Youtubers Vs. the Rest of the World

Photo by David Stewart and taken from The Sunday Times article

Hi all! I feel like this is an important topic that needs to be discussed right now.
Over the past couple of months, I've started to feel that youtubers (particularly the mainstream 'british youtubers') have started to receive a lot of criticism from a lot different magazines, newspapers and websites about how they earn their money and the way they go about it.
Some of the particular articles that I have read are:

• http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/sure-teenage-girls-need-role-models--but-not-of-the-zoella-kind-9809136.html
• http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1473511.ece
• http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/28/vloggers-changing-future-advertising

Two of these articles seem to have a very brushed over view of what we 'young people' know as the youtube culture. One is a completely fixed and aged view of the 21st century and how 'young people' interact. 

A lot of this attention of the youtube culture of vlogging has come from the recent negative publicity from the activity of a certain male youtuber called Sam Pepper. A recent prank video of his brought a lot of attention to how he treats women and possible 'sexual harassment' towards women and even fans. This has been forced into the limelight and therefore, the press have also published their own articles on it (if you haven't heard about any of this, here's an other article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29404364). 

More attention has been brought to the youtube world for other reasons as well, however. This includes the recent popular book published by Alfie Deyes (Pointlessblog) that remained in the number one spot in the book charts for a number of weeks. Although this is a positive thing, many journalists have taken this opportunity to question and criticise the youtube world and culture particularly how youtubers seem to get money. 

I've been quite an avid watcher of youtubers for a few years now and even if I stop watching them for a couple of days/weeks, I always find myself referring back to their videos and keeping up with their lives. Although I may not know them personally, I know their lives well enough to know they work extremely hard to build up their channels audience, edit videos that are often published everyday, carry out interviews and meetings for new projects, keep all their audience interested, film their videos, come up with video ideas and uploads those videos which can sometimes take hours and hours on end. Some youtubers also have blogs and merchandise that they need to keep on track of and update. Yes, they earn a lot of money. Yes, those videos aren't all interesting to you personally. But they put in so much effort to make sure they get that money. Many of them spent years of their lives working on their channels before they even got a penny out of them. 

I feel like the many people criticising them just aren't in touch with the world changing as well. This is the 21st century and it's not weird for 'young people' to find other people to idolise. This situation happened with music. For many, many years, teen's often find themselves idolising different bands and artists. This is now happening with youtube stars and just because it doesn't seem like a conventional or normal job, doesn't mean it isn't a job worth supporting or embracing.

The youtube phenomenon, as it is often referred to, is something that is not too different for human kind because for years, new jobs or trends have been created by the change of technology. Yet for someone reason, some people are still struggling to come to turns with another change, for some reason it's journalists especially (the only good website I have come across which produces articles that the audience always agrees with is Sugarscape!). Yes, journalists need to cover what is happening with the world around them and voice their opinions but so do bloggers and I have  never come across one blog post which has an negative reaction to the changing world. This is probably because bloggers are also a changing job and because there haven't been many negative press towards bloggers or even 'stand-out' popular bloggers as much as their are for youtubers.

The thing is youtubers are now becoming a real job and sadly, I feel like some people need to start to get used to the job world changing yet again instead of criticising the change and trying to stop it from happening.

What do you think about the recent criticism? I want to hear what different people think about the articles. Tell me in the comments.

See ya on the flip side,

Holly x