplyDeleteOn one hand these vloggers are putting their lives online for all to see and no one is asking/paying them too. But on the other hand some of these people are making very entertaining stuff and it becomes so popular that they become full time vloggers!
My next post just went up entitled “The New Wave of Online Celebrities” if you would like to read it.