Creating alternative rockstars of YouTube

Bamberg / DPA

When Annemarie Sommer enters the seminar room she’s convinced that in order to be a YouTube sensation, you have to do things others wouldn’t think of doing.
When the 15-year-old leaves, she knows that in fact, YouTube stars don’t necessarily have the best videos – but they are the best connected.
“How to Become a Rockstar on YouTube” is a workshop being given for teenagers by scientists at a German university in an effort to uncover the power of data. Your video’s content can be really cool – but that doesn’t matter if nobody’s watching it, says Kai Fischbach, the dean of IT who’s leading the workshop at the University of Bamberg.
“Success on YouTube depends on the content – but also how connected you are, and with whom,” he says.
“If you only have two followers, but they’re Barack Obama and Bill Gates, and they recommend you, that can work.” The mechanisms of success and failure are the first lesson for the class of teenagers who are attending the workshop this afternoon.
The second is a life lesson, “because we all leave behind a data trail,” says Fischbach. Data can be extremely powerful and he wants to show that using science.
Because fans feel a strong connection with the celebrities they follow, a recommendation for a product by one of them can be extremely effective, says media researcher Nicola Doering of the Technische Universitaet Ilmenau in an article for an industry magazine.
“When a popular YouTuber on beauty products praises a new lipstick or a certain protein shake, thousands of young people rush off to buy those products,” writes Doering.
YouTube says it has more than a billion users and every day they play videos with a collective length of several hundred million hours and generate billions of clicks.
That demand creates stars as well as a market.
Vincent Valentine regularly attracts hundreds of thousands of views for his prank videos as do comedians Kassem G and Lilly Saini Singh aka Superwoman and fashion vlogger Bethany Mota. Paul Pieczyk, 16, has no desire to be a YouTube star. Well, perhaps a bit. “I always wanted to become better known,” he says. “Because it’s fun when I can do do things that are exactly what people like.”
He makes gaming videos on YouTube as “Mcquasi” and has 300 followers. “When I had less than 100, I always wanted to reach 100,” he says. “Now I want to reach 500.”
The more subscribers he has to his channel, the more reach he has. “Then you can do things with other people, take part in things,” he says. With more famous gaming YouTubers, for example. That’s exactly where researchers in Bamburg say success lies on YouTube.
Good cameras and lighting, HD quality and professional editing aren’t enough. What’s essential is to network with channels that have lots of, or very important, subscribers.
Fischbach and his colleagues are using the platform’s popularity to enthuse young people for their research and to raise their awareness.
Businesses, for example, dedicate a lot of time and effort to finding out which channels they need to use to reach their customers. Data and scientific analysis allow them to predict what topics will be in the spotlight in a few weeks time – and who the stars will be.
But only a tiny minority of video producers will go on to make YouTubing their main profession, according to Doering.
She warns that young people start with high expectations of quick financial rewards and internet fame and are more than likely to be disappointed. In fact young people have little idea of the business model behind social networks, according to a study by Germany’s JFF Institute for Media Education.
YouTube stars are different to film or pop stars, says the institute’s
research director, Niels Brueggen.
They seem more easily accessible to viewers and so are easier to identify with and more likely to become role models.
“The fact that their success is not self-made or down to how nice they are but is driven by an agency – it’s good to be able to see that,” he says.