JOIN USYouTube audience upset over advent of movie celebs
Social media presence plays a crucial role for celebrities to keep in touch with their fans.
After Instagram and Snapchat, a few actors, celebrities have moved on to YouTube to share a glimpse of their glamorous lives.
Actresses Alia Bhatt and Jacqueline Fernandez are the most recent ones to launch their YouTube channels. Their reason is a closer connection with their fans and an inside look at their life and work.
Why YouTube
Along with vlogging, for celebs, YouTube is a vital medium to endorse their brands and projects, promote their movies etc.
So, that makes YouTube a platform that boosts one’s career in many ways.
Owing to their popularity, many YouTubers have also become entrepreneurs, actors, authors, influencers etc. An example would be Lilly Singh aka Superwoman.
How is it profitable
Along with career prospects, comes the money. The money that YouTubers make doesn’t depend only on the number of subscribers they have.
Ad clicks, sponsored content, reviewing or promoting merchandise and selling their custom merchandise are the other ways by which YouTubers get paid after they gain a certain number of followers.
PewDiePie, Jeffree Star, Ryan ToysReview and Lilly Singh are a few of the highest-paid YouTubers in the world.
Celebrity channels: YouTubers happy, audience not so much
Alia and Jacqueline gained hoards of subscribers in a short span, and many YouTube users didn’t welcome their arrival on the video-sharing platform.
The criticism is around how celebs gain subscribers in a blink for their ‘not-so-sensible’ content.
But Bhuvan Bam of ‘BB Ki Vines’, the first Indian YouTuber to cross 10 million subscribers, welcomes the idea of celebrities joining YouTube, considering it a worthy platform.
“It’s a great change and won’t necessarily conflict with the original content creators’ audience because YouTube is a massive platform and has an audience for all sorts of content; one can watch 15 videos a day so there’s room for everyone,” he told Metrolife.
He also says that it is not fair to say that celebrities don’t work hard to create content.
He reasons, “Nowadays, the audience are content-oriented and consume quality videos. Even when you look at films, viewers want to watch good films that are content-driven and unique and not just rom-coms with the same plot.”
Bhuvan also shares some of the challenges of being a YouTuber, “The challenges I face are content and creativity fatigue. I make videos on topics that appeal to me, and I think should be spoken about, with my own twist. I never made videos just for views.”
Not only Alia
Alia and Jacqueline aren’t the only ones on YouTube. Priyanka Chopra, Shilpa Shetty Kundra, Arjun Kapoor and Varun Dhawan have their own channels. Actor Kartik Aaryan is also set to launch his channel soon.
In numbers
Alia Bhatt: 828,606 subscribers
Jacqueline Fernandes: 196,946 subscribers
Varun Dhawan: 61,987 subscribers
Priyanka Chopra: 485,560 subscribers