There’s a second YouTube inside the YouTube that everyone knows

NYT wrote about PewDiePie:

One crucial thing to understand about YouTube is that there are really two of them. The first YouTube is the YouTube that everyone knows — the vast reference library filled with sports highlights, music videos and old Comedy Central roasts. But there’s a second YouTube inside that one. It is a self-contained universe with its own values and customs, its own incentive structures and market dynamics and its own fully developed celebrity culture that includes gamers, beauty vloggers, musicians, D.I.Y.ers, political commentators, artists and pranksters. The biggest of these personalities have millions of subscribers and Oprah-level influence over their fandoms. Many Inner YouTubers never watch TV and develop elaborate parasocial bonds with their favorite creators. For people who frequent Inner YouTube — generally people under 25, along with some older people with abundant free time — the site is not just a video platform but a prism through which all culture and information is refracted.

I started hanging out on Inner YouTube in earnest a few years ago, and its scale and insularity was jarring at first. Imagine a genetic mutation that gave everyone born after 1995 the ability to see ultraviolet light. Imagine that these people developed an identity around UV light, started calling themselves “UVers” and became suspicious of any media product made exclusively on the visible spectrum. As an old person with normal eyes, you would experience this change as a kind of slow cognitive decline. Every day, as more and more of the world played out in UV, you would struggle to catch glimpses of it. All of a sudden, people would be talking about Area 51 or eating Tide Pods, and you’d have no idea why. This deep chasm of understanding between Inner YouTube and the rest of the world has proved to be the defining problem of Kjellberg’s career.

YouTube vloggers selling a $350 lifelike doll of their two-week old baby

FFWD:

Nowhere in the unofficial YouTuber handbook does it advise you to commission and sell a creepily lifelike version of your youngest child.
And yet.

...

In a 27-minute vlog, the Ingham Family (whose patriarch has previously faced accusations of creeping on their teenage fans, claims he denies) announced the release of their latest merch: a 19-inch tall, soft-bodied recreation of their youngest son, Jace.

The eerily lifelike doll — called in the doll world a “reborn” — captures Jace Ingham at the age of two weeks. It comes with three outfits, a hat, dummy with clip, nappies, “birth certificate”, gift bag and pen.

...

Alongside having a realistic representation of the youngest child of your favorite YouTube family, buying a Jace reborn also gives you the chance to meet the Ingham Family at a special tea party, according to the retailer.

*Previously: "This is the 'voodoo doll' in the super-racist voodoo episode of 'Murder, She Wrote'"

"At VidCon’s 10-Year Anniversary, Influencers, Fans, And Brands All Seem Ready To Leave YouTube Behind"

Ryan Broderick for Buzzfeed:

The YouTubers people care about can’t be invited because they’re all out of control. And the safer creators they did invite are all traumatized

...

The short-form video platform, owned by Beijing-based artificial intelligence company ByteDance, has completely cannibalized VidCon this year. The app is responsible for both the rapper Lil Nas X’s record-shattering “Old Town Road,”

...

TikTok was omnipresent at VidCon. The outside pavilion of the convention center quickly devolved into a TikTok playground, as tweens and teens recorded short videos with each other. There was a TikTok twin meetup. One kid with 6 million followers duct-taped a pair of sheet cakes to his feet to make a “walk a mile in these Louboutins” meme. At one point, a huge pack of 13-year-old girls chased a boy wearing a face mask through the crowd. The girls told BuzzFeed News that it was Chase Hudson, a 17-year-old TikToker with 2.8 million followers.

...

YouTube threw a huge, well-organized bash, complete with multiple open bars and hot dog, chicken finger, and taco stations. Guests walked to the dance floor through a tunnel displaying the platform’s greatest hits, like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and the Cut’s “100 Years of Beauty.”

By contrast, TikTok’s extremely sought-after and secretive party was thrown at a bowling alley in a shopping center around the corner. Hundreds of teens jockeyed for a spot in line amid a fog of phone cameras and Juul smoke.

...

Beck gushed over how much success Chipotle has had recently on TikTok. The restaurant chain only has 18,000 followers at the moment, but it successfully activated a popular TikTok trend called the #ChipotleLidFlipChallenge.

And speaking of adventures in advertising:

The 11pm @SportsCenter just aired a sponsored segment for @CENTURY21 where they tried to sell a house in Boca Raton, FL.

This is VERY bizarre yet for some reason, I’m incredibly intrigued. pic.twitter.com/c3he6tvsDM

— Kevin Escalera (@KevinEscalera) July 12, 2019

"When your job is to constantly share your life, even your worst moments are an opportunity to please your audience"

NY:

Entering a restaurant, he wraps his left wrist around the door handle, so that he can pull the door open while still looking at the phone.

Chaos follows him. The restaurant starts getting a lot of unusual phone calls. The callers say that they are Paul Denino’s father or his mother and they urgently need to talk to their son, who is autistic. An employee asks the man if he is Paul Denino. He says yes, but then explains that the callers are pranking him. He is live-streaming through the camera on the stick, and some of the thousands of people watching are trying to fuck with him. The calls grow more disturbing. Callers claim that Denino is a pedophile trying to lure children to his lair, or that the large backpack he’s wearing contains a bomb, rather than a two-thousand-dollar cellular transmitter. The restaurant manager asks Denino to leave. Almost immediately, the restaurant’s rating on Yelp begins to plummet. Dozens of one-star reviews flood the page within seconds. They’re full of obscure references to Denino and to the Purple Army, the name of the legion of virtual fans who follow him wherever he goes.

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When I first met him, in January, he said that he was on track to make sixty thousand dollars that month, through sponsorships and donations from viewers.

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Everyone in his life is part of the show. “If I don’t know what to do on a certain day, I’ll just call someone over and we can develop their character,” he told me. These characters are given names like Anything4Views, Hampton Brandon, Salmon Andy, Mexican Andy, Asian Andy, and Motorcycle Andy. (Andy is a nickname that his viewers like to apply to minor characters.)

...

There was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. Things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix, on his way to a video-game convention, and several of the airport’s runways had to be closed. The episode led to Denino’s permanent banishment from Twitch, which is why he now streams on YouTube.

"I Took Jake Paul’s [$54] 74-Video Educational Series"

BF:

Over the course of 12 chapters, each chapter containing four to eight videos, Paul puts aside his pro wrestler–style barking at the camera and comes across as thoughtful and competent, with deep insight about social media and an astonishing bird’s eye view of the landscape he occupies.

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Paul has all sorts of tips on how to make the smallest tweaks in video editing, profile, search engine optimization (“YouTube is, at the end of the day, a search engine…that’s why Google bought it,” he says), and what time of day to post (after school west coast time during the week, as early as possible on weekends), to game the algorithm.

...

Another sneaky trick Paul uses on Snapchat is to make his account look verified (even though it isn’t) by making his username have a ton of spaces after it and then an emoji. On Snapchat, only verified accounts have emojis associated with them that appear in the right-hand column of your friends list. By using the space bar and an emoji, you can trick people into thinking you’re verified, and this makes you stand out in their friends list so they’re more likely to tap into your stories.

Check out the airline featured in the opening scene of Seinfeld's nazi episode

The other night I rewatched the "Seinfeld" where Jerry and George steal someone's limo and it turns out to belong to a neo-Nazi. "The Limo" aired in 1992; Larry Charles wrote it. A few details jumped out this time! Here's the very first shot, putting us at the airport: pic.twitter.com/T0oqbZt5YC

— Jonah Weiner (@jonahweiner) January 8, 2018

Related, here's how someone has posted the episode to thwart Youtube's copyright detection algorithm.